Comments on: Warner Bros going Blu-Ray exclusive

By: Bigtex

Bigtex — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 15:27:17 +0000

Could we please stop saying “It looks like the format war is over”, I can’t count the number of times this has been said in the last year and a half. The war is never over, both sides have billions of investing dollars. Just because 1 says they’re going 1 way, doesn’t mean they can’t change their mind later. It happens all the time. It was “over” when porn changed. Then it was over again when porn changed again, then it was over when I blew my nose.

Also “throw your HD-DVD” away. Yeah, thats smart, because there aren’t hundreds of movies in HD-DVD to watch. Not to mention there are plenty more distributors of HD-DVD than just WB.

The best news of this topic would be no news, as there isn’t a bit of news that can come out that will make a bit of difference to us. The “war” will go on forever.

Having HD-DVD is excellent, the prices for these HD-DVDs are super cheap. Imagine if only Blu-Ray won? My god, I don’t think Sony can extract much more money from my ass than they already have, imagine Sony with no competition… HD-DVDs are nice and cheap.

By: JohnnyC

JohnnyC — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 00:16:14 +0000

I don’t understand why people would rather Blu-Ray win than HD-DVD. With Blu-Ray people like us would have to wait longer for HD rips, we would be stuck with Region coding, Blu-Ray also doesn’t have mandatory DTS HD, and in a couple of years your probably going to have to buy a new Blu-Ray player due to larger capacity discs. Add to that, these 200GB discs would only be useful for storage but Hard Drives read quicker and by the time 200GB Blu-Rays are out 2TB Hard Drives will be the norm and if companies released fims that took up 200GB then we would all need new HDTV’s, the resolution would be 9600×5400 or something stupid, if they released games that actually took up 200GB there would be a new game every 10 years!!

By: FamilyGuy

FamilyGuy — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 12:15:25 +0000

People keep throwing around the word monopoly but if that is the case wasnt the dvd a monopoly as well? Sony might have created/started Blu-ray disc but they arent going to be the only ones in control of it so there is NO monopoly.

They wont be and arent already the only ones making blu-ray players or blu-ray movies.

By: LaughingSam

LaughingSam — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 06:12:09 +0000

I stopped reading after awhile but wanted to make these points:

I support Blue-Ray over HD-DVD because I imagine that in 2 or 3 years, recordable discs will be cheap enough to use for semi-permanent data storage like many people do with DVD-R’s and before that CD-R’s. Blue-Ray has much more capacity. Do you want to burn 1 Blue-Ray or 2+ HD-DVD’s to store the same information? Using hard drives for storage may be cheaper but hard drives fail much more than burned discs. You can easily lose a 500GB or 1TB drive full of information with no warning. In fact, you should expect it to happen at some point, it’s so likely. Everything I’ve ever burned to CD-R or DVD-R is still accessible as far as I’ve checked.

My friend supports HD-DVD because he had an XBox and now an XBox 360. Basically a low level fan boy mentality which I see mirrored here by a few people. A poster above basically said it doesn’t matter what the capacity is because movies fit on both formats. This is very short sighted thinking.

Director/Producer Michael Bay believes that Microsoft has only supported HD-DVD to create confusion and to block Sony from success with Blue-Ray. Microsoft’s goal is really to get you hooked on downloadable content through their XBox Live. This does make a lot of sense to me. You can tell they have put a lot of thought into XBox Live which is actually very usable for a console based system. I would’ve liked to support Sony over the more traditionally invasive Microsoft by upgrading my PS2 to a PS3, but I went for the XBox 360 because of the extremely better online gaming experience. Sony has made the mistake of letting the each individual game company provide their own online experience for their games and it’s been much more miss than hit. I assume they are changing this, but haven’t looked into it due to a lack of games for the PS3 (a situation which has recently improved). I won’t be buying the HD-DVD player that connects to the 360 – If I really wanted one, I’d just get a stand alone player that won’t be useless if my 360 dies for a few dollars more. I recently read on a 360 fan site that Microsoft is planning on adding internal HD-DVD playability to future 360’s which should be an interesting twist.

By: Peter Parker

Peter Parker — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 05:57:18 +0000

@enigma

More news on the mandatory codecs:

(Obviously) the players must support all mandatory codecs but each disc must contain one or more of them (for video and audio).

This would be why Unleashed didn’t have Dolby True HD.

By: oneSh@DyTHUG

oneSh@DyTHUG — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 00:17:53 +0000

F00k Blue-Ray and HD. I’m old school. I back my DVDs up on 4300 floppy disks. lol

By: Jim Bob

Jim Bob — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 22:56:30 +0000

About time, I hope microsoft DIE!

By: bert

bert — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 21:14:29 +0000

im glad blu ray is moving fowards.
there are alot of ps3 haters out there, who dismiss the bluray drive and @ darth acron, why the hell are you mocking folding@home, if you even had a brain cell youd realise its a good idea.
dell only sell bluray drives,no hddvd (here in uk anyway)
i bought my ps3 for two reasons really, blu-ray and gt5.
ive still gotta wait for gt5, but the quality of a movie is awesome, i like the fact that i dont have to buy some stupid external drive and faf around to watch hd, i also like that i can watch hd/dvd without having to pay for a remote, i also like playing all my games online for free, with no subscription.

all in all, once youve bought hd dvd and xbox live the ps3 is a much much sounder investment.
i might be the only one but im very happy with my ps3 and glad i didnt get a 360 as i almost did on many occasions.

By: kingpin

kingpin — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 20:30:57 +0000

I’m not bothered who wins, I find both formats pointless, its just a last ditch attempt to make people buy media in physical formats, we are not too far away from having all of our media delivered through the internet, cd sales are declining year on year, once high speed internet becomes the norm, who is going to pay to buy a movie from a store? The only purpose blu-ray or hd-dvd will serve is just to back up data, and even then there will be better ways to do that.

By: theman

theman — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 20:29:58 +0000

By: Peter Parker

Peter Parker — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 19:24:18 +0000

@enigma

Unleashed (Danny The Dog) should have Dolby TrueHD although it doesn’t have to be default.

The current mandatory audio codecs for HD DVD are:

Dolby Digital @ 504kbps – lossy
DTS @ 1.5Mbps – lossy
Dolby Digital Plus @ 3.0Mbps – lossy
Linear PCM – lossless
Dolby TrueHD – lossless

The mandatory Blu-ray audio codecs are:

Dolby Digital @ 640kbps – lossy
DTS @ 1.5Mbps – lossy
Linear PCM – lossless

Everything else is optional according to the current HD DVD specification.

Blu-ray also supports higher bitrates in the all of the lossy audio codecs apart from Dolby Digital Plus, which supprts 1.7Mbps comnpared to 3.0Mbps on HD DVD.

Whilst DVD had Region 0 allowing for world wide use, some Blu-ray films are encoded with Regions 1-3. I don’t know how many of them are done this way but there are a few.

By: enigma

enigma — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 18:53:30 +0000

@117
Are you sure? I just rented Danny the Dog on HD-DVD and it didn’t have TrueHD, so if its “mandatory” someone messed up there. I’ve rented other movies that do have TureHD, and it’s not the default, I have to manually select it… so now I’ve gotten in the habit of always checking…

By: Peter Parker

Peter Parker — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 18:23:10 +0000

@John

Dolby TrueHD isn’t mandatory on Blu-ray. It is on HD DVD.

By: Peter Parker

Peter Parker — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 18:20:33 +0000

PC games are now on sale with multiple dual layer DVD’s because 8.5GB is not big enough. BlackSite Area 51 (around 11.2GB) and John Woo Presents Stranglehold (12.5GB) are two examples.

By: John

John — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 18:15:14 +0000

@Peter Parker
Blu-Ray also has Dolby true HD so you are misinformed or you dont have latest firmware updated…