Funny thing is I thought DVD players came out
a few years ago cause of the perfection of the
blue laser diode. Wrong! It was a development
of existing technology. But I thought the
green laser had too long a wavelength... ah
what the heck! Must find a place for these
big laserdiscs I got 20 years ago. And stop
laughing I will agree with Rita Rudner, we
want something in writing its the last thing
they are gonna invent!

Blue Ray...funny but I was looking up a book
title on google recently. My first day in the
school library 40 something years ago and I
was trying to choose. "Come on you" was the
cry, period is almost over. Then a book loomed
called The Blue Ray looking like science
fiction. Written by some military person it
seems. A device to pacify the natives! Yes!

Exactly who made Walmart king of the galaxy? I certainly didn't vote for 'em, and I don't see any waterlogged women lobbing utensils about.

Walmart picked a side. So what. When HD is unavailable because they folded, then the issue will be closed. Until then: long live multi-format hardware; long live the free-to-choose consumer.

__________________
[Dr. Horrible]___________________________[Penny]
Listen close to everybody's heart________And you believe there's good in everybody's heart
And hear that breaking sound_____________Keep it safe and sound
Hopes and dreams are shattering apart____With hope you can do your part
And crashing to the ground_______________To turn a life around

You're pinning this on WalMart? Granted, WalMart's decision to go strictly with Blu-Ray is important, but more as a sign of the end of the format war than as a cause of it. NetFlix, Blockbuster, and Target all dropped HD-DVD before WalMart did.

Rumors are that Toshiba's going to pull the plug on HD-DVD, and soon.

__________________
SeanF

"Ask to understand, but don't challenge unless you have the knowledge."--NEOWatcher

The contents of this post are ©2008 by SeanF and may not be copied or retransmitted in any form without the express written consent of SeanF

All the sources I've seen indicate that Toshiba has stopped production, and will be making an official announcement sometime very soon (as in this week). It's pretty much over.

__________________
WANTED:

Schroedinger's Cat

Dead And Alive

and Sony wins again.


didn't they win the CD battle 20 years ago?


of course they lost the battle over BETA and memorystick. But Sony has a lot of power in the industry.

__________________
"I will do my best to understand and explain the universe from big to small without invoking miracles, unrepeatable events, or divine intervention. In place of those things I will use observations, mathematics, and science."


-Cross
My travel blog

Some of my Astrophotography


Those that lack education have a hard time understanding its value. - Cross

True enough, but nobody was heralding the immediate end of HD-DVD back then, and HD was getting some backers of their own. Now that Walmart picked a side, everybody's looking to throw HD-DVD onto the cart with the old guy?

El Reg (I think) reported that "the porn industry" picked a side a while back. For the life of me, though, I can't remember which.

I will say, however, that it's moments like this I kinda wish we were having this discussion on Fark or something. You guys are missing out on a bunch of puns that I must not utter here. (PM me if you want 'em. Or not. They're pretty obvious.)

Wake me when that happens.

__________________
[Dr. Horrible]___________________________[Penny]
Listen close to everybody's heart________And you believe there's good in everybody's heart
And hear that breaking sound_____________Keep it safe and sound
Hopes and dreams are shattering apart____With hope you can do your part
And crashing to the ground_______________To turn a life around

Nope. The battle just became irrelevant. Everybody and their dog is making multi-format CD-Rs and drives now, and you can get either kind of blanks just about anywhere, even Walmart.

__________________
[Dr. Horrible]___________________________[Penny]
Listen close to everybody's heart________And you believe there's good in everybody's heart
And hear that breaking sound_____________Keep it safe and sound
Hopes and dreams are shattering apart____With hope you can do your part
And crashing to the ground_______________To turn a life around

Along as whatever side still plays current dvds as well I do not care.

__________________
If it's just us, it seems like an awful waste of space.
Contact Carl Sagan

I don't have either. I'm one of those consumers who is waiting for the whole thing to sort itself out. Can't really afford a new player right now, anyway. Heck, my first DVD player cost me about $80 and was the cheapest in Olympia; my current one cost about $35.

__________________
Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I've been waiting for the format wars to end before spending any money on either type of hardware. For those Blu-Ray early adopters out there, well, it appears some of you might not be very happy for long according to this article:

Blu-ray may have taken a commanding lead in the next-generation format war, but the group has a big problem looming: early supporters of the format will be left out in the cold when the Blu-ray Disc Association introduces BD Profile 2.0

Unlike HD DVD, which mandated features such as local storage, a second video and audio decoder for picture-in-picture, and a network connection from the very beginning, the companies behind Blu-ray took a different approach. Initial hardware players lacked these capabilities in order to keep costs down.

None of the Profile 1.0 players can be upgraded to Profile 1.1, which was finalized recently, with the exception of the PlayStation 3 -- whose update arrived in mid-December. Likewise, Profile 2.0 is expected to arrive in October bringing Internet connectivity that Profile 1.1 players lack.

...
In addition, the BD-J interactivity layer, based on Java, has continued to evolve since the introduction of Blu-ray Profile 1.0. This means that early players may have a buggy implementation and perhaps more importantly, they are not powerful enough to play the latest films properly.

When BetaNews asked developers of BD Live whether they were concerned about a backlash from early adopters who supported the format from the beginning, we were told: "They knew what they were getting into."

BDA President Andy Parsons echoed that sentiment at the Blu-ray press conference Monday, telling BetaNews that it's normal for new technology to change and older hardware to become obsolete. He added that early Blu-ray owners can continue to do everything they could in the beginning: watch movies in high-definition.

I don't know if these changes are important or not, but I find the attitude that "they knew what they were getting into" to be rather harsh. This article was the first time I'd heard of these changes. If I'd bought one of those early players, I'd probably be quite upset.

I still have a large cache of videotapes and have a dual vcr/dvd player. Most of the videos have are dvds and I do not want to buy a second version of something I or someone in my family already have.

__________________
If it's just us, it seems like an awful waste of space.
Contact Carl Sagan

I have blu-ray, by virtue of having a PS3.

I think that for HD DVD the Fat Lady was warming up in her dressing room for a while, and is now standing in the wings awaiting her entrance.

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I offer a complete and utter retraction. The imputation was totally without basis in fact, was in no way fair comment and was motivated purely by malice. I deeply regret any distress that my comments may have caused you or your family, and I hereby undertake not to repeat any such slander at any time in the future.

I don't think it's to do with Walmart. Most of the big film studios are now firmly in the blu-ray camp. If there's no or limited releases, then the availability of players will reflect that in the market. Walmart are following here, not leading.

Here's the BBC article about it.

__________________
I offer a complete and utter retraction. The imputation was totally without basis in fact, was in no way fair comment and was motivated purely by malice. I deeply regret any distress that my comments may have caused you or your family, and I hereby undertake not to repeat any such slander at any time in the future.

Well, seeing as I don't have an HD television, I'm not worried about HD or Blue Ray DVDs. I'll pick a side once one of those sides agrees to buy me a new television. Until then, I'm happy with my standard DVD's.

__________________
I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

Theory of Zombie Relativity:
1) Everyone Else is a Zombie relative to You
2) Whether or not it matters is related to the inverse square of the distance between their teeth and your brain
(Quoted from Demigrog)

I said WalMart dropping HD-DVD was important. It's big news. But it's big news as a sign that the war is over. They're not ending it, they're responding to its end.

And it's not like the others dropped out a long time ago. Warner just dropped HD-DVD last month, and NetFlix only about a week ago. I'm not sure when Target dropped out. And the rumors that Toshiba was going to drop HD-DVD started before the WalMart announcement, too.

You'll be the first person I tell when I hear it.

__________________
SeanF

"Ask to understand, but don't challenge unless you have the knowledge."--NEOWatcher

The contents of this post are ©2008 by SeanF and may not be copied or retransmitted in any form without the express written consent of SeanF

I'm waiting until they get all the way up to X-Ray disks.

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
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Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

I have separate players, largely because--with the exception of my stereo--I don't like having a machine that does two majorly different things. I've never wanted a TV/VCR combo, and I don't want a VCR/DVD combo, either. But other than that, I'm with you. I will, slowly, start replacing the movies I have on VHS; I've pretty much started with my favourites, in no small part because the tapes of some of them are starting to fail from overuse. (My poor copy of MST3K's I Accuse My Parents!) And Fargo came with a trivia track, and I'm a sucker for those. However, replacing them all will be an expensive proposition.

For those with the fancy-schmancy players--do they still play regular old boring DVDs?

__________________
Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

As far as I know, they do.

__________________
Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

I do, yes. Apart from anything else, DVD's don't look that great on my HD TV (1080p) when played on my DVD player due to their resolution - the PS3 upscales them, so they look much better.

As for buying blu-ray films - I'm not about to try to replace my existing DVD library. If my kids are likely to want to be able to watch a new film in their rooms, then I'll get it on DVD so they can watch it (PS3 is only blu-ray in the house). When deciding between the formats for a new film that I want to buy, I'll consider whether I think there's a benefit to be gained from watching that particular title at the higher resolution and quality of blu-ray, plus the usual considerations about whether there's any interesting extras, etc.

_