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Blu-ray wins?


Neil

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It wasn't quite as clear cut as it appears tho, with production costs significantly higher than HD-DVD, i honestly thought it was curtains a few months back when Paramount signed that 18 month exclusivity deal with HD-DVD.

I'm pretty certain PS3 won this for Blu-Ray tbh, expecting Xbox owners to fork out n additional 100+ quid for the drive probably a step too far. Tho im completely certain had the Xbox been able to come out with the drive initially it would be a very different story. Regardless of what the studios were backing, Blu-ray's been outselling HD pretty much 2:1 since the PS3 came out.

Personally, fucking delighted, firstly that sony managed to finally back the right horse, and secondly that i dont have a rather expensive piece of (soon to be) obselete technology under my telly :)

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Even though blu-ray has won this particular battle, in my opinion its curtains for all optical media in the long term. HD downloads, whether legal or otherwise, will be the norm sooner or later.

i concur and i also think that this is the horse microsoft have really been backing all along hence no built in hd-dvd drive.

though i would expect a blu-ray add on for the 360 to be announced this spring.

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It wasn't quite as clear cut as it appears tho, with production costs significantly higher than HD-DVD, i honestly thought it was curtains a few months back when Paramount signed that 18 month exclusivity deal with HD-DVD.

There's actually next to no difference between production costs of Blu Ray and HD-DVD discs. In some cases Blu Ray works out considerably cheaper, especially in bulk.

Warner moving to Blu exclusivity was the final straw for HD-DVD, whereas when Paramount moved to HD-DVD Blu still had a 60% stake in all HD Media. Now that it's 70/30 the likelyhood was that Paramount, who's exclusivity runs out in March, were to go format neutral at the very least leaving just Universal as the main player in the HD-DVD camp. Incidentally, Transformers was not the cash cow everyone though it was going to be for HD-DVD.

WalMart also stated recently that they would stop selling HD-DVD players and media in it's stores in America from March onwards. ASDA in the UK will probably follow.

The real battle begins now as Blu will be taking on DVD to become the main optical media on the market which hopefully will yield sharp price cuts for Blu media and players.

The UK will not adopt HD downloads for the foreseeable future as there is not the required infrastructure across the telecoms services to support across the board high def downloads. It will cost an estimated 100 billion to replace the current cabling to support internet speeds of 100mbps which is not achievable using the current UK wide cabling and all exchanges would have to be replaced to compensate for the higher usage demands. With ISPs already bottlenecking internet traffic at peak times the future for HD downloads in the UK certainly is not rosy.

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I will point out also that Microsoft had their eggs in both baskets from the start as Vista supports Blu Ray fully as does the programming of the Xbox 360.

The programming of my phone would support blu ray.....

One retarded comment quotes another
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Unless your original DVDs are multi-region. :down:

True, but given time there will be multi-region blu ray players on the market too. DVD's are so cheap now that it's easy to replace region 1 etc discs if you absolutely have too. I've kept a multi-region DVD player in case i want to watch the few region 1 discs that i have.

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True, but given time there will be multi-region blu ray players on the market too. DVD's are so cheap now that it's easy to replace region 1 etc discs if you absolutely have too. I've kept a multi-region DVD player in case i want to watch the few region 1 discs that i have.

I have Region 1 discs with content that I can't buy on Region 2, cheap or otherwise, that's usually why I've bought them in the first instance.

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Just crap to have to have two different boxes under the telly. And just pointing out the fact that your statement earlier on that blu-ray players would play DVDs should have had a caveat attached. ;)

Try putting your DVD in a VHS recorder...

I had also already covered that particular instance in my original statement.

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I had also already covered that particular instance in my original statement.

I'm not sure where, but anyway, lets move on.

The fact that a Blu-Ray player won't play multi-region DVDs, plus the region coding of Blu-Ray discs are just another couple of barriers in the way of the format being a success.

For example I might have fancied a Blu-Ray player as a nice way to upscale DVDs, but not if it won't play multi-region.

Once there is a Blu-Ray player at the 100 quid mark, which will play multi-region DVDs AND Blu-Ray discs, and once Blu-Ray discs are a similar price to DVDs ie under a tenner, then I might buy a player. I suspect many others will be the same. If they don't start making some concessions it will just be a niche market like laserdisc. There isn't a dramatic enough jump in terms of quality between DVD and HD to appeal to the mass market otherwise.

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I'm not sure where, but anyway, lets move on.

The fact that a Blu-Ray player won't play multi-region DVDs, plus the region coding of Blu-Ray discs are just another couple of barriers in the way of the format being a success.

For example I might have fancied a Blu-Ray player as a nice way to upscale DVDs, but not if it won't play multi-region.

Once there is a Blu-Ray player at the 100 quid mark, which will play multi-region DVDs AND Blu-Ray discs, and once Blu-Ray discs are a similar price to DVDs ie under a tenner, then I might buy a player. I suspect many others will be the same. If they don't start making some concessions it will just be a niche market like laserdisc. There isn't a dramatic enough jump in terms of quality between DVD and HD to appeal to the mass market otherwise.

Are you conveniently forgetting that DVD players and discs were as expensive as Blu Ray is now when it came out....

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Are you conveniently forgetting that DVD players and discs were as expensive as Blu Ray is now when it came out....

No, I waited for the price of DVD players/discs to come down before I bought one of those as well.

That said, there's not an obvious comparison to be made between the introduction of DVD and Blu-Ray/HD-DVD. DVD was a huge step up from VHS for all sorts of reasons. The step up to HD is more subtle, and therefore a harder sell. There are plenty of people out there who are perfectly happy with their DVDs and have no inclination to buy a Blu-Ray player.

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Are there any superior factors except a better picture (if you own a posh tv) and cramming more episodes of a tv series onto a single disc?

There's a lot more space on the discs for higher quality audio transfers i.e full 7.1 (and further) LPCM tracks or packeted HD audio like Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio HD.

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