I bought a HD-DVD player a month ago when Best Buy was selling the Toshiba A3 for $200. I got the deal where "300" and "Bourne Identity" came in the box, Best Buy let me pick out any two HD-DVD movies they have, and I get five from a rebate list (still waiting for them). I thought before I would wait until there was a format winner and loser between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, but the player price got me to move. My old DVD player didn't do upconversions, so I figured that even if Blu-Ray won, I would have a better DVD for regular DVDs than I had before. Since then, I've read articles that suggested that there won't necessarily be a format winner. The example given was Playstation and XBox; both games are popular, and players pick the one they like best. Maybe HD-DVD and Blu-Ray will be the same. Then I read another article that suggested in a couple of years we won't be buying DVDs at all; instead we will just download HD movies from the internet. If that's the case, DVD players will function as convenience items to play movies over and over without having to waste memory on. So, Hornfans, what are your thoughts on where this is going?
When the iPOD goes HD with terabytes will there only be one Highlander. Terabyte storing capacity is the next big thing in memory storage. It will be where we will store things like important files, movies, and music. Of course this will be a high-end consumer product so there will still be HDDVD and Blu-Ray for lower end consumers and still probably DVD for the most poorest of consumers. As for the HDDVD and Blu-Ray battle, the switch from analog to digital will clear the brush a bit. Some consumers might feel compelled to update entirely with the switch and we'll be able to see who is more in command of the market.
I think HD down loads are a few years off as the files are HUGE and take a while to down load and you would need your computer networked to your HT to watch a down loaded movie.
I guess my question is- in the future, will DVDs be like videotapes are now...a dead technology that is no longer supported, and will last only as long as the last player works? Will HD-DVDs and Blu-Rays be like laser discs? I notice that the Criterion collection is still regular DVD. I wonder if they will be a good sign of what direction this goes.
I still say downloads will beat them in the next five years. Evidence from the computer and cable industries - Media Center shipping with Vista Home Premium and Ultimate - Increased availability Home NAS servers from major manufacturers like Dell, HP and increased availability from the smaller companies that we all know like Buffalo, Linksys, etc - Increased frequency of Media Extending devices - Incredible hardware support for the x264 codec(all midrange graphic cards and above). This is important because that codec can get one 1080p files with surround @ 8 gb and under. Go to any torrent site and you see a ton of these. - Media extending cable boxes showing up with hard drive attachment capability. - Media extending TV sets actually showing up. - Increasing download speeds and huge increases in bandwidth in the next calendar year. This all points to HD VOD service, with possible permanent download possibilities at some point as well as iTunes/Rhapsody type services from the studios. Once a Microsoft or Time Warner outbids Sony and Panny for studio support (I believe they will, which is probably why M$ is so quiet no the whole format war, which they themselves could easily end) I actually believe they are waiting for a recording format winner(HD-DVD R/RW just hit the streets today) There's no reason one can't download a movie during the 2-3 hours they are watching it on some cable systems like Verizon FIOS. Its simply all about slowly changing home to digital storage systems, which most with computers are already doing on a smaller scale. Then getting these people to use extenders or use a living room computer or HTPC.. Its all about home integration whether than a set of set-top boxes. The two disc boxes don't follow that format. Of course its totally possible this doesn't happen. But keep in mind, one could do all of this to their home for less than the price of a real Blu-Ray player with all of the bells and whistles the format promises.
The other day, I was looking at the Fry's ad in the paper. They had a 1080p upconversion DVD player for sale. I didn't think it was possible to upconvert a normal DVD to 1080p. Has anyone had any experience with those? And if they could really upconvert a normal DVD to 1080p, wouldn't that make HD-DVD and Blu-ray useless?
There is no upconversion DVD player that can output 1080i or p. If there was they would corner the market like you said.
Sure, you can upconvert a DVD to 1080i or 1080p. The problem is you're just guessing what all those extra pixels should be. A really good upscaler looks much better than a bad one, and can be comparable to cable HDTV for a well-mastered DVD. Of course, even a good upscaler doesn't really compare to top-notch HD material.
I'm gonna side with Hellraiser as far as downloading HD movies goes. I think we will eventually abandon a physical media for video, but I think that's a long ways off, certainly not in the next 4-5 years. Just to be clear, I realize you can do it now and that HD VOD is right around the corner, but that's for a small percentage of consumers. I'm talking about this becoming the standard, and it's my belief that HD-DVD or Blu-ray will have many good years before they are replaced by digital files.Here's some reasons I have:Network infrastructure - In order for physical media to yield to digital downloads, high-speed internet has to be available for everyone. It's easy to get it if you live in urban areas, but there are a lot of people living in rural areas that still don't have this luxury. Those people will always need a physical media until the cable/phone companies catch up. Speed and reliability - Not only do they need to expand high-speed coverage, but they also need to increase the speed and reliability. For example, I have a PS3 running cable internet (RR) and it can take up to an hour to download a 1 GB video file. For a 10-15 GB full length 1080p movie, that would be a significant amount of time. If I wanted to watch said movie on Friday night, I'd have to know about it before leaving for work, just so I could set up the download. Meanwhile, physical media makes it easy because I can just swing buy Best Buy or Blockbuster on the spur of the moment. In my opinion, they need to make it consistently possible for a full length 1080p movie to be downloaded in under 1 hour. I think that's still a ways off, but maybe I'm wrong. Hardware support - I know Windows Media Center is becoming more common, but this would require having a separate computer linked to each TV, or a method of streaming video from a central computer to all TVs in the house. That either involves a lot of duplicate hardware, or a shitload of bandwidth coming from one place. Right now, can you even stream 1 movie in HD quality? Could you do multiple movies to multiple locations, all wirelessly? I don't think so, and last time I checked, wireless network hardware is fairly expensive. It would cost a lot more to set this up than it would to purchase a couple HD-DVD or BD players. Familiarity - I think this is the ultimate limiting factor. I'll use my parents as an example...they are in their early 50s and are anything but computer whizzes. My dad doesn't even have an email account, but he does watch about 1-2 movies on DVD per week. If his movie watching depending on his ability to maintain a dedicated home theater computer, he would give up movie watching. This idea would have to be presented to him in the form of a DVR, where it's a simple device that connects directly to the TV. I'm gonna take a guess that there are a lot of people in the same boat as him, especially those that didn't grow up in the internet and iPod generation. Also along these lines, people just like the feeling of buying a movie. It gives them satisfaction to walk into a store and pick one up, and they can even wrap it up as a gift for someone else. They know that movie will always be available, and don't have to worry about a hard drive crashing or something like that. They can also take that movie into another room, or loan it out to a friend. Digital files don't have this convenience yet, and I think people feel less secure about purchasing a $20 movie that would be stored on an unreliable HDD. Anyways, I'm sure we'll one day see digital media as the primary format, but I fully expect the new High-def movie formats to have their 8-10 year reign first.
dloading HD movies over the net will not be feasible. well, it won't for the majority of the US. 99% of homes have copper wire to the homes. therein lies your limitation on bandwidth. copper wires are not ideal for moving large quanitities of packets. to conceivably support gig/sec downloads, you would need fiber optic. and even w/ today's fiber optic technology, that's not achievable on a WAN supporting several neighborhoods and city areas. but fiber optic throughput is constantly being improved. they are able to transmit more and more wavelengths over the same fiber so we may be there one day. but to make the offering ubiquitous, the cable, telecom, media companies would have to overbuild the entire transport infrastruce. this is just the long haul. the hardest part will be deploying fiber to every home. that cost is astronomical. the return on investment will not be there.
