[smacintush]

Originally Posted by mrtew 

I think DVD will disappear a LOT faster than LPs did when CDs came out. DVD's don't even have any various advantages over HD like LPs did over CDs so there's no reason to keep buying DVDs whatsoever. Once the winner is decided everyone will go get a $79 bluray player at wall-mart and buy BR discs even if they don't have an HDTV won't they? They will get a better picture, still be able to watch all their old DVDs, still be able to use their old TV, etc. and will stop digging themselves into a obsolete hole.

The reverse is true too. Besides resolution, there is no real advantage of jumping into HD over DVD and if you still have an old SD TV, there's no real advantage to a better resolution format.

Those old DVD players will last for YEARS. Why throw money away on something that you gives you no real gain? DVD's will die very slowly as those old DVD players die and as new people grow up, move out and buy their own stuff.

[Weezer]

The jump from DVD to HD-DVD is a lot less dramatic for your everday person than the jump from VHS to DVD was.

DVD added a completely different type of media, menus, extras, and works as intended with pretty much every TV out there via composite.

The jump to HD is much more evolutionary than revolutionary. Menus are better, extras are better, video/sound is better, but for the vast majority of consumers, not better enough at the previous price points.

Now that we are seeing $99-$199 HD-DVD players, I think it is a totally different ballgame. People have been easily spending that much on upconverting dvd players, so it's a no brainer to upgrade to the HD.

To say that DVD will drop as soon as the war is over is foolish. New releases will be coming out on DVD for atleast the next 4-5 years as the market gradually shifts towards newer sets and players. The adoption of DVD only took buying the new player and plugging it in. For most consumers, upgrading to HD movies requires a new 1k+ TV, new player, much more expensive disks, new audio receiver (if you want the new codecs), and new cables. To think that kind of mass market change will happen overnight is silly.

[exca1ibur]

DVD will be around for a while for the fact that HDTVs have to be a bigger market. Right now HDTV itself is new. Why would you buy an HD format disc, or even have HDTV from a cable company if you have an SDTV? The Digital TV revolution is still in transition, and will be for a while. The fact people overlook is you need an HDTV alone with your Blu-ray and HD-DVD player to get the advantage. Unless you own both what's the point? Why own an SDTV with a HD player? You will not see a difference in anything but audio, assuming you have the setup there as well. The VHS - DVD transition didn't require a new TV so that transition was easy.

When you get to a point where HDTVs are the majority market, with HD channels everywhere, the difference will be obvious between SD and HD for the general public. At that point the DVD market will start to decline, until then it will be around for a while. I'd guess at least 4-5 years.

[jokell82]

Originally Posted by PaperNotes 

When you consider that low res video on phones and web browsers is so popular you kinda get the feeling not many give a **** about high definition until everything is in high definition bar none. Look at this factoid. This thread and its poll is very old but only has 47 votes. Sucky level of interest.

The poll is only two days old.

[goMac]

I haven't voted in the poll because I don't own either. I'd vote for neither, but with the HD-DVD player prices as they are, I may pick one up.

[mrtew]

Originally Posted by Weezer 

To say that DVD will drop as soon as the war is over is foolish. New releases will be coming out on DVD for atleast the next 4-5 years as the market gradually shifts towards newer sets and players. The adoption of DVD only took buying the new player and plugging it in. For most consumers, upgrading to HD movies requires a new 1k+ TV, new player, much more expensive disks, new audio receiver (if you want the new codecs), and new cables. To think that kind of mass market change will happen overnight is silly.

OK, you're the most exaggerated counterposter! Foolish, Silly? Wow. Foolish and silly is to keep buying more and more DVDs for the next four years while you save up for a huge screen HDTV. None of those high-end audiovisual things you list are required to start buying HD discs. All you need besides maybe a $299 HDTV is a $79 BluRay or HDDVD player. But they don't exist yet and even if they did only a silly fool would buy one knowing that the format that they start buying discs in might be gone soon. IF the war didn't exist any non-silly, non-fool would quit wasting their money on obsolete DVDs today and only buy HD discs starting tomorrow. As it is, I've pretty much stopped buying any movies at all until there's some kind of resolution and I'd think anyone that cared about their money and movie collection would too. Once there's a winner I definitely think the changeover will happen overnight.

[icruise]

I think the fact that they still sell "full screen" versions of DVDs says a lot about the average consumer's interest in HD movies. In my opinion, even if there was only one HD movie format, DVDs will still be going strong for some time unless the studios decide to just cut them off and force people to buy new players. My guess is that this would not be in their best interest, but you never know.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see if DVDs disappear "overnight" as you say. The hard thing will probably be telling when one format or the other has actually "won" because the way things are going, it'll be a long struggle, and it's possible that there may never be one clear winner.

[jokell82]

Originally Posted by mrtew 

OK, you're the most exaggerated counterposter! Foolish, Silly? Wow. Foolish and silly is to keep buying more and more DVDs for the next four years while you save up for a huge screen HDTV. None of those high-end audiovisual things you list are required to start buying HD discs. All you need besides maybe a $299 HDTV is a $79 BluRay or HDDVD player. But they don't exist yet and even if they did only a silly fool would buy one knowing that the format that they start buying discs in might be gone soon. IF the war didn't exist any non-silly, non-fool would quit wasting their money on obsolete DVDs today and only buy HD discs starting tomorrow. As it is, I've pretty much stopped buying any movies at all until there's some kind of resolution and I'd think anyone that cared about their money and movie collection would too. Once there's a winner I definitely think the changeover will happen overnight.

I'm not sure you could find anyone that would agree with that.

I went with my sister the other day to pick up Ratatouille on DVD. When it rang up at $14.99 I had forgotten how cheap DVDs were compared to the HD formats. Until prices come down across the board average consumers will stay away.

[mrtew]

Originally Posted by icruise 

I think the fact that they still sell "full screen" versions of DVDs says a lot about the average consumer's interest in HD movies....

This isn't the thread for debating 'full screen vs. wide screen of course, but if you research it you'll find out that you actually get almost the whole width of the original movie with many full screen DVDs and way more of the height that you even see in the theatre. They actually crop the frame to make it widescreen, not vice versa, contrary to popular belief! (of course widescreen IS the way the director intended it to be seen if that's important).

[Brien]

Well, depends really. Not all theatrical films are shot in 4:3 and matted, some are actually shot wide. But yeah, that is true a lot of the time.

[icruise]

In any case, it's really beside the point. All I was saying was that people who buy full-screen movies do it because they want the picture to fill up the screen on their standard-def TVs, and they are not going to go out and buy an HD movie player the second a winner is determined.

[Eug]

I went to the Toshiba/Universal/Warner HD DVD promo yesterday in Toronto. One guy was trying to tell the VPs of these companies that every new DVD release should be a HD DVD/DVD combo disc, or perhaps a Twin Disc so that everyone buying a DVD would automagically get an HD DVD.

The VPs very diplomatically said to him that even if cost weren't an issue (it is), it's still a marketing issue, because some consumers simply don't understand. They said that if they did that, they'd be very worried that they'd get a lot of them returned simply because they didn't understand that the disc wasn't playing because they had picked the HD DVD side and not the DVD side. I think this is true. It will take more penetrance in the market before average people really understand what HD DVD (and Blu-ray) really are.

OTOH, Paramount is releasing Star Trek on combo HD DVD/DVD only. No DVD release is planned. So there goes that argument. Too bad Paramount wasn't there, because it would have been interesting to hear their take on all of this. (Paramount wanted to be there, but had prior commitments.)

P.S. They gave us Ocean's Thirteen on HD DVD (along with I Now Pronounce you Chuck and Larry) as swag for showing up. Ocean's Thirteen isn't even out yet. Nice lunch too. They also had Shrek The Third playing during the break. Despite the fact that's not out yet either, nobody seemed to care.

One guy also walked out with a Toshiba HD-XA2 as a door prize. Lucky bastard.

P.P.S. They also had a commercial compressionist/DVD/HD/BD disc author there. It was interesting to hear his take on the war. I'll post more about it later but his take was:

1) VC-1 rocks in terms of video quality, and its encoding is fast. H.264 AVC rocks in terms of video quality, but it takes forever to encode, and many times longer than VC-1 for the same quality. MPEG2 cannot get close to either of them in terms of video quality with any reasonable bitrate, so they stay away from MPEG2 for HD.

2) 50 GB is irrelevant. Well not really. It may be relevant in outlier cases with a four hour movie with lots of extras. However, if you put extras on a second disc, 4 hours shouldn't be a major problem for 30 GB.

3) It takes them 2-3 days to author a complete commercial DVD, once they have all the assets in place. (Video encoding for MPEG SD is in real-time, so that's not an issue.) It takes them 4+ weeks for HD DVD or Blu-ray with all the fixin's. Encoding is variable bit rate 2-pass, and a fast VC-1 encode is about 8 fps for each pass, while slower ones are... slower. Then they have to manually select parts to re-encode. So that's about 4 fps (or 12 hours for a 2 hour movie), plus additional time for selective re-encodes. Because this takes so long on even VC-1, they don't use H.264 AVC at all, except for testing. Judging by their previous comments, a similar H.264 AVC encode would take days on their equipment.

4) They can do in-house HDi programming for HD DVD. They don't touch BD Java at all. Far too complicated for compressionists. They contract to 3rd parties for Java programming, and add in the Java applications later to their BD authored discs.

5) HD DVD and Blu-ray are completely different in terms of authoring. Basically the only major thing that can be shared is the encode, but the interactivity is programmed completely differently (as evidenced above), so basically it means that if a company is format neutral its authoring costs are nearly twice as much.

Originally Posted by mrtew 

This isn't the thread for debating 'full screen vs. wide screen of course, but if you research it you'll find out that you actually get almost the whole width of the original movie with many full screen DVDs and way more of the height that you even see in the theatre. They actually crop the frame to make it widescreen, not vice versa, contrary to popular belief! (of course widescreen IS the way the director intended it to be seen if that's important).

The intent is the more important measure here.

The camera may be matted for instance, even if it's filming in full frame. So a boom mike won't be visible in a widescreen matte, but it may be totally obvious in an unmatted DVD release. That's why unmatted releases may suck. For example, in A Fish Called Wanda, John Cleese is supposed to be naked in one scene. In the theatres, he was naked. On the unmatted DVD, you see his underwear.

[Brien]

Originally Posted by Weezer 

The jump from DVD to HD-DVD is a lot less dramatic for your everday person than the jump from VHS to DVD was.

DVD added a completely different type of media, menus, extras, and works as intended with pretty much every TV out there via composite.

The jump to HD is much more evolutionary than revolutionary. Menus are better, extras are better, video/sound is better, but for the vast majority of consumers, not better enough at the previous price points.

Now that we are seeing $99-$199 HD-DVD players, I think it is a totally different ballgame. People have been easily spending that much on upconverting dvd players, so it's a no brainer to upgrade to the HD.

To say that DVD will drop as soon as the war is over is foolish. New releases will be coming out on DVD for atleast the next 4-5 years as the market gradually shifts towards newer sets and players. The adoption of DVD only took buying the new player and plugging it in. For most consumers, upgrading to HD movies requires a new 1k+ TV, new player, much more expensive disks, new audio receiver (if you want the new codecs), and new cables. To think that kind of mass market change will happen overnight is silly.

If they even have receivers at all... it will be a very very long time before HD reaches mass-market the way it 'should'. Case in point would be the continual delay of the analog shut-off.

[jokell82]

Originally Posted by Eug 

I went to the Toshiba/Universal/Warner HD DVD promo yesterday in Toronto. One guy was trying to tell the VPs of these companies that every new DVD release should be a HD DVD/DVD combo disc, or perhaps a Twin Disc so that everyone buying a DVD would automagically get an HD DVD.

The VPs very diplomatically said to him that even if cost weren't an issue (it is), it's still a marketing issue, because some consumers simply don't understand. They said that if they did that, they'd be very worried that they'd get a lot of them returned simply because they didn't understand that the disc wasn't playing because they had picked the HD DVD side and not the DVD side. I think this is true. It will take more penetrance in the market before average people really understand what HD DVD (and Blu-ray) really are.

OTOH, Paramount is releasing Star Trek on combo HD DVD/DVD only. No DVD release is planned. So there goes that argument. Too bad Paramount wasn't there, because it would have been interesting to hear their take on all of this. (Paramount wanted to be there, but had prior commitments.)

Those issues (other than cost) go away with a Twin disc. And I'm told production on a Twin disc is a lot cheaper than a combo.

[Railroader]

Originally Posted by mrtew 

OK, you're the most exaggerated counterposter! Foolish, Silly? Wow. Foolish and silly is to keep buying more and more DVDs for the next four years while you save up for a huge screen HDTV. None of those high-end audiovisual things you list are required to start buying HD discs. All you need besides maybe a $299 HDTV is a $79 BluRay or HDDVD player. But they don't exist yet and even if they did only a silly fool would buy one knowing that the format that they start buying discs in might be gone soon. IF the war didn't exist any non-silly, non-fool would quit wasting their money on obsolete DVDs today and only buy HD discs starting tomorrow. As it is, I've pretty much stopped buying any movies at all until there's some kind of resolution and I'd think anyone that cared about their money and movie collection would too. Once there's a winner I definitely think the changeover will happen overnight.

My parents, and many older people I know, would still be buying VHS tapes if they could.

I know I'll be buying some DVDs until a super cheap portable HD player is marketed. The built-in DVD player in my van is a very valuable asset during 3+ hour trips my family takes every couple weeks.

[Eug]

Originally Posted by jokell82 

Those issues (other than cost) go away with a Twin disc. And I'm told production on a Twin disc is a lot cheaper than a combo.

According to Universal's VP Marketing, even Twin Disc is a marketing issue. See below.

Here is my longwinded summary of the event:

-----

I went to the Toshiba/Universal/Warner HD DVD promo on Saturday in Toronto. Great event. Well organized and well-attended. Everyone was enthusiastic. Everyone involved deserves kudos for doing such a good job, especially on such short notice. BTW, They gave us Ocean's Thirteen on HD DVD along with I Now Pronounce you Chuck and Larry as swag for showing up, and Ocean's Thirteen isn't even out yet. Nice lunch too. They also had Shrek The Third playing during the lunch break. I have to admit though, not that many people seemed all that interested in Shrek the Third. Everyone was going gaga over the Blade Runner Limited Edition Box Set as well as the Harry Potter 1-5 box set when Warner showed them to us. One guy also walked out with a Toshiba HD-XA2 as a door prize. Lucky bastard.

Some points from the talk:

XA2 to get 7.1 bitstream support over HDMI next week.

Did a demo of a 1080i60 source vs. a 1080p24 source on a 1080p60 TV. Nobody could see a difference.
Did a demo of a 1080p24 source on a 1080p24 capable 120 TV, and on the same TV with 24p support turned off. Nearly everyone could see a difference, because the lack of jitter.

Did an audio comparison of DD+ vs TrueHD PCM vs TrueHD HDMI 1.3. Hard to compare since the volumes were a bit different.

-----

They had a commercial compressionist/DVD/HD/BD disc author there. It was interesting to hear Pat's take on the war.

1) VC-1 rocks in terms of video quality, an