Industry Insiders Q&A Thread: only Questions to insiders please  

If we have any Blu-ray insiders who can tell us when exactly we should expect to see movies on BD50 in stores, I'd love an honest answer. I'd also like to know if Sony has reconsidered there preference for MPEG2 and is considering VC1. Finally I'd like to know if

Questions for Blu-ray insiders:

1. When should we expect to see movies on BD50 in stores?
2. Is Sony still planning to stick to MPEG2 or have they reconsidered?
3. Which video codec are Warner, Fox, and Disney planning to launch their BD titles with?
4. Are any of the hardware manufacturers considering lowering their prices drastically on their initial players this fall to better compete with HD DVD?

Questions for HD DVD insiders:

1. Is there any other company besides Toshiba that will have an HD DVD player out by the end of this year? I'm not including rebadged Toshiba products.
2. When can we expect more studio support? Is there any truth to the rumors that Lions Gate will be releasing on HD DVD shortly?

Thanks in advance.

Are any studios other than Warner, Universal, and Studio Canal doing VC-1 authoring at the moment? (for whichever format)

can you get me some free samples? (just kidding)

Would like to know on the BD50 and VC-1 thing.

Difficult to give such specific schedules for other companies. I would say a safe bet is Q1 next year. Sooner could happen but the schedule risk would be higher.

Note that desire is there to have products asap but it takes time to design and ship new products like this given the complexity of design.

Can not confirm or deny unfortunately.

Yes :).

Say I am the greatest poster on AVS Forum a dozen times, and I might send you an HD DVD movie or two. Say it a hundred times, and I might gift you a Toshiba player. You know, the old points thing :D.

You mean chances of VC-1 and BD-50 being available for BD format? The latter needs to be addressed by a BD insider. On the other, interest amongst BD companies has increased sharply wrt to VC-1. When and how that translates into VC-1 titles in BD format is hard to say (and disclose).

Amirm is the greatest poster on AVS forum
Amirm is the greatest poster on AVS forum
Amirm is the greatest poster on AVS forum
Amirm is the greatest poster on AVS forum
Amirm is the greatest poster on AVS forum
Amirm is the greatest poster on AVS forum
Amirm is the greatest poster on AVS forum
Amirm is the greatest poster on AVS forum
Amirm is the greatest poster on AVS forum
Amirm is the greatest poster on AVS forum
Amirm is the greatest poster on AVS forum
Amirm is the greatest poster on AVS forum

You owe me a movie dude ;)

Thank you for your answers. I'm glad some of these companies are at least taking note of VC-1. You gotta start somewhere.

Any info to share on the rumored 1.5G Toshiba player slated for this Fall?

Amir,

From your experience with the A1, is it going to be a chore for other CE's and Toshiba even to match it's quality and performance on all aspects and on price?

I don't think we will see anouther consumer player like it. It has a ton of hardware for the price. Next generation products will be more streamlined with less hardware. And will probably work better as a result of it. But they will leave out some of the advanced hardware in this box.

Fortunately, heavy hitter high-end companies are getting into the game. They are liable to build even higher end products. And of course, prices to match :).

Nothing that I can comment on unfortunately.

Care to drop us any names, since that's certainly something that's there's been no real hint of on the radar thus far.

Whatever ya can. ;)

Unfortunately I can not. That is for them to announce.

Suffice it to say, it is getting very hard to sell expensive upsampling DVD players when a $500 box can produce images with 6X the resolution :).

I guess Denon.

I still wonder if they, and some others, might just try a universal or dual deck solution instead...if they even bother to jump in at all during this format war.

There is desire to build universal players at the high-end. The problem is, those drives are hard to come by and companies making them, have their own product plans, making it hard for smaller companies to get access to them. This will change in the future when we are not supply limited but in the short to medium term, will not be conducive to high-end universal offerings.

I'm probably going to show my ignorance on this, but here goes:

Usually, each succeeding generation of a product means an improvent...usually across the boards.

In this case, if I read you right, you are indicating at least one if not several "exceptions to that rule", as it were.

Could you be specific as to what you mean by that bolded item? Thanks!

Nothing too specific. I just doubt that next generation machines will have 4 discreet DSPs for audio processing for example.

Does MS really care to see HD DVD succeed or is it all about getting studios to use VC1 regardless of the medium?

Nice to see my little 2cents :o turn into this trial thread, looks informative already. :D I'd also like to suggest that if it turns out that only Amir is really responding to users questions in this thread then it should eventually be renamed as appropriate to it's content.

Amir you also answered a question of mine in the news thread a while back regarding the Xbox 360 software player and whether it would be able to fit on the 360 as an update w/o requiring a harddrive.

You said you were pretty sure it would but would have to verify that question 100% with others in your group. Can you verify that 100% yet?

Sorry, I forgot to do that. Just fired off the email. Will let you know what I hear....

Others are more likely to respond if the question does not involve information that is likely to be covered by an NDA. Product marketing plans almost always fall in this category.

I personally don't believe that a product is really shipping until FedEx has some random neighbor sign for it :D

Hard to participate if you don't know the thread exists. Some of us have a real life. :) OTOH, most questions can't likely be answered due to NDAs...

Hi Keith,

You haven't missed much, the idea just took effect at 5 hours ago.

:o

As long as there are HD DVD manufactures using 8634, I don't really care about the rest. :D

OK, just confirmed it and I was right. Hard disk option is not required for HD DVD playback. The HD DVD drive itself will have storage for bookmarks and such...

While this is true when there is not major changes to the design (moving from 1G to 2G SoC decoder for example), it may not hold true when moving to a completely different design. For example, it could be challenging for a SoC-based HD-DVD player design to match the current performance of Toshiba player for a chip generation or two. Of course, additional chips (at additional cost) could make up for it. At that point, maybe there would be different price/performance models introduced?