why there is no way hd and bd will be like sacd and dvd audio

I will play devils advocate and list reasons way it COULD be another SA-CD - DVD-A debacle.


Confusion over the formats and not understanding why they can't get their favorite movies.


Apathy and indifference.


100% satisfied with DVD and many believe that it is HD.


Waiting for the format war to end, which causes both to fail.


Will see little or no deference on their 32"HDTV.

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I do agree with the argument that HD resolutions are "easier" for the Joe Blow consumer to digest than high resolution audio formats.


However, there are (and were at launch) a *CRAP TON* of DVD-Audio and SACD discs available, just not here in the good 'ol States... Like so many things in the world of hifi gear and gadgets, the rest of the world gets the best stuff. Music is no exception, despite the fact that most SACD and DVD-Audio titles are from US artists!


Seriously, there are a couple of websites I look up before I buy any cd because there's a fair chance that the title is available from Europe in some high resolution format. I recently bought Mark Knopfler's "Shangri-La" in SACD, and Foo Fighters' "In Your Honor" in DVD-Audio. I've never seen either of these on a store shelf, or for sale on popular US sites like Amazon...


Anywhoose... When it comes to something a consumer can "see"... There will always be a sales advantage, IMO.

I believe HD movies will succeed because the studios and CE manufacturers will not let it fail. They will slowly do away with sd dvd and consumers will not have a choice within the next five or six years. If not sooner.


Studios want better protection for their product, that's the biggest issue, and CE companies want to sell more profitable products. Pretty clear to me that sd dvd is on its way out. And sooner than most folks think.


Most average people said the same thing about dvd when it came out, to expensive, not that much better, etc.. The studios decided it was cheaper and offered better protection of their product, at least for a short time, and tape was phased out.


With the ability to play sd dvd, there really is no reason for the companies involved to not support HD movie playback. The existing dvd's will not become useless and that's the big difference between vhs and dvd when people were switching over. Thats not a problem today. Hell, thats one of the main reason I bought into it early. I have over 400 dvd's and the ability to play them on the machine was very important to me in the beginning.

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That's true.


If HD DVD and/or Blu-ray are successful (even as a niche) over the next couple of years --- and as the cost of the technologies decrease -- I could see the day where all "DVD" players will start to become real "HD" players much in the same way nearly all big screen TVs have become "HDTVs." I mean I'm talking about the day when an HD DVD or Blu-ray player can be purchased for $100 to $200 (we're probably five years from this if the formats truely become successful). Of course, the costs of HD software will have dropped as well if all of this happens. (Imagine the day you can find older HD DVDs for $5.00 to $10.00.)

Having dual incompatible formats with exclusive titles is not the way to win the "long haul" war of attrition, either. Normal people will just buy another $40-$50 DVD player when their current one breaks, and continue to happily buy $10 DVDs of their favorite movies.


If there was one HD format that might be different.


Plus the studios aren't in it for the better picture. They're in it to sell you all your currently owned movies again on a new format.


One last thing, my 60" SXRD is by far the largest screen of any of my real-world friends except for one. That guy has a 65" Mitsubishi CRT RP and seating located 15-18 feet away from it. He's not going to notice much improvement in detail from that distance, IMHO. Everybody else will probably get cheap 42"-ers when their tube-TVs die, and the improved resolution won't show that much since they won't be sitting 6 feet away.


The real-world is not filled with people from AVS, unfortunately.

As more and more people go for fixed pixel displays (many that have terrible scalers to native res) the HD formats will do well to show off the best PQ of the respective panel compared to SD DVDs that must be scaled to native.


That being said, shiny discs are likely to become a niche sooner rather than later - the advantages of portability aside, the studios would no doubt -love- to tie all content reproduction to a specific IP-style address, controlling distribution through the life of the film. In a future with blanket ultra highspeed and unlimited bandwidth (heck, there's wifi on planes now) it seems that the physical medium for films will be totally beside the point.


I frankly wouldn't be surprised if the death of disc shows up within a couple years, with tentative launches from the studios already taking place within months.


With terrible resolution to begin with (I believe apple is doing 640x480 for their recent launch), HD discs will be far better in the short term. However, if on-demand blanket HD is available at a reasonable 1420x1080 (or whatever the res is for satelite HD), compressed with a new and optimized algorithm, the need for shiny discs will be for those who a) have a old skool love for media in their hands, b) very high-end setups where they can tell the difference.


A vast, vast majority can't tell Mp3 from CD on even the most capable of systems, let alone the jump to high res. When most listen to MP3, they don't feel they're missing anything - sure, a/b'ing shows them the sonic elements that are being discarded, but the quality is better than the radio most of us grew up with. The same may happen to film, "good enough" pic with the convenience of instant access to all films from all libraries with a single account broadcasting to our hand helds, our TVs, heck, why not straight to the back of the retina!


Do I think the ubiquitous strawman Joe6p will get gaga over HD discs at home? No, I don't. I hoped for DVD-A to become more mainstream (DualDisc looked like it might help), and thought that Sony just might make SACD hybrids catch on with cheap replication costs (added content of 5.1 makes you want to purchase the disc rather than just torrent the hell of the songs).


There's an entire generation growing up without any connection to music served on in a physical way, let alone paying for that music. The same can be said for films and TV shows. I personally missed home celuloid presentations, but I came way after those of you on this board that may have had their first home theatre showing 8mm prints with 20 minute excerpts of the flick, or those like Robert Harris, et. al. that own 16mm and 35mm prints for showing at home. For me, the connection to celuloid is now strictly a niche that is likely to be abandoned in the next decade with a move to digital, save for certain special venues like Imax. Similarly, I doubt HD discs will last as long as DVD has, let alone VHS or LD during their run.


Conclusion? Get them while you can, enjoy the hell of the flicks, love that some of your favs are in the best format you're likely to see for some time. I know that's what I've done with my DVD-A/SACDs, some must-have titles that make owning players for this media a must for my system. I will own a player to play Lawrence of Arabia and another to watch Kong, just as I own an audio player for Dark Side of the Moon and early Elton John, and another for Pet Sounds, Harvest, the Polyphonic Spree and Rumours.

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Having lived through the SACD/DVD-A thing, I have some opinions as to why they became niche products:


1) Not enough people listen to music through their DVD players or home-theatre setups (analagous to "not enough people are going to watch music through their game machines). Multichannel audio was a paradigm shift that hasn't caught on, and is 3x the cost of stereo to implement (no parallel to HD)


2) High-end music is a niche market anyway. The mainstream is going to portable music. (a bit analagous to "DVD is good enough". However, as more people get HDTVs, I don't think this argument is going to stand up for HD movies)


3) Poor marketing (so far, same-old for HD-DVD and Blu-ray, but will hopefully change).


4) Required new, expensive hardware (we are still there with HD video, but prices will come down, and people ARE buying HDTVs, despite poor content).


5) SACD production was subsidized, and had early-adopter buzz. Sony then decided it was niche, and pulled production subsidies. Instantly, the growth of SACD stopped. (Blu-ray could suffer the same fate, but more likely Sony will sink before they give up Blu-Ray. However, Blu-ray doesn't have the early-adopter buzz).


6) Connectivity issues!!! This was huge. I feel this was the biggest killer of the audio formats. We simply couldn't get a digital connections to most receivers in multichannel. Licensing costs and copy protection worries led to proprietary schemes, or in most cases, analog-only connections. (analogous to the HDMI/component issues in video. However, now HDMI w HDCP has become a widely adopted standard. Finally! If we had this for audio back then, the audio formats may have taken off. However, the analog downsample flag still raises its ugly head in the future).


While there are similarities with the audio war, I believe the differences favour adoption of a high-def video format. I think one of HD-DVD or Blu-Ray has a chance of being that format.


Long live DAD audio disks! (okay, they are already dead, but they are compatible with ALL DVDs and give amazing sound through an outboard DAC. There were millions of DVD players ready to play them! And they still died, because of no copy protection, and because high-quality audio is a niche market. ARGHHHHHH).