Further fuel for the “HD-DVD is fucked” fire, slashed-price players and superbowl ads be damned.
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Fantastic reading: HD-DVD fanboys in denial on Amazon discussion boards.
“Considering the real facts of the matter, presumptions that the High-Def format war could be won by either side anytime soon were seriously misguided. The truth is that both Blu-ray and HD DVD are losing the real battle, which is to supplant DVD as the next mainstream optical disc standard. They’re just losing it to different degrees.”
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More fun FUD that will ensure that neither format “wins”.
Outline of what the current HD-DVD key legal maelstrom is all about.
Sex, Lies and Videotape (oh, and Blue-Laser DVD Formats)
Attention lazy received-opinion-espousing comment posters.
Last week, there was lots of discussion around Sony reportedly refusing to allow porno to be distributed on their Blu-ray high def format.
(For the moment, let’s ignore the fact that this isn’t necessarily true—the Blu-ray Disc Association deny any such ban.)
The lazy opinion I refer to is “Sony have learned nothing—The reason VHS won over Betamax is because they refused to allow porn on Beta.” (Entertainingly, this very opinion is spouted in the ArsTechnica article linked to in the previous paragraph which I was using to debunk the opinion in the paragraph before that.)
I’ve hunted around for anything online that can back up the idea of Sony not allowing teh pr0n on Betamax, and can’t find a sausage. However, I did find an article entitled Pornography Drives Technology: Why Not to Censor the Internet which proposed a considerably different connection between boobies and videotape:
Predicting that the greatest use of home VCRs would be time-shifting, that is, recording TV shows off the air for later viewing, Sony designed Betamax tape with a one hour playing time. When the market for videotape proved not to be time shifting, but prerecorded movies instead, longer-playing tape was demanded, and VHS arose to meet the demand. Though Beta eventually went to a four hour format, it was too late. Within years, two-, four-, and six-hour VHS tape became the industry standard.
What were people watching on these early videotapes? The early home video rental stores, the outlets that drove Betamax from the market, were almost exclusively pornographic, drawing on the same clientele as early nickelodeons.
So while it can be argued that yes, there was a comparative lack of red-hot-girl-on-girl-action on Betamax, and that, potentially, this contributed to the downfall of the format. However, it was for purely technical reasons—the unavailability of suitably girthy videocassettes—rather than moralistic stances by Japanese corporations.
(And as an aside, is there really that much demand for HD porn? It strikes me that most porn I’ve seen in my life would be improved by reducing the resolution of what I was witnessing.)
The keys for use with BackupHDDVD are now starting to be extracted and shared, enabling your to back up your HD-DVD discs. I doff my cap to the community that made this happen so quickly.
It appears that someone has found a way to extract the encryption keys for HD-DVD discs, then rip them. This doesn’t render the whole of AACS broken (it was designed to work around broken software), but until the movie industry makes its move, all HD-DVD discs out there today can be ripped.
Tracking the popularity of the competing blue-laser DVD formats by comparing Amazon data. Very smart. HD-DVD is winning at the moment. (Wonder if that’s just because people getting HD TVs are searching for “DVD HD”?) Let’s see how the PS3 affects this.
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All good points. DVD offered a *lot* more than VHS (picture quality, extra features, no rewinding, chapter selection), and wasn’t as inconvenient as Laserdisc. Bluray and HD-DVD just off “more” DVD. Will either of them “succeed”?
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Slicing and dicing an HD DVD player. A Pentium 4 processor, a 256Mb USB flash drive (running ext2), and a gig of RAM are amongst the goodies.
An overview of how the AACS encryption system that’ll be baked into Bluray and HD-DVD works. It’s very well-crafted, but ultimately doomed-to-fail — either through cracking, or through speedy product-obsolescence.
BusinessWeek article on the troubles facing early adopters of HD-DVD & Blu-Ray. I reckon Comcast & DirecTv are going to win the battle to bring High Def movies into peoples’ homes. The days of shiny discs are drawing to a close.
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