Blue-ray or HD dvd.. Who will win the war!
 

I thought someone should make a poll about this topic, there have been loads of rumors on which camp apple is on, personally i think, that if the next gen macs have blu ray drive/burners that'll be it for hd-dvd. All be it apple wont put a next gen drive in for a few more years until there cheaper, and even then it will probably be in the mac pro for a few years before coming to the normal macs. But thats my opinion, who do you guys think is gonna win the war?

I voted for some new super disk because I think that by the time this battle gets settled flash RAM will be replacing hard drives and optical disks.

My guess (and hope) is that Apple releases the next gen of Macs with an UltraDrive which reads both formats and writes to either. Then, as with DVD+R verus DVD-R, who gives a flying ƒ¥Ωk?

niether, 1080p is 1080p no matter what media you run it from. With compression and high speed internet I see the future as being disk-less.

None of them. As the internet gets faster digital distribution will become the new standard and all hard media will become obsolete (except hard drives).

i was gonna put diskless as an option

and pardon my ignorence, but can someone explain flash ram, and why is it going to be like the best thing ever?

Although i think that it is cool that they've(DVD companies) made discs that big, i'd still prefer it if they'd develop Flash memory instead, as it's better for laptops etc as it uses less power (no motors) and if they can 'develop' it big enough, we can say goodbe to spinning HDD's as well.

Flash RAM is non volatile, which means that it holds it's information when the power is off. Get enough of it together and you can use it instead of a hard drive. It's a little slower than DRAM, but much faster than a hard drive.

I don't think either one of them is going to win. No consumer in his right mind is going to buy anything blu-ray or HD-DVD unless it already comes bundled, like Toshiba's and Sony's offerings, which you can't really remove it.

Blu-Ray sucks. And Sony is using the Playstation brand name to push it. Sony killed Blu Ray from the start by not allowing porn on the media. Sony did this with betamax and it failed miserably. Guess they never learn from their mistake. And they never learned the first rule of sales: "Sex sells."

HD-DVD shows more promise. I don't know much about it, but if it isn't made by sony, there's some hope, right?

Not if it's backed by Microsoft as HD-DVD is. Then it means that you're going to be locked into Microsoft products.

I guess it's good that Flash RAM may beat the two of them!

I vote BluRay, but as people have been saying, with the internet and compression, actual physical media will become a thing of the past

I thought it was a Toshiba product.

its a product made by committee, with many big names on it.

I found this page maybe your wrong

I think Blu Ray will win (although what may happen is that AHunter3 is right, everybody just buys players and drives that can read both).

Blu Ray specs are simply better than HD-DVD. It is not true that Sony won't allow porn on the media. And I don't think online distribution will be a factor in this round. Mainstream consumers like to have something real and physical for content distribution. Sure, things like iTunes, Steam, and XBox Live Arcade are making inroads on this, but Joe Six-pack likes knowing that even if his ISP goes on the fritz, even if his hard drive crashes, even if he forgets his account info, he can still go over to his DVD/CD shelf and pop in a DVD or CD and it will play.

Actually 1080p is 1080 regardless of what media you use, and someone (I was to say Toshiba) has scaled HD DVD to 50 gigs in size, so its capacity is now comparable.

However, I really don't care who wins, I view this the same way i viewed the DVD+ and the DVD- formats.

I actually don't care either, as long as we don't get super-restrictive DRM put on our media.

It'd make me stop buying physical copies of things outright if we had to register accounts, for example, and enter a username and password every time we wanted to play something. (iTunes works this way, but it's a one time deal to authorize a machine. I'm driving at physical media requiring a connection to a corporation to play)

I don't even like the ITMS DRM they use either

Right, but you can simply fit more 1080p (or whatever else you want) onto a BRD than a standard HD-DVD. I was unaware of the 50gig HD-DVD, though.

Really what blu ray allows is developers to be lazy. BR is nowhere near being needed for anything these days. What is really happening is now everyone is ignoring compression technology (which has come a super long way) and they are saying, oh this wasn't possible with out blu ray.

what of the following would need blu ray?

1) video games
2) movies
3) software
4) media (music, interactive things, etc)

I just created a full software image for an animation lab and overall the total install amount was 20 gigs of software + the OS. When I compressed with the zen works imaging, it compressed it down to 6 gigs. That was the speed option too, not the full compression option.

I'll have to agree with the XB360 devteam on this one: "Blu-Ray is overkill."

DVD's just went mainstream in 2000ish if I recall correctly, and 7 years into it's life we are already trying to replace it? I guess no one ever heard of getting the most mileage out of technology we already have.

I myself will stick with DVD's. They are good enough, and I really don't give a damn either way for Hi-def. i hope Apple stays out of the war altogether and doesn't pick sides.

This has to hurt HD-DVD

Warner Bros drop support for HD DVD

It's an irrelevant battle; the war will be won by online downloads, not a physical media format.

I own an HD-DVD player ($180 on Amazon including TEN free movies, couldn't pass that up). It's got an awesome picture, but then of course an HD download does too. Watching an HD-DVD on it or an HD download on the Apple TV is all the same to me. Actually if I could stop building cabinets to house our growing DVD collection, that would please me greatly.

I think it should be about getting use out of what we already have, not building bigger.

But as far as the battle goes, Blu-Ray looks to be winning the war now.

I just hope Apple stays out of the fray altogether.

I love how tv ads for high-definition always show you a sample of how amazing high-definition looks. If it looks amazing on the low-definition tv you're viewing the ad on then you don't need to fork out for the high-definition tv.

If movie studios put their catalogues exclusively online, and halt retail sales of disks altogether, then they would have amazing control over who can download their content. It might have a negative impact on the movie marketplace in SE Asia because internet connections to US servers from SE Asia are generally slow. High speed download of copyrighted material is difficult, especially when downloads are blocked due to IP addresses originating outside of the continental US. For example: I can't view music videos on MTV because of my IP location.

Furthermore, most SE Asians don't have any easy way to get access to US credit card or banking accounts, so would be unable to buy content. Without movies on retail discs, people living in SE Asia would be starved (of movie content) to death. We might see the black-market entrepreneurs become even wealthier, and people here actually dependent on them to get their content.

Currently, there are a few retailers here in BKK selling legitimate Thai version (region 3) DVDs, but if movies become download only in the future, these legit retailers will surely vanish, and the black market will be the only option. I wouldn't want to see that happen because most of what is on the black market is low quality junk, highly compressed, poorly edited, rife with misspellings, etc.

Instead, you'll have to start building hard drive racks with ventilation systems to house all of your downloaded HD content.

In this country I have never seen a single blu-ray in wide distribution. All movies/music videos are DVD. Blu ray is still very unpopular here

In BKK, Blu-Ray is showing up quickly, and the titles are very expensive. I've seen stores selling legitimate Blu-Ray discs for 10 times the price of the same titles on (standard definition) DVD.

Damn, I can't believe that progress reached Bangkok faster than Russia!=)

Content Delivery Networks are the answer. They use controlled P2P-type technologies to make distribution fast and low-cost. A friend of mine is engineering the technology behind one of them, and it's pretty amazing. They are essentially a controlled Bit Torrent.

I have four terabytes in my home office right now, consuming very little space. TB drives are $300 today; how big will drives be next year?

I was informed last night that 4 major studios dropped HD DVD and went with blu ray. I think Blu Ray will be the more dominate one now.

And how much is average blu-ray cd rom?
This may be fine, but I usually use the same type disks in my Mac, PC, DVD-player (connected to TV) and my stereo-system, that supports DVD. In case if blu-ray wins the market completely, I'll have to change a lot of expensive hardware:)

I have been following the news very closely this week, and haven't seen any news of 4 studios dropping HD-DVD. Warner has dropped it, and there is rumor of two more possibly next month. I think you're going to have to support your statement with some links or an audio recording to be credible.

Interesting, but how many full-length HD movies at 1080 (compressed or non-compressed) do you have stored on your 4 terabytes of disk space? Do they include all of the extras?

Do you have them backed up just in case something knocks out the original data? This is going to be a big consideration because content providers, such as Amazon and iTunes Store, are probably not going to allow more than one or two downloads per purchase. So, backups are a must-have.

That sounds like something worth looking into, but I would assume that there won't be any strong offerings available in my region until a few years after the technology hits the US and Europe.

I really don't know, there's a lot of other data there, and I'm not the one in charge of media in my house. If I was, we'd have very little, I don't really care that much. As far as I know, the movie fairies deliver them to us. In general you can assume around 10GB/hour for full HD. I don't believe we have backups, but it is in RAID 5.

However all of that is irrelevant since we're talking about a future service, which will depend on technologies to make it work. Five years ago would you guess that TV shows would be purchased from Apple?

Unfortunately, AppleTV only supports up to 720 lines of resolution, not 1080.

Predicting Apple’s technological route
 

Perhaps not five years ago, but I certainly thought that movies and TV shows were the next natural step as soon as the iTunes Music Store was launched in the Spring of 2003. And that it was only a question of time.

After all, Jobs (and Apple) has always yearned for the Cool Factor -- which goes a long way toward explaining a lot of their strategic choices. Such as providing user friendly technology that is complementary to the entertainment industry.

Yeah, I’ve wondered about that myself. And furthermore it seems the storage space is paltry, given how cheap large disks are. They could at least provide other configurations as an option.
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Here's what I, Cringley says in part about Blu-Ray, and the rest of his article is a good read -- Cringely prognosticates: "End Game: Why Apple Will Buy Adobe".

Robert Cringely has always been eminently readable, intelligent, well argued and entertaining. Everything that a certain other self-appointed pundit with a wider distribution is not.

...even when he is wrong, which he quite often is, he’s well worth reading.

Thanks for the link!
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Apple as the King of eBooks?
 

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I was fascinated by this comment to Cringely’s article, by Mike Cane:

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