Forum - View topicHey, Answerman! [2008-12-19]
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Metal Superman
 Posts: 18 |
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On second thought, keep on doing what you're doing. I'm getting a kick out of some of these words, despite having to look up the definition for half of them. I guess I'm just not that smart :/ |
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Avatar
Posts: 14 Location: Alberta, Canada |
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Sorry if this has been discussed previously. Although I agree that production costs will drop with greater adoption there is a few caveats. First Blu-Ray is not as early as some believe. Considering that DVD was introduced in 1997 it thus far has only an 11 year life. Blu-Ray was finalized and introduced in 2004, thus nearly a five year life span. So it can be said that Blu-Ray is already a third or more completed it's life cycle provided it can replace DVD in the next two years. HDTVs have been on the market since 1998. Only recently has Full HD or 1080P become common, but Quad HD or 2160P has already appeared in some Panasonic and Pioneer prototype plasma, as well as Samsung LCD TVs. Super HV or Ultra HD, 4320P, has a shipping year of 2015, but I know there is some confusion with this and Quad HD release dates, including on wikipedia. Quad HD will be available in some consumer products as early as 2010 with cinema projectors in use today. My point is relatively simple. The current Full HD revolution is already half over, only North America has been slow on it's adoption. This late in the game it may not make sense for small distribution companies to get involved with Blu-Ray. As mentioned internet distribution may be more practical even if using h.264 MP4 as a compression codec rather than VC-1 to maintain the higher resolutions but reduce file size. Pioneer recently announced a 16 layer 300GB Blu-Ray Disc that will be backwards compatible with existing Blu-Rays Players. DCI specifications for QHD, 4K digital projectors, require 300GB hard-drive distribution packages. If Blu-Ray expects to have a life span longer than the next five years it would be best if it makes itself compatible with the future QHD format. At which point yes then it makes sense to continue to invest in Blu-Ray as a format. But not now. As an anecdote I began collecting anime VHS summer 1997. I also began working in a video rental store in fall 1999. I was among the first to truly see the VHS to DVD transition and I can tell you that anime distributers then were among the first to adopt DVD. The primary reason was the higher margin in DVD sales over VHS. It took five years to see the same price cuts in DVD players what Blu-Ray players did in two. Unfortunately in its race to the bottom it also erased it's software margins. What was $40-60 CAD last year is now $25-40 for new releases and $12-15 for catalog titles. Toshiba refuses to manufacture a Blu-Ray player, instead focusing on upscaling technology, because of the above and of course their format loss. The Dark Knight may have broken Blu-Ray records with 600,000 units sold, but it sold 3 Million units on DVD. The previous Blu-Ray record holder was Iron-Man with 250,000, before that the average movie was selling below 100,000 units. You do the math, including Justin Sevakis' explanation, and tell me if it's worth it for anime distributors to adopt Blu-Ray? |
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GATSU
Posts: 15307 |
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Speaking of TDK, I love the irony of Warner selling the BD disc with a downloadable version of the movie, since it defeats the purpose of investing in BD in the first place.
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fuuma_monou
 Posts: 1817 Location: Quezon City, Philippines |
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Isn't the point so you don't have to buy the movie again on iTunes if you want to watch it on your iPod? |
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HeeroTX
Posts: 2046 Location: Austin, TX |
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High-five! Kimagure Orange Road was my next honorable mention, I disqualified it from my posting because I don't remember the BGM from KOR, but it definitely has GREAT OPs and EDs. My favorite is Kagami no naka no akutoresu (altho, I admit it's in large part due to the sequence more than the song) (edit: Oh, also "Full Moon wo Sagashite" also has a great litany of OP & EDs) Last edited by HeeroTX on Sun Dec 21, 2008 2:12 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Avatar
Posts: 14 Location: Alberta, Canada |
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No the point is to reduce piracy. What I found amazing was Disney's Sleeping Beauty Blu-Ray release not only came with Digital Copy, but the full length movie on DVD as well. It was only $3 more expensive than their Two-Disc Platinum DVD edition. Yet another anecdote for you. I currently manage a retail home theatre department. I had a couple looking at portable DVD players for their RV last summer. The husband wanted to buy Disney's Cars on Blu-Ray as well as they had just recently purchased the player for their theatre room. The wife told him no. When asked why she simply said, "because I'm not going to buy a second blu-ray player for the RV." Her point? Portable DVD players don't play Blu-Ray Discs. If more studios like Warner Bros, Sony, Fox, Universal, and Paramount wise up to this fact as Disney did for Sleeping Beauty, then perhaps Blu-Ray may have faster adoption. Or perhaps it will backfire after all, since 40% of people can't see the visual image improvement of Blu-Ray over DVD and a greater percent are happy with upscaled content. |
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GATSU
Posts: 15307 |
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Avatar: But if they're trying to reduce piracy, they're basically acknowledging that there's a legal market for downloadable content which BD won't be able to stop or even surpass in sales. It's kind of like when Di$ney introduced chat features on one of its BD discs, because they're trying to compete with MySpace.
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pparker
 Posts: 1185 Location: Florida |
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Blu-ray wins the war - Posted on February 19th, 2008
TDK touts 100GB recordable Blu-ray Disc - May, 2005 Blu-ray will succeed eventually, but only because the average consumer will one day be able to download HDTV movies and record 10 of them onto one disc. The format wars are moot from now on. Very few perceive enough difference in quality to replace their DVD libraries (as with VHS), but as Sony learned (unfortunately) with Betamax, capacity is what will win consumers over to the new format. |
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Avatar
Posts: 14 Location: Alberta, Canada |
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Apple proved that there is a market for legal downloads with the iTunes Store years ago. It's only now that major studios are beginning to learn how to use the market to their advantage. In this case it's DRM. Under Copyright law Fair Use includes one back up copy. Despite their efforts with the DMCA to prevent technologies that break copyright protection they can't deny this one aspect of law. Instead they are making it simpler for consumers to access their copy rather than using free tools to do it themselves. The difference being is that the consumer's copies are nearly untraceable while being distributed over the internet. By using Apple's DRM and specifically the iTunes login information that is attached to every downloaded file those individuals that upload their files can be traced instead by credit card rather than IP address which has recently become more difficult to use in court to identify copyright infringes. Now the defendant must prove credit card fraud otherwise the RIAA/MPAA has them dead to rights.
Sony lost the previous format war to VHS because they refused to license beta-max not due to capacity. In fact it's capacity that may actually be BD's most difficult challenge. There is technologies that triple the theoretical storage of BD on optical discs. The difference is that BD has been adopted by software companies and it's only because hardware companies haven't adopted newer technologies that BD can still compete against DVD. As for HDTV downloads onto BD-RE I haven't seen BD recordable drives on the market except for PCs, have you? The difficulty here is more DRM in the form of HDCP. Unless your input device has an HDMI input it's not likely you will be able to record HDTV in resolutions higher than 1080i using component cables. Plus the MPAA is currently asking the FCC for an exception to use the Broadcast Flag to prevent HD content being viewable over analog cables. The future of HD content isn't permanent ownership but "rental." In Canada we don't have TivoHD so I can't say as to how that technology works. We do have HD OTA capture devices, however HD OTA content is limited to certain regions and the infrastructure required won't be in place for several years. |
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pparker
Posts: 1185 Location: Florida |
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I just think consumers are simpler than anyone thinks, including myself. Given the choice between a 1-hour tape and a 2-hour tape with enough capacity for a whole movie, I'll take the later. The perceptible difference in quality between Betamax and VHS just wasn't great enough, and the convenience of getting as much as 4 hours on one tape tipped the scales for the consumer. That's regardless of any other considerations that may have stifled their success.
Nah, the war is over. BD's capacity will be sufficient, soon enough, to fend off any competition at this point. The major studios have spoken, and that will be the end of it. Licensing fees could be an exploitable weakness, but if so, they will back off on those as patent holders normally do once a technology becomes ubiquitous and they have to defend a monopoly position from government.
Since I haven't gone for HDTV yet, I'm not an authority. Google seems to indicate that standalone recorders are available in Japan for consumers, but not yet the U.S. "October 3, 2007-- Panasonic has released a Blu-ray disc recorder with a stonking 1-terabyte hard drive built in. That’s a mind-warping 381 hours of full HD video." Since Blu-ray regions combine North America and Japan, I presume you could import one.
Frankly, who cares? Only a handful of videophiles will notice a difference between 1080i and 1080p, or even 720p. I don't even believe most who say they can, anyway, without instruments. I know two people who I believe can distinguish analog audio (superior) from digital, for instance, and one is a professional piano tuner, who can tune a piano to Hollywood composer standards solely by ear. The variance in quality of monitors or TVs far surpasses the difference in absolute resolution in terms of the average viewer's perception. There's a whole interesting discussion around how much better video and audio can get before any further enhancement is beyond most humans' ability to distinguish.
That may be the case. However, I see the industry having to contend with people not wanting to pay every time they watch something--or else losing revenue because of crackers. I buy DVDs because I know I'm going to watch that program again and don't want to have to pay again or worry about whether I can access it at 3:00 am on a Sunday when the urge strikes me. I suspect the the industry will end up figuring out how to "deliver" DVDs over the Internet simply enough, similar to streaming now, but high quality with workable encryption/subscription. Because, as you say, the infrastructure doesn't exist yet for true, complete catalog, 24x7 on-demand video, not to mention the rights mess that still has to be sorted out. Whether they move fast enough for the average person remains to be seen, but that is definitely the end game. |
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Avatar
Posts: 14 Location: Alberta, Canada |
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Yes software vendors (studios) have chosen Blu-Ray as the HD video format of choice. And with the announcement of BD-DVD hybrid discs available 2009 in Japan adoption will be faster provided the price increase is reasonable. However, I still have to argue "who cares?" Sorry if I confused the issue regarding recording as it's not the resolutions that people will care about it will be HDCP. (As an aside most of my customers can't see the resolution difference between 720p and 1080p with a 1080i source on the same size of screen 42" and smaller, but connect a 1080p source such as a Blu-Ray player and most can see the difference without hesitation.) HDCP licensing strictly prohibits recording digitally encrypted content (Section 3.1 & 3.2), thus only leaving the analog loop hole. But as I mentioned the MPAA has already begun lobbying to use SOC (selectable output control) as well as network broadcasters using the Broadcast Flag to prevent viewing content via analog cables and recording devices. In other words everyone will care they won't be able to record their favourite television programing and movie broadcasts on their shiny new Blu-Ray 300+ GB recordable discs or petabyte storage devices in the future as the analog hole is plugged. Unfortunately HDCP is not limited to HDMI and will most likely be a requirement for all future digital output technologies that is until a new more strict license replaces HDCP. Edit: Sorry forgot to mention that unless the Panasonic 1TB BD-R device (or any future Japanese product) uses a NTSC or ATSC tuner it's not worth importing for recording television broadcasts. |
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Greed1914
 Posts: 4427 |
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Yeah, this came up on an episode of Attack of the Show on G4. The panel discussion on Sony not wanting porn initially brought up how this move killed Beta and gave VHS the victory, but as they predicted it turned out not to make a difference. People go online for it now, so it's not nearly the issue it was then. Plus, it seems that porn made it onto BD anyway. |
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_Emi_
 Posts: 498 Location: Langjökull |
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This is the camp I fall in. I see that it's better quality but it's not enough for me to care. I'll upgrade my DVD player to Blu-ray when my current player bites it, and that probably won't happen for a while. My DVDs, on the other hand, will never get upgraded. I'm not coughing up more money for a version with only a minuscule, for me, upgrade in quality. I don't know how I forgot in my first post, but Revolutionary Girl Utena also has great music, both BGM and OP/ED/insert songs. I especially love the duel songs with Wakaba's being my favorite. Pity it's so short. Nemuro's and Akio's duel songs are great also. Out of the normal duelists, Saionji's are my favorite, especially the duel version of Virtual Star Embryology. For the soundtracks, all I need is the third one and I'm all set. |
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Shii
 Posts: 110 |
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pparker
Posts: 1185 Location: Florida |
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I did forget to mention that resolution does make a difference as the screen size increases. I'm still waiting for a good enough front projection system under $5,000 to give me a true theater experience in my living room, and when my screen does become 8 feet wide, I'll care more about 1080p  I still doubt I'll replace my DVD copy of When Harry Met Sally, though. But certainly LoTR. I haven't seen anime in HD yet, but I can't imagine needing to replace any of those DVDs either.
Oh, right. We are almost past the era of average consumers copying entertainment for free, I would say. It appears that the SOC waiver has been blocked for now by opposition parties, but the entertainment biz is too powerful. They make the drug that we all must have, and it's difficult on principle to argue with their right to restrict usage of their product. The problem with their point of view of course is the same as with most law: 98% of people are restricted because of 2% that violate "morality" as defined by special interest groups (especially morality that is money-motivated). The overhead cost of that philosophy is enormous, and particularly the U.S. has taken it to ludicrous levels. In this case, that cost seems to be the forced replacement of all entertainment equipment built before 2004 or so (I'm sure that's oversimplified) by U.S. consumers. But regardless, I'm betting that show biz gets it way, and 10 years from now, if not 5, we'll be nostalgic about the days of copying TV shows onto DVD. That does not mean that piracy will have ended, however (only consumer convenience and open-source entertainment products--a little side benefit for electronics makers). That 2% don't care what you outlaw and generally find a way around it anyway. But the MPAA will be able to say they won. |
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