HD vs Bluray.....Your speculation..

This is indeed a tricky one.

Both sides have players out in the US/Japan. And from initial reports both types of players are extremely buggy. It looks like both sides have rushed their first products to market, with fairly poor results. I won't be buying a stand-alone player anytime soon, but i'll probably buy a drive for my PC if the price is low enough (sub £150).

I don't think we'll see a clear winner for quite a while. My bizarro opinion is that both formats will co-exist for the foreseeable future, and instead the hardware manufacturers will turn to dual-format players. Early adopters will probably end up buying two players, but by the time the mainstream starts to dip their toe in (probably Christmas 2007) I think they'll be quite a few multi-format players around.

So that's my speculation.. two formats living awkwardly side-by-side. Just look at how successful DVD-Audio / SACD have been! :p
 
Goatboy said:
No one cares about double layered, double sided DVD's now and manufacturers chose to use two double layered discs, same will happen with Blu Ray so you'll end up with a theoretical 100GB. With the efficiency of H264 encoding what do you need all that space for?

Blu-ray isnt just for hd video though, all that space is very usefull when your putting files on a disk or backing up a whole hard drive, archiving stuff etc in fact with that much space you could use a bd-rom as another hdd for saving files to. A lot of people who are waiting for its release want it for this purpose rather than hd films, I couldn't care less what format films are released on but I will definatley be getting blu-ray just for the capacity.

Goatboy said:
Also worth a mention that the HD DVD players are a lot cheaper, £300 as opposed to £500.

The ps3 is much less than £500 and does much more than just play films. ;)
 
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Blu-ray isnt just for hd video though, all that space is very usefull when your putting files on a disk or backing up a whole hard drive, archiving stuff etc in fact with that much space you could use a bd-rom as another hdd for saving files to. A lot of people who are waiting for its release want it for this purpose rather than hd films, I couldn't care less what format films are released on but I will definatley be getting blu-ray just for the capacity.

I was thinking the same, but what kind of access times, data transfer rates are we going to see?
 
AS_Platinum said:
I was thinking the same, but what kind of access times, data transfer rates are we going to see?

72Mbps for 2x speed is going to be the minimum avalible, blu-ray uses Constant Linear Velocity which means all parts of the disk will be read at max speed.

The BDA already has plans to raise the speed to at least 8x 288Mbps in the future.

Random Access Time (Pioneer BDR-101A)
Blu-ray 2x: 250 ms
DVD 8x: 150 ms
 
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Well from what I've read BD isnt looking like the fantastic leap forward we'd all been looking for.

According to this review here it's not as good as HD-DVD...

http://www.hddvd.org/messageboard/topic/10/23579/

Bear in mind though this is based on the first Samsung player (BD-P1000) so will get better as more machines come to market but I dont think it's what Sony were really hoping to hear.

I'm still sitting in the "undecided" pile, from what I've seen on my cousins Toshiba HD player I'm deffinitley impressed but until I see some BD myself to compare it too I wont buying one.

Neil
 
Energize said:
Blu-ray isnt just for hd video though, all that space is very usefull when your putting files on a disk or backing up a whole hard drive, archiving stuff etc in fact with that much space you could use a bd-rom as another hdd for saving files to. A lot of people who are waiting for its release want it for this purpose rather than hd films, I couldn't care less what format films are released on but I will definatley be getting blu-ray just for the capacity.


In order to succeed they need huge penetration into homes, if people only bought Blu Ray as a PC storage media it would be deemed a complete failure, the only way the either product can be succesful and recoup investment costs is for it to become the number one choice in peoples living rooms. The profits come from licensing films and hardware not from a spindle of blank discs.
 
Its going to be the availability of films which will drive the winning format. Most people couldn't care about the tech specs or access times or storage space. They will moan though if their favourite films aren't available on the shiney new machine under the TV, and if one platform ends up with a decent catalogue (and quickly) that will be the one which will be purchased.
 
Goatboy said:
In order to succeed they need huge penetration into homes, if people only bought Blu Ray as a PC storage media it would be deemed a complete failure, the only way the either product can be succesful and recoup investment costs is for it to become the number one choice in peoples living rooms. The profits come from licensing films and hardware not from a spindle of blank discs.


Yes but you asked why we anyone would need that much space.
 
Energize said:
Yes but you asked why we anyone would need that much space.

I think someone once said Porno.....That's a good reason! Film extra with more behind the scene footage......i think the list is endless.
 
Energize said:
Yes but you asked why we anyone would need that much space.


As someone with seven full up hard drives I love the idea of 100GB discs but everything I've said in this thread is related only to films since that's the battle.
 
Goatboy said:
As someone with seven full up hard drives I love the idea of 100GB discs but everything I've said in this thread is related only to films since that's the battle.

That isnt the only battle, films are the major consideration but there the other uses which could win the battle if the format distribution is close cut or keep one format alive even if the other dominates the film industry, since hundreds of thousands will use blu-ray instead of hd-dvd to make data backups.
 
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I really hope only one of the formats wins out.
As if both formats continue to co-exist & manufacturers produce universal players, then neither format will take off.

They will go the same way as SACD & DVD-A & remain a niche market.

They never took off due to universal players being released that could play both formats. So a lot of music labels could not decide which format to release titles/albums on, so never bothered releasing albums at all on either format.

So let's hope that no universal players are released. This will then force the public & also the film distribution companies to back one format or the other by buying the corresponding player.

Interesting times are ahead.
 
FrankJH said:
at the point when PS2 was released I think it was an original cd player and only in one of the revisions did dvd come into it

The PS2 had a DVD drive from launch, however the early jap models didn't have the DVD video player software on board, it had to be loaded from the memory card IIRC. Also, the first games were on CD as apposed to DVD. It always had a DVD drive though.
 
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