HD DVD returns from grave, smashes Blu-Ray

[Wesley Scoggins]

... in China.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=562&1=1

Thought this was interesting, Toshiba licensed HD-DVD to Chinese manufacturers who are pumping out new "CBHD" disks.

Because of the less stringent licensing fees people can snap them up cheaper, and sales are beating Blu-Ray in China 3-1.

Wow, a year ago never thought that'd happen.

[Nir Shelter]

The battle continues...

[Craig W. Bickerstaff]

Really? Really?

Judging by the image attached I will immediately assume that the people reading this article and actually thinking it means anything are HD DVD fans still clinging to a format that is long gone.

GIVE IT UP PEOPLE IT IS OVER!!!!

[Jonas Rejman]

Really? Really?
GIVE IT UP PEOPLE IT IS OVER!!!!

Are you ignoring the decision of a country with a population of 1.3 billion, an unsaturated market, that is having the industrial and information revolution at once?

I am afraid we might be over, if we do not pay attention.

[Craig W. Bickerstaff]

Are you ignoring the decision of a country with a population of 1.3 billion, an unsaturated market, that is having the industrial and information revolution at once?

I am afraid we might be over, if we do not pay attention.

Are you talking about Blu-ray disc? Filmmakers? Maybe even the United states?

[Kwan Khan]

Wow......

[Michael Hastings]

I'd like to see it come back. Picture quality can be and usually is just as good as blu-ray and content is king.

I bought 4 Toshiba HD-DVD players - 1 costco floor model for $50 and 3 others off of ebay for about the same - for playback use at trade shows and home use. Bought about 25 HD-dvd movies and docos for $5 to $10 on blockbuster and other clearance. Had them over 18 months and never a glitch.

Bought the PS3 for its blu-ray. Bluray drive Crapped out after 6 months but didn't notice until too late for warranty because hardly used it (grandson just used it to play downloaded demo games).

Have a samsung Blu-ray now but don't see any big advantage.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

HD-DVD was a fine format that ended up getting a bum deal, Toshiba didn't effectively market it very well is all that it came down to.

As for this news with China, it's not surprising. The BD licensing structure is terrible. It's bad enough that I was really shocked it didn't play a larger role in the format war -- then again, studios don't seem to care, they just charge more on the consumer end.

I doubt this means we'll see a come-back of the format here in the USA. Over the past several years, the Chinese market has been dominated by alternative formats that are typically easier and cheaper to produce. VCD dominated their video market vs. DVD for nearly a decade.

[Rudi Herbert]

As the famous tagline says: "What happens in China stays in China" :-)

Whatever format rules China, however a huge and important market it is, will not jump over to the rest of the world, certainly not the western countries dominated by corporative mentality and studio connections. As far as we, on this side of the world, are concerned, that war is good and truly over. BD is our format.

[Gavin Greenwalt]

HD-DVD was the last physical format that I buy.

I've got like 40 or 50 HD-DVDs. I bought up a ton of the classics that I love and decided to call it quits on physical distribution.

I have a blu-ray player for the odd hollywood video rental but the end is very near. XBox is going to be offering on demand 1080p streams this fall. Netflix already offers pretty good SD and reasonable 720p movies.

I'm so tired of scratched disks and skipping with HD-DVD and bluray I just don't want to deal with it anymore. DVD was bad enough, the HD formats seem to skip even if there is a grain of dust on them.

[JanneJansson]

Physical disk formats is going away. I bet itunes sells more hd flicks then any disk format in a year or two.

[Craig W. Bickerstaff]

Downloads is a mixed minefield of mixed results reliant on an ISP industry which has spotty quality at best.
Physical Media is familiar, accessible and offers top notch quality and special features, it's not going anywhere fast.

[Michael Hastings]

HD-DVD was a fine format that ended up getting a bum deal, Toshiba didn't effectively market it very well is all that it came down to.

As for this news with China, it's not surprising. The BD licensing structure is terrible. It's bad enough that I was really shocked it didn't play a larger role in the format war -- then again, studios don't seem to care, they just charge more on the consumer end.

I doubt this means we'll see a come-back of the format here in the USA. Over the past several years, the Chinese market has been dominated by alternative formats that are typically easier and cheaper to produce. VCD dominated their video market vs. DVD for nearly a decade.

The difference with DVD formats versus say Beta vs. Vhs is that it is all just data - if the physical media/read head can keep up with the data rate you've got it. VCD was by necessity supercompressed.

DVDs at 4.7GB plus have plenty of space to handle high quality movies and these days it is just pennies more expensive to reproduce than CDs.

And of course REDRAY has shown how much is possible with even more modern compression. It may be that Blu-Ray took so long to dribble out that it may have missed its time too.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Michael, I'm nodding my head in agreement... But can't figure out what your post has to do with my post that you quoted. :)

[Wesley Scoggins]

I don't know how effective downloaded media is going to get. There is so much copy protection (They advertise the "FREE DIGITAL COPY!" on DVD's these days, but really have any of you tried to get the "Free Digital Copy"?

All the loops you have to jump through to get them is pretty ridiculous in some cases. And to get it on your iPod or something can be a huge hassle.

Most people i've talked to say that just copying their DVD is easier than getting the digital copy.

Then there is the compression scheme, I used Netflix's streaming service for a while, and it looks to be sub-VHS quality in many cases. Then get a high traffic period and their network get's strained? It spends 4 minutes buffering, then gives you a even further reduced quality stream.

It's fantastic when you can get actual HD content (which still runs at a WAY lower bitrate than Blu-Ray) on a good day without having to worry about your stuff getting buffered. Not to mention I prefer being able to pop my movie in and watch it without having to wait for something to load.

With QuadHD resolutions popping up in the next few years, I don't know how streaming is going to keep up with that unless Red starting licensing RedRay's compression scheme for streaming use (not a bad idea..)

[Patrick Scheller]

Don't get too excited about that bit of news u DVD-HD fans. China is trying to isolate itself from rest of the world by "reinventing" almost any basic technology. They also tried it with Windows and Linux :arf: that won't mean a lot in the near future. They don't lack in manpower but they lack in finances and support from the rest of the world (who owns ALL the movie rights!). And by the time they get it working, their technology will be already old and outdated by others. They could only succeed in becoming a trendsetter and inventor of new technologies like Japan did. But the copy-cat path they are taking now by stealing technology from the west is not giving them the power to impose anything to the rest of the world.... neither to their own people who are greedy for western technology :coolgleamA:

[Michael Hastings]

Michael, I'm nodding my head in agreement... But can't figure out what your post has to do with my post that you quoted. :)

Well first of all I don't always make sense. :biggrin:

But I think I was trying to point out that the quality is in the data, not the player or medium and the marketing aspects are different now. If china decides to make 30,000,000 optical drives that play HD-DVD or some combination of compatible digital formats (like everything that plays mp3 now) they may be able to simply overrun the resistance of the Blu-ray folks.

And copyrights never seemed to be that important in asia, although I don't know if that is changing now - but it seems like with all of these forces coming together - the days of $24-30 blu-ray movie prices will be fairly short.

[Joseph Ward]

What about Region Code? No Region Coding like HD-DVD, Region C Blu-Ray, Region 6 DVD or something new?

Can HD-DVD discs play on CBHD Player?
Can CBHD discs play on HD-DVD Player?

[Robert Martin]

Then there is the compression scheme, I used Netflix's streaming service for a while, and it looks to be sub-VHS quality in many cases. Then get a high traffic period and their network get's strained? It spends 4 minutes buffering, then gives you a even further reduced quality stream.


I've been using Netflix streaming for hours per day for about a year, with no experience of the issues you describe. i have seen terrible image quality ONLY when they've been dealing with godawful source, as with almost everything from Troma, where the same terrible transcoding can be seen on their DVDs.

Their A-quality stuff -- like the Ring Trilogy -- has been just wonderful. Where Netflix encoding frequently fails is sound -- I've seen them put up films with the director's commentary soundtrack, with the wrong language track, even a classical recital with NO soundtrack whatsoever. VERY rarely, I've seen them screw up an encode visually -- but that is simply shoddy work, the compression tech they're using is more than up to snuff when used correctly.

Of course, Netflix supplies multiple streams for each film, to accomodate low-bandwidth & high latency users. Your buffering issues -- the like of which I've never seen, though I've seen other transient issues attributable to the server network -- are indicative of ISP issues that could also have caused your system to fall back to the low-bandwidth encodes. Before they switched to Silverlight, there was a cheat that allowed you to force the high-bandwidth version every time -- I used that at all times, and never experienced rebuffering or a long wait at the start. There may be a new cheat for the current player, but I've not looked into it as my system consistently defaults to the high bandwidth encode since my isp upgraded service.

[Wesley Scoggins]

Were you doing it on a desktop?

I was doing it from NetFlix's service that is integrated into XBox Live, so maybe that was part of it?

But my experience with it was that I saw quite a few drops in resolution mid-film. I would be watching a movie and about 2/3rds of the way through it'd stop, buffer for a few minutes and then return with what looked like a 380 or so line picture.

It would go from about DVD to good VHS quality, to about YouTube quality often.

Of course, this was months ago when they first started rolling out the service, I am sure that it's changed since then, just my first experiences were just not "ideal".

[XiaoSu Han]

Don't get too excited about that bit of news u DVD-HD fans. China is trying to isolate itself from rest of the world by "reinventing" almost any basic technology. They also tried it with Windows and Linux :arf: that won't mean a lot in the near future. They don't lack in manpower but they lack in finances and support from the rest of the world (who owns ALL the movie rights!). And by the time they get it working, their technology will be already old and outdated by others. They could only succeed in becoming a trendsetter and inventor of new technologies like Japan did. But the copy-cat path they are taking now by stealing technology from the west is not giving them the power to impose anything to the rest of the world.... neither to their own people who are greedy for western technology :coolgleamA:

Well the Chinese don't want or need to impose anything upon "the rest of the world who owns all movie rights", they just wanted to have a high resolution disc format that could be had for cheap so more people could afford it. And that's what they've got.

[Imran Farouk]

well lets think bout this here...
Blu-Ray isn't exactly cheap...
Yes the west may own a majority of the movie rights...
But think about markets like china and india where both of them could easily out profit those of the Western markets if sales caught on,

Producing cheap but high quality dvd's for the masses is what studios would find ideal, western ones especially, the idea of higher gross/net profit margins would definitely satisfy any studio's hunger for money.

During these economic times the ability to make more is always a good thing,

The chinese maybe 'copying' if you call it that but they are most certainly doing things 'for cheap so more people could afford it'...

100 HD-DVDs for $100 or 100 Blu-Ray DVDs for $150
Similar size, same quality...

Which would you pick if you were a studio head?

$15 - HD Dvd or $30 for a Blu-Ray

Which would you pick as a consumer?

[Jeff Kilgroe]

well lets think bout this here...
Blu-Ray isn't exactly cheap...

It's pretty cheap now that it's established. I'm paying less for Blu-Ray replication than I paid for DVD replication 6 years ago. The problem with Blu-Ray is on the consumer end. Studios, distributors, etc.. are trying to charge 35% higher prices for HD content. The same pricing applied to HD-DVD here in the states before Toshiba and the few HD-DVD supporters decided to slash prices as a desperate final act. The big deal with HD-DVD and why it's seeing a revival in the Asian markets is there's really no license fees to go along with it and retooling DVD press lines to make HD-DVD is a relatively cheap thing to do.


$15 - HD Dvd or $30 for a Blu-Ray

Which would you pick as a consumer?

The problem is that it's not going to work that way. When manufacture costs for pressed discs is under $0.30 for both disc types and even when you factor in the Blu-Ray royalty costs, which are now starting to be exempted from many products anyway, you're looking at maybe another $0.05 for Blu-Ray. The cost is in the content, the intellectual property.

If I feel like buying a Blu-Ray, I hit up the new release pre-order pricing at Amazon or I stop by Wal-Mart or Target and see which ones are on special. Both retailers have Blu-Rays for $15 or $20 regularly and they rotate which titles... The only titles that seem to be exempt from the special pricing are Disney and some new releases.

I bought the Bourne Trilogy Blu-Ray box a few months ago from Amazon for $42.99 w/ free shipping. HD-DVD will have a tough time making inroads back into the American markets. I think it will be like VCD all over again -- a format that failed here in the USA, turns out to be a major success in Asia and it finally sees a resurgence in the US within the import films market. I think HD-DVD will do the same thing, maybe.

In another 3 years, when DVD players don't exist anymore -- all players will be Blu-Ray players and they will be $35 for the cheap ones and studios are mostly only releasing Blu-Ray and prices are equivalent to current DVD prices, how would HD-DVD make sense?

Optical disc formats are most likely on the way out within the next 5 to 10 years anyway. Solid-state is the future, even for write-once, disposable, or manufactured content. I'll be really surprised if Blu-Ray, or any other optical media, holds onto the top consumer distribution format for more than another 5 years. I have a hunch the next format to come swooping in will be a variant of CF cards or C.Fast. 32GB to 2TB and more on a single card. Inexpensive to manufacture as static ROM. Probably cheaper to manufacture than optical media within the next 3 to 5 years.

[Tom Lowe]

I really think, in hindsight, that Microsoft used HD-DVD to rope-a-dope Sony into nearly bankrupting themselves with those hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes that Sony paid to the studios, and the $300 per unit Sony lost on the PS3, while all along Microsoft was concentrating on getting better game titles for XBOX and betting that harddrive downloads would eventually replace discs anyway. That's some Sun Tzu type of shit right there.

[Iannis Holwech]

The chinese maybe 'copying' if you call it that but they are most certainly doing things 'for cheap so more people could afford it'...



The Chinese HDDVD format CBHD is not "copying" in the way the Chinese are "famous" for.
It is a format developed in association with Toshiba and the DVD-Forum and was started as far back as 2003/2004.
The basis is the HDDVD format but with audio and video codec developed at Chinese Universities.

The strategy behind this by Toshiba by not just license them HDDVD was to give the Chinese something they wanted (their own HD format without high license costs to be paid to the west and help them develop something of their own; pride in own intellectual property (and maybe the hope that would make them be more heavy-handed on disc pirating of the format)

This was meant to be in exchange for when the time came when Toshiba would want to change the DVD licensing, where they would stop the production of RED Laser only DVD players and only allow Blue Laser DVD players (HDDVD/CBHD) to be made.

If they hadn't done this, and wanted to changed the DVD license, the Chinese manufacturers would probably just continued to make RED Laser DVD players as long as they could sell them (the Chinese produce 95% of all DVD player hardware in the world) and stopped paying the license fee. This would have both undermined the effort to emigrate consumers to HD optical, and tied Toshiba in endless court cases to try to stop them.

This was the strategic deal that was made, and this was also the main reason behind why HDDVD lost the "format war".
Because of this Sony managed to sell the support for the BD format to the Hollywood studios with a small majority, on basis of industrial protectionism of the Japanese industry for the future of HD Optical against the Chinese hold on SD Optical (DVD).

So in the end it was corporate concerns and industrial politics that decided what would be the next consumer format.
What would be the best for the consumers, a wider scope of content to be delivered on formats within the format produced on existing production equipment or that the best technical format ought to be chosen did not matter much in the end.

Toshiba has just applied for membership in the Blu-ray disc association (BDA) because they want to produce BD hardware. What is more interesting is that they come to the BDA as the only company that can offer the discontinuation of RED Laser players.
But I don't believe they will do that before they sit on the BDA Board of Directors.

Anyway, first we will have to see what the BD3D format contains and if our BD players can be upgraded or if we have to buy a new player to see BD3D.
If the last is the case, we look at a whole new format, which means they should rather rework the whole format to be more "future proof".

Buy the way, in the existence of HDDVD and the success of CBHD in China and thereby the availability to buy "readymade" low-priced Blue-Laser machines lays a great opportunity for a REDRAY format that far surpasses what RED has announced till now.
Just put available parts from DVDHD together with some processing power from the Scarlet&Epic camera, REDRAY compression and codec and you have a "low price" format that run rings around BD with little or no licensing cost for RED. :emote_hippie:

[Iannis Holwech]

I really think, in hindsight, that Microsoft used HD-DVD to rope-a-dope Sony into nearly bankrupting themselves with those hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes that Sony paid to the studios, and the $300 per unit Sony lost on the PS3, while all along Microsoft was concentrating on getting better game titles for XBOX and betting that harddrive downloads would eventually replace discs anyway. That's some Sun Tzu type of shit right there.

If you are right, Microsoft succeeded fairly well as Sony is expected to report a loss of 102 billion Yen at the end of this fiscal year ending march 2010. :Drogar-Smoke(DBG):