Why Blu-Ray and HD DVD Won't Catch On

[Jeremy Charette]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.popularmechanics.com/blog/technology/3060491.html' target='_blank'>http://www.popularmechanics.com/blog/technology/3060491.html</a><br /><br /></div><i>"...We're excited for the possibilities inherent in discs that can store as much as 100GB of data. But if the best Blu-Ray can offer is a great-looking trailer for a movie we don't want to see, and the best HD-DVD can offer is a lower pricepoint than Blu-Ray, then maybe both camps in this much-hyped format war should head back to boot camp."</i><br /><br /> <img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/failure.jpg" /><br /><br /> This blog post on Popular Mechanics is about the author's experiences during a sneek peek at an upcoming Blu-Ray player, but I think the above quote says it all. I am appalled at the terrible movies studios are porting to HD. Why not release major blockbusters first, <i>then </i>fill in the library with cult movies and less popular titles? :roll:

[jeffd]

Who cares about the movies out for it when the price isnt affordable for either. ;)

[Jeremy Charette]

Seriously. Popular Mechanics compared a $500 HD DVD player and an $80 up-converting DVD player, and concluded that it wasn't worth the extra $400.

[Felix Torres]

Half-baked.
Both camps are so focused on the format war that neither is paying much attention to the basics. So you get slow players, lack of extras, and mis-formatted content (no shocker here; an HD-DVD exec predicted this a while back, because BD-ROM specs weren't finalized until a couple months ago and Sony's insistence on using MPEG2 instead of VC1 or MPEG4 suggests most early releases are going to be coming straight off DVD masters. And since the colorspace and other attributes for the HD formats are different from the DVD spec...)
And the price *still* doesn't add up; not for hardware and not for the content.
Now, the skipping, that is new and very interesting.
Suggests a bandwidth bottleneck somewhere in the player...

Definitely not 06 tech, even for early adopters.