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Author
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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 03-15-2008 09:08 PM
Here's some other Blu-ray news.
c|net - Top 5 Most Wanted Gadgets
The c|net website released their most wanted gadgets list for the month, as voted by visitors of the c|net website.
Panasonic's upcoming Blu-ray Disc player, the DMP-BD50 ranked #1 on the most wanted list. This player is set to be the first BD Live! (BD Profile 2.0) compliant standalone Blu-ray player to hit the market. It may arrive on store shelves as early as April 1. Hopefully that's not an April fool's joke.
Playstation 3 ranked #3 on the list.
Other items in the top file included Nintendo Wii (which fell to the #5 spot), one of Dell's XPS gaming notebook computers and Windows Vista Service Pack 1. Apple's iPod Nano ranked at #9.
Another interesting news item:
Video Business article link
quote: Video Business article
Best Buy builds bigger space for Blu-ray
Best Buy is moving out the old to make room for the new, as Blu-ray Disc becomes a larger merchandising focus.
Some of the chain’s stores are using new security packaging for all single and box set BD software, affixing clear plastic casing over the original disc case.
Outlets also are making room for multiple BD hardware demos, such as one Los Angeles location that features two Samsung displays, one Sony-branded station and one Sharp section. The manufacturer areas screen a variety of BD material, with one Samsung display rolling a format tutorial.
HD DVD stock is nearly wiped out on shelves of some Best Buy stores.
At one L.A. store, one BD standee held 35 facings, and in-line racks held more than 200 BD facings combined. The store had no HD DVD standees, and in-line racks amounted to space for about 120 facings.
Many HD DVD slots were vacant, however, and featured titles were down to one or two copies apiece. All HD DVD titles are marked at 30% off.
In early January, the store’s total facings were split, with 190 for BD and 110 for HD DVD.
Best Buy spokesman Brian Lucas said the chain is just getting started emphasizing BD as the only choice for high-definition.
“The stores will be evolving a lot. When you can focus on Blu-ray, it lets you finally focus on demonstrating solutions rather than options,” said Lucas. “Rather than having an HD DVD setup and Blu-ray setups, we are now freed up to” more efficiently satisfy customers.
Lucas said the new security packaging isn’t yet a national fixture, but that certain store managers are testing the best way to offer BD product.
Compared to standard DVDs, BD is sold at a premium price and might be at a higher risk for theft. In the Los Angeles stores, when BD got the security packaging around the first of February, standard DVD and HD DVD are sold without security cases.
The next noticeable high-def push, spanning TVs and BD hardware, should hit near the Summer Olympics, said Lucas.
“One thing we talk about with high-def awareness is that the purchase decision is dictated by trigger points,” he said. “Super Bowl and certainly the Olympics fall into that category as well.”
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 03-16-2008 12:49 AM
quote: Mike Blakesley
It's not because they haven't marketed it. It's because the young crowd doesn't see the need for it.
Mike, the "young crowd" will not give two shits about music made for 50 year old guys. Will you please acknowledge this fact already!?
![[Confused]](confused.gif) ![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
SACD and DVD-A had far too little in the way of albums that would appeal to young, frequent music buyers. And yes, is it entirely the fault of the music industry for not even bothering to supply appropriate content in the first place. Young people are not going to buy old people music they don't give a shit about. It's not the music they like. And it doesn't matter if the old people music is on some grand new format. They don't like that music in the first place. It's shit to them regardless of the format and form of packaging.
I haven't seen anything in the way of SACD releases featuring performers like Norah Jones, Foo Fighters, Alicia Keys, Metallica, Avenged Sevenfold...y'know...music that is "new" and that the biggest demographic that buys music actually likes at all. And that demographic is young people. Mainly people under the age of 30. They're not going to be interested in some old-ass re-master of a classic Santana album or a 25 year old re-do of Foreigner 4. That's the music their parents or grand parents listened to.
Is 50 Cent releasing anything on SACD or DVD-A? No. Is Snoop Dogg releasing anything on DVD-A or SACD? No. Is Puddle of Mudd or Nickelback releasing anything on SACD or DVD-A? No. I haven't seen major country music performers like Toby Keith, George Strait or Carrie Underwood do anything on SACD or DVD-A either.
The most popular music acts of the last several years have not done anything to produce their music in high resolution and multichannel form. They're sticking with 2 channel only production and simply engineering it to be loud instead of good.
I don't know if that is the fault of the music performers or if it is the music labels telling them they only have enough money in the production budget to produce a 2 channel album and not something in 5.1 24-bit/96kHz.
But the fundamental fact is this: the biggest music buying demographic was never really given any chance at all of accepting or rejecting SACD or DVD-A because the damned music labels never released any SACD or DVD-A titles the young music buyers would want to own at all in any form. They wouldn't buy that old stuff on CD, iTunes or anything else. So they sure as hell weren't going to pay a premium to own music totally irrelevant to their tastes in SACD or DVD-A.
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Tom Mundell
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 120
From: Silver Spring, MD, USA
Registered: Nov 2007
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posted 03-16-2008 07:35 AM
Another problem I encountered with DVD-A and SACD was that many players had default settings that would down sample any hi-res audio to cd quality; I know my player did this and to turn that off meant navigating the rather unintuitive menus. I've talked with a few other people who didn't know about this; they plugged in their new DVD-A/SACD player, put a disk in and hit play. They complained the results sounded just like a CD and were ready to not bother buying any more discs when I had them double check, and sure enough the player was down sampling!
quote:
I haven't seen anything in the way of SACD releases featuring performers like Norah Jones, ... Metallica,
Maybe not the best examples, I remember seeing both of those and more;
Norah Jones SACD
Metallica DVD-A
There were a number of recent, popular albums released in those formats, I remember finding them at my local Tower Records. Still I think your point is valid, they were probably far too few to have an impact.
quote: Paul Trimboli
Am I correct in assuming that new releases on vinyl won't have such compressed dynamics that CDs do because of the mastering requirements for vinyl?
I don't think this has anything to do with anything that's particular to vinyl, I think it's done as nowadays the main purchasers of vinyl would be audiophile types who prefer recordings that don't have dynamic compression.
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Scott Jentsch
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1061
From: New Berlin, WI, USA
Registered: Apr 2003
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posted 03-16-2008 02:40 PM
quote: David Stambaugh
Jeez, you guys are completely over-analyzing Scott's hypothetical. His point is the sizes of the HD files makes central storage for download viable. Copy protection isn't the issue; practicality of storage and download is. I think.
You are correct, David. My point was that if someone (a company that would have legal rights to do so, of course) wanted to make Blu-ray quality HD downloads available, it is technically possible to do now. By locating the server on the localized networks of the providers, it would avoid one of the two primary concerns of the providers, which is external bandwidth consumption.
PBS' Cringely takes a stab at why Apple hasn't gotten into Blu-ray, and while I don't agree with all of his points and conclusions, he may be onto something with his theory that Google's investments into data centers across the country and Apple's reticence to support Blu-ray are related. Add in that Google is making a play for wireless bandwidth spectrum, and the combination could put cable companies out in the cold as well.
What I think is more likely than providing Blu-ray quality downloads is that we will see QuickTime HD Movie Trailer-quality downloads instead. Anyone with a discerning eye and a decent system is going to know that the low bitrates used for those trailers is insufficient when compared with the high bandwidth examples that Blu-ray and HD DVD represent.
Unfortunately, the unwashed masses pay more money in a collective sense that those of us who are more discerning. Any corporation with shareholders to please will go after the maximum number of sales to the maximum number of people with a minimum of expenses. That equation never bodes well for the highest quality possible being delivered at a reasonable price.
Apple's current HD offering is insufficient right now. I haven't seen any of the movies to judge personally, but the number of titles available is greatly lacking. All of the other venues for HD movie delivery are lacking in titles and lacking in quality compared to Blu-ray, including HD PPV, VOD, and Microsoft's Xbox Marketplace.
That gives Blu-ray a window of opportunity. One that the Blu-ray manufacturers are wasting by pricing their products too high for a significant population to buy into the format before those deficient services become better.
Sony failed with SACD in that they failed to produce every music release they produced in hybrid SACD/CD discs. They had a great thing going with their hybrid discs and they didn't capitalize on the opportunity, and if they weren't going to make the investment with their own titles, I would imagine that the other labels figured it wasn't worth their investment either.
Of course, all of that discussion about SACD and DVD-A ignores the fact that some studies suggest that the quality differences between CD and SACD releases has more to do with production quality than the end format. When more effort was placed into the production of the disc, CD's were very comparable to SACD's in many of the examples used in the study (if I can find this reference, I'll link to it).
That gets back to the argument that today's music is so over-cranked, that higher quality formats aren't going to help it any. Can you imagine that Hannah Montana is going to sound any better in 24/96 or 48/192?
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 03-16-2008 03:46 PM
Certain "fashions" within the music industry will have to chance to allow proper recording/engineering practices to return to the studios.
Movie soundtracks are recorded in an almost blinding pace with seemingly impossible deadlines, but it seems like the folks doing that sort of work are giving more of a damn about riding the levels properly. And that just seems backwards. You're going to listen to a hit song so many more times than you ever will listen to a specific movie's soundtrack.
On to Cringely's article.
I think Apple is taking a very serious risk against its core business of selling computers and computing software by taking this stance on Blu-ray. I think it's a pretty stupid move.
Apple has been trying hard, and succeeding in some cases, with wooing Windows PC users to the Mac platform. Their stance on Blu-ray could seriously undermine those efforts.
Competition in the PC platform has been heating up yet again. Dell has been selling Blu-ray equipped notebooks and desktops for over a year. More and more PC manufacturers are adding such drives to their systems. Acer launched a new line of notebooks with BD-ROM drives and 1080p resolution displays. The prices on a lot of these systems are pretty affordable, and, as usual, more affordable than comparably equipped Macs with a mere DVD burner.
Cringely noted that lots of wedding videographers and many other semi-professional users had Macs with Final Cut Pro. The lack of Blu-ray support on the Mac platform could turn into a big liability for FCP.
Competing companies like Adobe have been incorporating support for Blu-ray authoring in their video authoring software suites. You can burn HD-quality video to a Blu-ray disc using Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 and Adobe Encore CS3. Adobe's Production Suite is a formidable competitor to Final Cut Pro, especially with it including industry leading applications like Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects. The Windows version has more stuff, such as OnLocation CS3 which allows direct to hard disc recording. Adobe isn't the only competitor to Apple either. Companies like Avid, Autodesk and Sony are steadily improving their offerings. And they have no reason whatsoever to exclude Blu-ray support.
quote: Scott Jentsch
What I think is more likely than providing Blu-ray quality downloads is that we will see QuickTime HD Movie Trailer-quality downloads instead. Anyone with a discerning eye and a decent system is going to know that the low bitrates used for those trailers is insufficient when compared with the high bandwidth examples that Blu-ray and HD DVD represent.
It's just going to show that not all 720p or 1080p content is the same in quality. Differences are major between D-Cinema in commercial theaters, video quality on Blu-ray Disc and the sort of quality you could get from downloading.
I think of the differences in this analogy: If 2K D-Cinema is placed on the level of a 4-star expensive restaurant, Blu-ray would be on the level of a very nice national chain restaurant and then Apple's HD offerings would be like buzzing through the drive thru lane at McDonalds. There's major differences in quality, but unfortunately not so in cost.
Using Apple's QT trailers as an example, Cringely extrapolated that a 1080p H.264 iTunes movie would weigh in at about 8GB. That's typical of the space required to store a 2 hour movie on DVD in good quality. 1080p is six times the pixel count. The quality differences definitely show, especially on the kind of TV I have.
quote: Scott Jentsch
That gives Blu-ray a window of opportunity. One that the Blu-ray manufacturers are wasting by pricing their products too high for a significant population to buy into the format before those deficient services become better.
In a little over 2 weeks from now a number of new Blu-ray players are reportedly due to start shipping and arriving on store shelves. According to the list of BD players on Blu-ray.com, a number of new players including Panasonic's BD Live! capable player, are supposed to ship to stores on April 1. The arrival of those new players could encourage some price cuts to happen on currently available models.
Playstation 3 is also selling very well. For the first time, it's now outselling both XBox360 and Nintendo Wii. Sony is reportedly having trouble keeping up with demand. Here in my town, the 40GB model is sold out at stores carrying them (Wal-Mart, Sam's Club, etc.).
Some are saying broadcasts of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing could spark a good sales increase for HDTV sets and many buyers may include a BD player in with the purchase. I think sales are going to be even better this fall as the big budget movies of Summer 2008 start hitting video. The February 2009 total switch to DTV in the US is also looming large and could drive sales further.
I don't think Apple has any chance at all of killing or even seriously damaging the Blu-ray market. Aside from the quality issues, I just don't see Apple TV as being a relevant product at all. Apple needs to sell that to people just to get a foot hold in a customer's living room just to get the chance to sell them highly compressed HD content. If the customer already has a DVR, like so many have, they can already order pay per view movies in HD or record other programming in HD. Why the hell do they even need an Apple TV?
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