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Topic: Anyone consuming HD or Blu-ray?
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 01-08-2008 01:38 PM
On the topic of why DVD still rules the home video market, it is still the leader because it was a huge leap above VHS and still remains a pretty good way to watch movies.
I've never seen any electronic stores running side by side comparisons of DVD-V and HD, which I think is a big mistake. If they played the same movie in DVD and HD on two identical monitors customers would see the big difference in image quality. Perhaps none have taken this step because they still make a lot of money selling regular DVDs and don't wish to dump too much on the format.
It's not clear whether the HD-DVD versus Blu-Ray format war is one of the primary reasons why standard DVD sales have been lagging. I think the main factor in lagging sales is the overall lesser quality of new movies. The DVD format is also over 10 years old, so there's no more novelty in it either. The lack of ground-breaking new movies has also made it a lot easier for folks to put off upgrading to HDTV and buying a HD movie disc player.
Technical issues with HDTVs and HD movie disc players have also made it easier for people to avoid upgrading. I'm happy to say a number of HDTV models have finally solved issues I saw as deal breakers for the past few years. I'm seriously looking at buying a certain 52" LCD-TV currently.
The HD-DVD versus Blu-Ray format war may not be over yet. However, retailers like Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Target may be the factor that finally deals the death blow to HD-DVD. Best Buy and Target have been reducing the amount of shelf space to HD-DVD and could move to elminate it entirely. Wal-Mart has been stocking little in either HD format, but appears poised to push Blu-Ray.
The situation in adult video is kind of interesting. HD-DVD was doing much better there. According to DVD File, not many porn titles were released in Blu-Ray because BD replicators were avoiding their businesses. Apparently major Hollywood movie studios were threatening to take their BD replication business elsewhere if those replication shops also handled porn content. The fear was that porn discs could accidentally find their way into things like Disney Blu-Ray childrens' movie packaging. I guess some of those worries have been dealt with since the number of adult movies on Blu-Ray is growing.
quote: Scott Jentsch
Releases on both formats were already much better than DVD (in all but a few isolated cases, of course), and adding 20GB of potential storage (keep in mind that not many 50GB discs were filled) isn't going to result in drastically higher picture quality or sound quality.
There seems to be enough of a difference that most Blu-Ray titles have featured uncompressed or lossless compressed surround sound tracks. Early BD titles weren't dual layer (and only MPEG-2). Most new BD titles are dual layer and AVC encoded.
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Blaine Young
Master Film Handler
Posts: 477
From: Kirkland, WA, USA
Registered: Sep 2006
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posted 01-08-2008 03:43 PM
I've been an LD collector since 1981 and have always loved that format. I guess I have a elitest mentality, but it strikes me as wrong if you can buy a DVD of "Transformers" in the grocery store with your bread and milk. Hell, you should at least have to go to K-Mart...
To me, anything that I can buy along with a bowl of soup and a sandwich really isn't work 'collecting'. DVD has replaced VHS, but it unfortunately took LD down with it.
Now with BD and HD-DVD, there is something 'special' again. But I still sometimes long for the linear simplicity of LaserDisc. And with all of the limitations of LaserDisc and it's analog video, I still prefer that to poorly compressed MPEG-2 DVD. Sorry, you just cannot take a 130 minute movie, compress the living crap out of it and then drop it on 1 layer of a DVD9, and fill the 2nd layer up with content you may watch once. (I'm thinking of the "Special Editions" of the Bond films in that rant. Something that was corrected with the Ultimate Editions released in 2007.)
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