Will HDi survive without HD-DVD? - Page 2

some guy at Tweeter Etc. said the same thing.
it's to bad HD-DVD lost the battle.

the PS3 factor is what did it. Microsoft not including it in there XBOX was the main reason HD-DVD failed.

Oh, there was a big war then too. It is just that one side caved before product intro.

By the way, that is where the name "SD" came out. That was the name of the format by Toshiba, Panasonic, etc. MMCD was the name for the Sony+Philips. When the two sides joined up, the format name became DVD. Then Panasonic, SanDisk, and Toshiba got together to promote flash memory, looked around for a name, found SD free and clear and ran with it!

What is interesting is that last go around, it was Sony and Philips who were promoting a lower capacity format, based on CD....

what I don't understand is.... when will regular music CD's become obsolete?

it seems like we are going backwards with all the MP3 garbage.

and is this true... are regular DVD audio tracks higher quility than CD's when outputing PCM with the DVD? it seems that way to me when I run the PCM digital outs to my Denon CD player. (the CD player has inputs for its digital to analog converter. It is a $1200 CD player at the time.) Compared to playing CD's on with this Denon... the DVD sounds better on the average ofcourse because I know the sorce can make anything sound bad.

I'm not knocking HDi, I might have even voted for it had I been sitting at the BDA meeting where it was decided on. That said, I don't think there will be substantially larger problems because of BD-J over the course of the format.

For starters, I believe Java is also supported by a large and capable company. I understand why you would prefer your own solution, but let's not belabour the point. Sun joined the BDA and undoubtedly will have a stake in the IP pool. And to be frank, they have not competed as favorably in other areas (like OS development) so they probably have quite a bit of movtivation to leverage BD-J as a way to get into content delivery in our living rooms.

Given those facts, I would imagine a lot of effort will be made to ease the implimentation as time goes on, perhaps creating templates that are simple to use (and easy to license) for budget players, as well as for content providers that don't want to roll their own. Don't you think so?

Java is promoted by a large company. But it is not "supported" anywhere near how Microsoft supported HDi.


My solution? What would that be? I don't work for Microsoft and if the war has been sunset as it seems to be, I hope we stop putting folks in camps and just discuss the merits of technologies.


The problem for Sun if you want to call it that, is that they get paid whether any of the worries are there or not. Every player will generate revenue for them. So what would their motivation be to go and put 100 engineers to make it work better in some Chinese DVD player?


I think effort will be put toward this as studios have tasted this and now want more. And for sure, progress will be made to improve the situation with time.

However, I don't think the above is enough. My recommendation is to narrow the focus of BD-J down to a core set that test suites can be written against, and better verification can be done. Leaving a wide open playground means this is no different than supporting the OS and I can tell you no middlewhere vendor getting paid $1 per player is going to kill themselves to provide free support after the fact. That they form a cross industry group which reviews which features will get used over time and make sure prior to that event, players have been tested with the new functionality. They may even have to create another brand to enforce this, like silicon image has created with HDMI.

It may never become obsolete. Its share of music distribution will get smaller but I suspect the business will easily go on for another decade.


From convenience, there has never been a greater jump forward than "MP3." But I hear you on audio fidelity .


DVD, HD DVD and BD all allow great than CD specifications. Whether that translates into higher quality, highly depends on your ear and equipment .



A DVD player, playing CDs, with its video output on, will probably sound worse than a good CD transport. But that is a topic for a different thread too .

that makes sense but they are dead set against common ui/feature set. they will need to come up with a game like beta testing program to validate content before going gold. there are some automated tools for testing but none of them can handle custom java components.

Cable industry has a major advantage here. They control what their customers see. It is not like you wake up tomorrow, and publish a page on Comcast guide, causing their set-top box to fail. So while HDi, had it been there at the time (it was not), could have served them better through ease of content deployment, they don't face nearly the same difficulty where anyone could decide to publish content, without any coordination with the equipment makers.

The recommendation I made was a halfway model of where cable and current DVD publishing model is. There cannot be a situation where player vendors approve content (as would be the cable). And I suggest that the current anything goes system built on a Turing Machine of infinite scope, is one that can ever be free of expensive support and consumer headache on compatibility front.

What do the cable companies use BD-J in, their set top boxes or DVRs?

I would certainly hope that isn't what is being used in their DVRs because those are some of the most user unfriendly and slow devices I've ever seen. I honestly tried to use one for about 3 week after switching back to cable from DirecTV and I finally had to go buy a Series 3 TiVo to use instead because the cable company's DVR was so bad

Considering the subject of the thread, I think that would be a good direction to take it. Knowing what it can be used for and how it is best used is at the heart of the issue.

This can actually be a useful discussion unlike most threads over the last 48 hours Not that I don't enjoy posting in them

Brandon

Wouldn't economies of scale kick in though? If the CE companies sell millions of BD-J players, even at razor-thin margins, wouldn't it offset the cost of implementing and supporting it?

I'm not sure I understand why this is different than Microsoft + HDi; won't MS get paid for HDi for every player sold, regardless of any problems using it?
If that is the case, I'd assume SUN would help for the same reason as MS: It is their product, and if it doesn't work it reflects badly on them.

Did you know...

A couple insiders confirmed that with HDi, you could turn and HD DVD player into a full featured network media player. Someone would just have to create a program (like XBMC) and put it on a disc. The problem is MS and Toshiba won't do it because it would not be profitable.

I like the idea though of playing HD movies from my networked PC on my HD DVD player.

The first thing that comes to my mind when I think of Java, on any platform, is slooooooooooooooooow.

Since the studios aren't going to give this interactivity crap a rest, I'd rather see HDi be used on BD, though it will never happen I'm sure.

I also wonder what will happen when the Universal titles with fancy menus, PiP an other interactive stuff, hit Blu-ray. Will they completely redesign them for BD-J? Or will they just make cheap, simple menus, and throw out the advanced stuff?

Good summary, but one really shouldn't mention Sun & support in the same post

And EMCAScript implementations are fast You should try doing something non-trivial in jscript sometime. It would be many many times slower than a java equivalent.

java is plagued by startup speed on other platforms. I don't know what the consequences of that are for BD-J.

Apparently you haven't experienced HD-DVD on an Xbox-360. As someone who works with both formats I can tell you that both formats have the potential to be buggy or flawless depending on the player.

P.S. For those who think Hdi is much easy to produce on, I have seen firsthand that it can be a nightmare just like BD-J can. BD-J is more powerful however. One example is BD-J's ability to hold audio and subtitle settings between content classes.

It is a common misconception to think HDi is "ECMAScript." It is not. Large amount of functionality for HDi is built directly into the engine and does not any script code to work. For example, if you want to draw something and move it across the screen (super common operation), there is no script involved. You simply give the graphics to the engine, specify the direction and speed and it will do that for you, all at machine speed. Script is used to add logic to such things ("if button A is pressed, then all this HDi function").

Now if you do use a lot of script for the logic, of course you can suffer some performance issues. And that is where good design comes from.


That is because the browser does not have the HDi "intrinsics" which deal with all the common operations you might need in an interactive system for video. In other words, the browser is a general purpose machine, so like Java you mention, it lacks specialized functions for the task. So you wind up implementing things in script and that is indeed slow. But per above, such is not the case with HDi.


Start-up is a big issue for implementation fo titles. One has to have a good system and implementation skills to hide the graphics and other big objects in the pipeline so that you don't sit there forever while they get loaded into memory before the title starts to run. I am sure some of you have seen this happen on some titles.

By the way, I hope this post doesn't become "prove HDi is better than BD-J." I won't get into that since it is academic at this point and at any rate, there are hundreds of posts on this forum. So please, please don't go there. I only mention the above in the context of understanding how the systems work.

You only need to search this from for posts form the BD side to see them lamenting how much "support" microsoft provided in usage of HDi. So please, let's not read the book by its covers. Or that these implementations used Linux OS and such. Generalizations like above are fun, but not applicable in reality to this field.

It is a good question. For titles that did not sell much, they may not get republished at all. For the borderline ones, they may be tempted to just use simple menus. Only for high value titles might they do the port. Unless of course, someone provides them financial incentives to offset the expense of conversion and even then, the time delay in getting things done may not be something they would want to tolerate across so many titles.

No it was not absence of a patent pool.

Putting the above technicality aside (which is true of both sides), there were a few differences:

1. Toshiba asked Microsoft to help them build the first version of HDi. They rapidly built a large team to do that, leading to release of first gen Toshiba players. They went on to do the same for every successive generation of products. Sun was not similarly situated.

2. HD DVD was a strategic technology for Microsoft. It may be similarly so for Sun but from where I was sitting, it never appeared to be high up the ladder in their company. They had a win, and were comfortable seeing it move forward through the efforts of others, far more than their own.

3. Microsoft created a business around licensing the implementation of HDi. This was the way they could justify such a large investment. So it became easier to justify on-going investments at the large scale per above.

4. Microsoft built and shipped its own implementation in Xbox 360, further cementing the need for in-house expertise and support of studios just the same. Any issues with HDi implementations in titles and such would mean direct expense in supporting its own products.

Exactly. As long as you have a large and complex systems as we do here, you better be prepared for lots of grief. Question then becomes, what do you do about it? Do you leave it be and have the customer or smaller player companies suffer? Or do you, before it is too late, try to curtail ths scope or put in other measures to avoid grief later. How long can I expect my first gen BD players to stay working? What support obligations should the industry have on this front?

Proof? "Just wait" doesn't cut it for me.

HDi > BD-J

Yep, better get used to clunky, 1fps menu's and garbage implementation. Sucks but reality.

Yep, better get used to clunky, 1fps menu's and garbage implementation. Sucks but reality.

Yep, better get used to clunky, 1fps menu's and garbage implementation. Sucks but reality.

Yeah, but I don't imagine they were given a position in the BDA and IP royalties just for fun. I would suspect they are pretty comitted to supporting this, especially since it's their best inroad into playing a roll in media delivery to the living room.


Sorry, "you" meant Microsoft, or rather your team when HDi was developed. I thought you played a roll in its development and deployment, so I figured it you took some intellectual ownership in it. Nothing was meant beyond that, so I don't know what "camps" you are referring to. BTW, I knew your job had changed, but I didn't realize you weren't with MS any more. Best wishes on your future endeavours.


I would think their motiviation would be twofold: 1) Assuaging the worries makes it easier to develop budget players, which leads to more player sales (hence more royalties), and 2) they could develop licensable middleware that would provide a second source of revenue.

Seems like a shoe-in that they would offer their expertise along these lines to mitigate any potential problems, doesn't it?