Will HDi survive without HD-DVD?

I think they were looking into using some aspects of HDi with Xbox live. Not sure if anything has or will come of that, but that is probably the best chance to see HDi used in the future.

Why would anybody care? It was a script based language targeted as competition against Java on just another battle ground - HDM. It was made for a special purpose - this purpose is no more. They lost.

Knowing Microsoft I guess they will recycle this "trivial piece of technology" one way or another...

Perhaps Amir can enlighten us once more

The more interesting question for me will be if HD-DVDs downfall has any real impact on VC-1 adaptation? Will eg. Universal and Warner reevaluate their "codec alliances" (exclusive use of VC-1 "for whatever reason" ) now that one big selling point for VC-1 is finally history - severe bandwidth limitation.

What remains is that VC-1 is the much CHEAPER solution compared to AVC - which can be quite a factor especially for smaller studios - see Lionsgate for example.

But HDi seemed to work better than Java. Or at least the implementation. I just know that generally the usage of the HD DVD menus were much better than the BD menus.

HDi versus BD-J serves as quite fitting metaphor for the two formats IMO -

One is very efficient, well executed and has been optimized in a timely manner

The other is more complex, technologically more ambitious but takes a while in order to live up to its potential.

Pick your poison - in the mid/long term this format war played out VERY fine IMO.


In short - you can do EVERYTHING HDi does with BD-J as well. It is not so the other way round. So if Universal wants to replicate their "HD-DVD menu structure" for upcoming BD titles nothing is holding them back (other than getting familiar and experienced with the more complex BD-J).

Mr. Lion -

Here's a real softball for ya. Just a quck question ... if you're qualified to answer it. What can BD-Java do that HDi can't. I have no knowledge of such things ... but having experienced both formats extensively on my two fine players (BDP10 and XA2), I always found the HD DVD menus to be smoother and more attractive. That's a very subjective statement I know ... and frankly, it doesn't really matter. But if BD-Java does have capabilities that HDi doesn't, I'd like to know what they are.

MS Entertainment VP Robbie Bach strongly hinted that HDi could (therefore implied would) be used in video downloads in the future. Could be a nice value add for the XBLM downloads but the question is who wants to pay for the extra features in rental downloads?

I would think more ownership model would be needed to take advantage features that are often used on re-watchings rather than on 1 time rental views.

MS almost surely knew and had a strong indication that HD DVD was going to lose the war long before most of us. If they want to salvage their investment in HDi they would be already in planning for months.

There were hints such as the failure to keep addon prices in line with standalone price drops, lack of marketing push, the sudden changes in leadership and structure at the MS hd dvd division and others made it pretty clear that MS was already beginning to hedge it's bets further away from hd dvd rather than toward it.

MS has lost a great deal of leverage in the HD movie market now. They are officially a bit player in HDM at best now.

On the other hand they have a lead in HD video downloads market. If they hear Sony's footsteps with their announced ambitous plans for their own downloads service they might want to leverage HDi to get as far out in front as possible in that area.

If not they could see the same erosion in HD downloads market lead that is beginning to be evident in the games console race since the blu-ray victory.

Uh-huh. That "severe bandwidth limitation" really made HD DVD unwatchable, didn't it?

To put it simple: BD-J is (from my impression, I am familiar with JAVA development, but not really with the BD-J derivate) a much more "open language", while HDi is more like a scripting language targeted at a certain, specialized purpose.

In reality it doesn't matter. But rest assured - BD-J "can do" everything HDi did.

Give it a rest.

They are both "open" systems so let's not go there, especially if you are in this business and know what is meant by that word.


It is not the language that matters the most. The issue is making it work. Both on content creation and creating the implementation in the player.

Interactivity will remain as the most complex, and incompatible part of these systems for a long time to come. Having prices go down and forcing these CE vendors to support these products forever with thin margins, is something few are realizing what they got themselves into. There has never been any CE product in the history with such high requirement for support. The latest letigation on this front is going to make this problem worse....

BD-J gives you broad and nearly direct access to everything going on inside the player. So a BD-J application could (hardware permitting) directly manipulate video and audio streams in real-time, capture every single input you send through the remote, examine every byte of memory, directly manipulate the activities of the disc drive, etc.

So let's say some movie studio wanted to do copy protection that couldn't be beaten. That studio could "double-encrypt" the video stream--once with AACS, and a second time with its proprietary encryption--and create a BD-J application that would wait for the player to decrypt it using normal AACS, then step in and decrypt it again with the proprietary stuff.... but only after examining the memory inside the player to make sure nothing bad is going on.

(That wasn't a hypothetical... that's how BD+ DRM works, as used in F4:ROTSS and other Fox titles.)

HDi is a scripting language, so HDi applications don't get direct access to everything inside the player, only the features HDi exposes to the application. I don't know the specifics, but I doubt HDi applications can examine the contents of memory, or manipulate video and audio streams in real-time, or receive raw remote-control input.

Every byte in memory? There is not computational power to do one tenth of that. The rest is a requirement for every interactivity system. That is, to be able to stay in sync with the movie and user commands. So none of this is here no there.


Ask them if they wrote this in Java. I am sure the answer is no. What you are describing is what BD+ does, which itself is a sort of VM.



HDi has the ability to do all of this but it is not performant either so it is never used in that context. As an example, you can grab a bookmark and have it be a frame of video. But there would be no way you would try to use HDi to capture every frame of video and do something with it. Ditto for other systems.

From achitecture point of view, all of these systems divide into two components:

1. Very high computational requirements. This is decoding audio, video, decryption, and 2-D graphics operation. All of this is done in "hardware" (sometimes with programmable CPU assisting but in special purpose ways).

2. Other bits that can run orders of magnitude slower. This is where the menu system and interactivity fall. So they are implemented using low-speed (by PC measure) computers. The CPU speed available to you is equiv. to a PC that is 10 years old (outside of a game console). If you can examine every pixel in a 1080p video in real-time using that PC, then you can do the same with BD-J .

Do folks want to have a technical discussion about how these systems work? If so, that may be a good use of this thread and I might hang around for that. If it is the continuation of BD-J is better than HDi and vice versa, then I suggest there is no reason for that kind of discussion and I will politely sit it out from here on .

Okay, dumb question here, but since BD-J has has access to everything in the player, what's to stop someone like Universal from writing an applet that passes HDi commands to the player via BD-J? Yes, there would be more overhead, but you'd really one have to write the adapter once at which point studios could leverage the deeper pool of HDi scripters instead of competing for Java Developers.

Not that it matters, as they'll just off shore the work anyway.

I was always under the impression that HDi was something like Windows Presentation Foundation (ie. an abstraction layer), but for Video, which is why I said what I said. Is that not the case?

Not trying to compare HDi to BD-J, just trying to understand.

What about catalog titles and most new moderate selling releases? Does anyone one expect studios to create complex BD-J applications on those discs and still sell them at a price close to SD DVD? It will be far too expensive to create on-line connectivity applications (like the ones on HD DVD) and have them be compatible with every BD-J HW implementation.
We have already seen that various CE makers have their own version of BD-J. That's why Samsung has such problems with Fox titles.

Wasn't that true of DVD vis a vis VHS too? All those menus and special features...no wonder DVD was such a failure...

No it is not the case. WPF (Silverlight) serves the same purpose but it is based on different architecture. We have ported over experiences from HDi to Silverlight but per above, it works differently there.


Ooops. Sorry .

Its performance will be one tenth of what it was in HD DVD players. Assuming no one wants to wait for menus to paint one pixel at a time , I am afraid that won't be a practical solution.

What Uni can do of course, is use all the graphics, design, etc. in porting the title over. So all is not lost. But the programming will have to be redone.


It might be hard to do with creative work like this, where the decision makers are here. If we were talking about pure programming of some office productivity app, that would be an option. But I don't think it is that feasible in this situation.

That was a jump also. But this one is an order of magnitude bigger.


No one is talking about anything failing. The point I made was that folks have to support complex products well after their sales, with thinner and thinner margins. Most DVD players do not require constant firmware upgrade to stay compliant since the core functionality was easy to verify to 99% level. With these next gen products, such a verification simply is not possible. The work is akin to developing operating systems. Companies like Microsoft can afford to keep giving you free updates to the OS after the fact, because their business model allows it. CE business model doesn't work that way.....

I hope you aren't seriously suggesting that people should have to pay for Windows service packs, that really would be a novel idea...

That's fair (and I hope SP1 is coming any moment now, my Vista installs are still having some issues ), but I think it's also over dramatic. CE business models have long been shifting that way. The iPhone being perhaps the most notorious example lately ("I'm sorry, it appears your phone no longer works after our mandatory "update", told you we didn't want you unlocking it..."). Panasonic, Sony, Toshiba, etc all have plenty of experience developing products that required additional support.

Some have (cynically?) pointed out that you can actually cut your up front software QC since you plan to issue updates, which mitigates some of the extra cost. In the case of HDM, the advanced interactivity also offers the potential for additional revenue streams, which could more than offset the extra development costs (especially for content providers, although I imagine a slice O' the pie would be shared with the CE vendors who make it possible).

So yes, it's a very different financial model that CE manufacturers traditionally employed, but they have been moving this direction for some time anyways, and there are several built-in ways to offset the costs, so I don't see this as a significant hurdle, albeit one that can't be swept under the carpet and ignored either.

Apple products traditionally have had upwards of 50% gross margin and in some cases, even higher. I don't think anyone here wants to be buying CE products with 50% margin where the typical DVD player has 10 to 30% negative margin!


I have never updated the firmware on my Sony TV or projector. The only products from any of the above companies I have updated has been HD optical.


I don't think this is a real option. Who can put out a product where day one, it would not run 500+ BD titles? First reviewer who runs into that, will kill the prospects of that product cold if the competition is not so situated.


There is no revenue stream going to player companies. Nor do I expect to see one.


Actually, they have NOT being going in this direction. Not successfully anyway. They are all still building rather traditional products letting Apple run away as they have but that is the subject for another thread .

That's a strawman arguement, I update the firmware on my Viao fairly regularly. All those companies make computers (never mind their own MP3 players, etc) which require post-sale tech support and software development.



And that's a reducto ad absurdum arguement; there is a difference between trimming the cost of QC and not having having any QC.


Have all your expectations have been met in this format war? Anyways, several of the larger CEs have IP in disk sales, so support for advanced interactivity that allows for more enthusiastic double-dipping itself is an additional revenue stream. And content providers, if they want the additional dollars from online interactivity, product sales, etc will need hardware that supports it, so if there's real moeny in it they will either work harder to make interactivity that doesn't break the players (spreading out the development costs) or they will share a portion of revenues back into the IP pool, etc. HD DVD wasn't set up that way because there wasn't enough CE support for it to matter.

BD-J > HDi

Now that the war is over, I wish that HDi could be implemented on BD. I have read a lot of theory on how BD-J is better and has more "potential". I admittedly have little understanding on the two languages, but know one thing. The HDi titles I have used have been flawless, while the BD-J applications have been insconsistent and buggy. The execution of BD-J has been poor to say the least. So now to the BDA, as said best by Rod Tidwell: "Show me the money"

And so it is. The larger companies with far more resources and bigger stakes will try to keep their neck above water. For all the rest of the companies to come, they will face the same obstacles, but without the back door financial rewards.


Or, you will find titles that will play on some players and not others. And folks getting sued one way or the other for stuff not working. And next thing you know, you have to accept a license that the player can't run all titles, every time you boot it, like the navigation system in some cars .

There is also another solution....


Sounds like you are making my case, not yours . It took a very large and capable software team at Microsoft to make those players work, on an easier to develop HDi system. I let you think what it means on the other side of the fence .

In theory only. HDi has already proven itself to be superior to BD-J in every way that matters. Many BD titles I watch just don't feel 'completed' the way that HD DVD does.

You better get used to BD-J.

there should of never been a war in the first place.

they should fliped a coin or something in the begining.

when DVD's came out there was no war.... what gives?