Does HD DVD’s 30 GB w/ home network storage have more future capacity than BD's 50GB? - Page 3

More PC manufacturers have BD drives in their Vista PCs than HD DVD drives.

I ask again since you ignored that part the first time. Given that some things are now reportedly being left off games for the XBOX360 that would have likely been there in the past, with them sold separately on XBOX-Live, has this brought the costs of games down?

--Darin

I expect a number of the Blu-ray exclusive studios are just that (exclusive) because of the added capacity. It is a big deal.

I expect that the studios have chosen Blu-ray because "B" comes before "H" in the alphabet.

No, this is a mandatory feature. The so-called "S-EVOB" stream can have its own dedicated 15 mbit/sec stream in addition to primar "P-EVOB" which has 30 mbit/sec.

What is optional is playing a PiP video in HD.

Hard to answer your posts when they start with an insult Darin. Would kindly appreciate not doing that if you want me to read the rest of what you have to say. I honestly did not read anything past that first line.


I don't know about gaming so can't answer your question. But putting that aside, the movie and gaming industry are very different. So analogies only go so far. Otherwise I could show that car companies routinely unbundle options and charge less for the car then .

Besides, I gave you very specific information from Warner that it costs them money to produce extras. You all as consumers could put pressure on them if they eliminate extras and still charge you the same. From my vantage point, I see them continuing to put extras on the same disc anyway as they need to entice you to make the initial purchase. And to the extent BD cannot match HD DVD in this network connectivity, then HD DVD titles would need to have the basic extras on the disc to compete. So until you establish factually that studios will completely eliminate extras, chasing your argument puts the cart before the horse.

What can I say.. I'm all woozy from the CES HD-DVD player announcements and will just have to wait for the Zhenjiang Star Group player with the free saw blades...

Plus the first rule of consumer sales is never "pass-on" any savings (unless you have to). Otherwise you have a Coke-Pepsi war and both of your product lines sell for less than bottled water..

b2b

No, and personally I have always considered the value of internet features to be somewhat dubious considering that they can quite literally be here today and gone tomorrow. Also though HD DVD does mandate persistent storage the requirement for it is only 144 MB. Just to mention this but BD-Live players require 1 GB of persistent storage.



Technically this is an opinion based on a few reference quality movies that have been released. For instance if I said that Spartacus proved that 30 GB is not enough for a three hour reference quality movie you would say that such an example proves nothing. Well King Kong, which didn't even have a lossless audio track, does not prove that 30 GB is enough for every movie out there. It only proves that it was enough for that movie.



No offense but the phrase "infinite storage" is a bit silly especially since HD DVD only requires 144 MB of persistent storage. Also call me cynical but is there any guarantee that internet features will always be available or that they won't insert advertising into them to pay for the cost of it?



The first statement is incredibly optimistic and the second statement is just plain wrong.



Just curious but how do you know this? And if you say that this is because of AVS Forum posts you have seen I can provide many reasons for why that says little about the average HD DVD owner.

You kinda highlight a point I didn't really make clear. I think most of the people hanging out on this forum have the broadband, HTPC, network, etc. etc. There is a great divide when it comes to console's and standalone players that "just work" and the "update drivers, check ip settings, configure network security" of home based network storage.

While I agree that the network standard of HD-DVD is sweet, I don't think it has a large impact in the present day as some would like to believe.

You only only need one movie to set the bar. You could very well indeed claim that Spartacus proves that 30GB is not enough but if someone counters with the King Kong then your point becomes moot because the bar has already been set higher than what Spartacus offers. Judging a movie based on whether is has a lossless audio track or not doesn't help us. Without knowledge of what the Master Soundtrack sounds like one cannot ascertain whether the DD+ soundtrack was accurate to the Master or whether lossless would have yielded an improvement. I've heard not a complaint about KKs soundtrack thus I must believe the audio is faithful to the Master.


No because the RAM persistent storage is but one type of storage type that is available. HDD drives will easily connect to the nextgen chipsets for a lot of storage. Close enough to infinite for most of us likely. Free Network access could come with adds. Consumers are used to this. Id rather have the access now and let it evolve.


True..very little things can have infinite capacity but it is a fact that Blu-ray does not mandate persistent storage.

Just a note that we will see titles this year in HD DVD that use networking features. This year! So tomorrow is today as far as studios believing in using networking.

Indeed, there is one studio who refused to publish content until they could use networking. It is that important to them.

So while I am not going to pretent the the full scenario painted here by Kosty will be here next month, I can say with confidence that content owners see a ton of potential in having services that allow them to direclty connect with their customers. And consider this so important the they beat us into submission to make networking mandatory in HD DVD .

Not all movies are equally hard to encode so saying that because one movie did it all of them can is not logical.



It does somewhat indicate that they either ran out of capacity or did not have enough bandwidth when it came time to add the audio.



Call me skeptical but at the end of the day I think if a lossless audio track could have been added it would have been added. If you want to believe it wasn't added because Universal didn't think it was needed than go ahead but I would point out that even The Ant Bully had a lossless audio track.



For someone who thinks that Blu-ray will have a problem because BD-Live is optional you sure are optimistic about having people connect hard drives to their HD DVD players.



Actually that is both wrong and has nothing to do with what I said. It is wrong because BD-Video 1.1 may not require an internet connection but it does require 256 MB of persistent storage. Also it has nothing to do with what I was responding to since Kosty claimed that Blu-ray can not benefit from internet features because it does not require an internet connection. A claim that is obviously wrong.



That will be interesting to see. By this year though do you mean soon or do you mean sometime late this year?

An interesting thread. I believe there are many people such as myself who have a network in their house and are looking for ways to take advantage of it. I haven't purchased a next gen gaming console yet, but I'm seriously considering it just to use it as a hub to get media from my computer room to my living room. Movies, slideshows, surround sound music, etc is just sitting there on my computer's hard drive itching to make it's way into the living room. It would be great if my Toshiba HD-DVD player would network in a way similar to the PS3 or Xbox360, as I'd prefer not to have to buy a game machine just to access my content.
I don't believe we are years away from all the benefits of the networked home. Even my parents house is wired and ready to link the computer room to the living room. A few years ago I couldn't imagine them even knowing what this was or meant. Now, if I can have a BD or HD-DVD player which can take full advantage of my home network, access to playing all my audio and video formats, and at a reasonable price, I'll be a happy boy. If it can also add value to the HD movies I buy, it's icing on the cake.

I think once the technical capability is available, businesses are going to try to use it in different ways. Like they say how a knife can be used ....

BTW, I'm sure some companies will get a backlash for over doing that kind of stuff you describe ....

Bandai?

I mean "sometime this year" .

That was an easy one, wan't it?

Always happy to provide another view and though I am skeptical about internet extras for a few reasons I do understand that some people consider them to be important. I disagree mainly with your view that since BD-Live is optional that we will not see internet extras on Blu-ray. I really don't see why you believe that.

But why is it so important to them? My guess is its great marketing data and they will collect your usage habits (just like Microsoft does in WMP) and target you with specific advertising. Hardly a good thing for the consumer.

i think networking has gotten easy enough that teenagers in the house will have no problems going out and buying wireless routers to hookup their ps3 or xboxes. once they know there are other devices they can hook up to the network, they will.

teens just gravitate toward technology. my 6 and 7 year olds figured out how to use the wifi in their DS gameboys without me ever reading the manual or even helping them. i didn't even know the gameboys could do that.

You don't see why since people know that since something is mandatory in all HD DVD players (since the very first one sold) and only optional in a BD player (and no such standalone BD player with B-Live yet exists), then people believe that they will see internet extras on HD DVD and that it might take a very long time or never for such on BD? And when will (why don't they) Sony announce it for the PS3? How big will the market demand be for BD-Live -- without the PS3? Just PCs with software players?

Amir, I'd appreciate it if you didn't blatantly misstate my position. I said:
I don't think a sizable percentage of the CE-buying public are ready to configure network-attached storage (be it on the PC or independent), although I'm certainly we'll get there in time.

Other than that, you made a lot of interesting points in your post, all of which, I'll note, apply equally to Blu-ray as HD DVD. I can assure you that from the BD studios viewpoint the fact that every Blu-ray player won't have mandatory BD-Live support is trivial when weighed against the potential for connected content.

What a silly, pointless statement. Everything you've ever shown on HDi could be implemented PC's independently of HD DVD as well. What's your point? Are you implying the demo was created via Windows apps, not via BD-J?

We did - PowerDVD. It was part of a demonstration featuring Dell's new Blu-ray laptop. That doesn't make it any less valid of a BD-Live demonstration.

The studios aren't waiting for there to be a massive installed base of BD-Live players before they do anything. They'll develop the content as the technology, know-how, and business model sufficiently mature to enable it. The content will attract more people to BD-Live capable hardware, not the other way around.

There is a large difference between using network features over broadband and using network-attached storage. It's two totally different animals, as anyone who has hacked an Xbox over their LAN to install Linux can tell you. (Not that I have....)

I don't think Amirm was implying anything about not using BD-J.

The impression that I get from you is that no stand alone blu-ray player can do this yet, HDi has already demonstrated this on thier stand alone players and you would like to add PC's to your list of stand alone blu-ray players because they also have a blu-ray drive.

It's not difficult. USB drives pop up in windows as Mass Storage devices with ease. I figure Win CE shouldn't be much different. Even with a CE device you can utilize a few technologies to assist and Broadcom makes NAS SoC LSI. People on here are trying to paint a picture of difficulty in this area. It's not rocket science.