DVD Forum picks the Toshiba/NEC blue laser spec for HD-DVD--merged thread. (1 Viewer)

[Grady Hollums]

Here is some more Digital Bits opinions. Man, I love this website!
Don't start selling my DVDs! Well, I guess I am going to have to just wait for the D-VHS players to get down into the $200 range or wait for the HDTV Satellite systems to get down to around $500 for the whole system. :frowning:
I just want to take advantage of my HDTV!! It is killing me to have a TV that I can not take full advantage of! I spend all the money for the TV finally pay off the TV and then can't buy anything else because I am now paying off the Speakers and receiver, ha ha. :b

 

[Jeff_HR]

So much for the "One Format Only" campaign.

 

[Brian-W]

In all my excitement I completely forgot that the DVD Forum encompasses a ton of members from chipset makers to hardware manufacturers.
Well, sadly in my opinion they've settled on a compromised format rather than what I feel would be the best format (higher capacity, and I prefer the cartridge encased discs to open discs).

 

[Vince Maskeeper]

fixed topic header

 

[Todd Hochard]

I'm with Brian. It should have been Sony's Blu-Ray.

 

[Jeff Kohn]

15gb/layer should be enough for HD-DVD, assuming discs are dual-layer from the get-go. Right now, ATSC is broadcast at 19mb/s, which comes to about 8GB/hour. Now I would argue that 19mb/s is not really enough bandwidth for 1080i, but keep in mind ATSC is constant bitrate, but DVD's are variable bitrate, in which case I think you should be able to get excellent quality from 20-25mb/s variable bitrate encoding (especially if they use MPEG4 instead of MPEG2). Assuming we stick with the current audio codecs, that would be plenty of room for a 2+ hour movie plus extras. In fact, for most movies you should still be able to use full bitrate DD and DTS. Longer movies may have to span two discs or maybe have a second disc for the special features, but that's true now and would probably be true blu-ray to some extent.

The way I see it the only thing we might be giving up by going with the Toshiba format over Blu-Ray is having enough room for MLP audio encoding. But somehow I doubt the movie studios would ever give us that. After all, even movie theaters aren't currently using MLP, they're using a slightly higher bitrate of DD (or DTS/SDDS depending on the theater).

So if Toshiba tells me that they can deliver dual-layer HD-DVD's with 25mb/s variable bitrate MPEG4 video and full bitrate DD and DTS audio, and that they can have it available quicker and more cheaply than blu-ray, I think that's a pretty good compromise.

Maybe in an ideal world we would get Blu-Ray with 30mbit video and MLP lossless audio. But in the real world, the quality gains that format would offer are going to be totally lost on the majority of consumers, so the manufacturers and studios have very little reason to go that extra mile from a business standpoint. We should just be thankful that the over-compressed red-laser format didn't win out, the pessimist in me expected that it would.

 

[Jeff Kohn]

Oh yeah, and is much as some people might like the idea of a system that uses cartridge, I really don't think that's a positive selling point in favor of blu-ray. The marketplace has pretty much decided against the idea, and it would also hurt backwards compatibility. I expect any next-gen HD-DVD player to still support playing my old DVD's, and I don't want to have to dick around with putting them in cartidges to play them.

 

[KeithAP]

According to the Nec/Toshiba press release about the format, it has a "user bit rate" of 36Mbps.
-Keith

 

[CamiloCamacho]

Well i think we have very good news, as Warner proposal loose. The bad side of this is that we will see a new war as DVD-A Vs. SACD, that slow down a lot price wars and above all things, software avalability.

But at 15gb per layer (meaning at least 30 gb, assuming they won't increase the number of layers) we have close to four times more space on HD-DVD. This, combined with a High Rate Mpeg-4, makes possible the use of better audio schemes and great video

 

[Lars_J]

A 36Mbps bitrate is great news - it's 4x DVD's bitrate, and ~25% more than D-VHS.

Now I'm just hoping that Sony & Co. abandons their format, so we can see hardware for this ASAP.

 

[Joe Schwartz]

Has the Blu-Ray group even announced the specs for a read-only disc? I've only seen their specs for recordable discs. Presumably, prerecorded read-only discs would use a different recording method, right? (For instance, physically stamping the reflective surface instead of using phase-change technology.)

 

[Grady Hollums]

Anyone want to start a "Shut Sony up" Campaign so we can get a universal format and start the movies and recordable disks out and going?

I really think that for the new format to work they really need to replace the vcr of today and make it automatically able to record and have a decent copy protection for the movies to make Hollywood happy.

 

[Brian-W]

Why must Sony always be the one to "shut up"? Beta was superior to VHS, and they rightfully lost that battle because they wouldn't license the technology out. Times have changed. Now practically every consumer electronics company will happily license out their technology.

Minidisc was never a competitor to DAT. Minidisc was a competitor to DCC (DAT was perceived to be a competitor to CD).

As for SACD, depending on who you ask, SACD seems to be 'winning' the war here. Given Sony owns a music and film/video label, they don't have to merely accept a competing format. This isn't the place for the debate, but go over to the Music forum here, it's plenty alive there.

I don't want a format war, but I also don't want some cobbled together format. The anti-Sony rhetoric is getting as old as the anti-D-VHS comments. Sony is just as innovative as any other company, why should they have to take the backseat?

Everyone is bitching for the best format, yet is rolling over to accept the Toshiba/NEC standard. First it was "we want the best" now it seems with this thread it's now "a compromise solution is fine"

 

[Rob Tomlin]

Sounds like the format war is pretty much a sure thing.

As someone stated previously, at least Warner's proposal was not accepted. Although the standard adopted by the DVD Forum still appears to be a compromise in terms of quality, it could have been much worse.

 

[Grady Hollums]

Everyone is bitching for the best format, yet is rolling over to accept the Toshiba/NEC standard. First it was "we want the best" now it seems with this thread it's now "a compromise solution is fine"

Brian:

You have some good points and I really made my previous comment about "shutting up Sony" as a half joke. But I am in the market to make sure that there is less of a war than what we are used to. That is all I meant by it. I love some of the products that Sony produces, but in the interest of all consumers I feel it is best for them to back off and show their support for a one format. Just my thoughts.

 

[Brian-W]

Grady, I realize you were partially joking about Sony. However, someone is bound to post about it and not be a joke. So no flames were directed at you.
What a lot of people fail to realize is that Blu-Ray was brought up by a consortium of companies and is not some Sony standard they are trying to push through. If you look at all the Blu-Ray press releases, they always have the nine major consumer electronics companies as the consortium that jointly came up with the standards.
This is not some Sony proposal that only Sony backs. All the major hardware manufacturers (sans Toshiba and NEC)are also backing Blu-Ray. The fact that NEC and Toshiba are the hold-outs makes you wonder that they want a bigger piece of the royalty pie or some other means.

 

[David Coleman]

I'm wondering what form of video compression is being proposed (mpeg4, corona, mpeg2, etc)? Are the data rates constant or variable. If a better compression scheme is available than mpeg2 and if it runs at a lower rate i'm all in favor of that.

 

[Wayne Bundrick]

Blu-Ray is backed by nine companies and all of them are members of the DVD Forum steering committee. And yet the Toshiba/NEC proposal has been selected by the committee. How did this happen? Check out this article:
http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20021108S0048
It turns out that the Blu-Ray people never formally submitted their standard to the DVD Forum anyway. They did all their work outside of the Forum and I think they believe they can successfully put their product on the market without the auspices of the DVD Forum as the official designated successor to the DVD format. But they make it sound like Blu-Ray is just a technology and each company is free to develop their own unique products from it. That doesn't sound like a good idea to me. Yeah were headed for a format war, and it's going to be between more than just two formats.
Here's an older article that discusses the differences between the two formats:
http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20020829S0062

 

[Jeff Kleist]

OK, let's do a little logical thinking here

Warner was pissed because they don't want to replace WAMO's presses, so were the other major pressing houses, and causing them to do so would slow HD-DVD when it launches

Sony likes collecting royalties in disc formats

The electronics manufacturers will not put out decks with no software (Blu-Ray), and given that ALL the studios are backing the Toshiba version, that's where they will go, kicking and screaming since without software, they have no units.

Sony will come into line soon enough on this, they have SACD to look at when they question themselves (because HD-DVD is mass market, not niche)

The bottom line golden rules is:

THESE DECKS WILL NOT BE SHIPPING FOR A MINIMUM OF 3-4 YEARS, PROBABLY CLOSER TO 10, SO CALM DOWN!

 

[David Susilo]

about the cartridge system's incompatibility:

Panasonic DVD-RAM recorder can accept both cartridge and non-cartridge DVD. So that means it's not impossible for using Sony's Blue-Ray AND still play our (then) old DVDs.