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The downfall of HD-DVD


Pugwash

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Format war?! What format war? It's a phoney war. Discs are dead - buy yourself a Mediagate 350HD mediaserver.

It's all about the bandwidth. If you're using a SAN to play videos, where do you get the content? The current best format for domestic video is 1080p24 h.264 AVC for movies. You're looking at a minimum of 10GB per movie (7GB/hour minimum) at the kind of quality you're getting off Blu-Ray. TV shows at 1080i60 are around 10GB/hour, meaning you need a huge amount of bandwidth to match the ability to go to the shop and come home with three movies for an evening in.

There's an old sysadmin saying for this occasion:

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." - Andrew S. Tanenbaum

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As someone who owns a SA-CD/DVD-Audio player, pugs, I know where you are coming from.

But, as the quality retrograde step that MP3 is compared to the 25 year old format that is CD audio proves - ultimate quality is not the deciding factor in format wars.

DVD killed VHS because they take up less space as well as offering better quality.

Hi capacity discs will not offer huge perceptible differences to the masses - especially at the costs involved. History shows they will instead go for the convenience of the-same-as-or-slightly-better than DVD quality in a convenient package.

PS. WRT to where I am getting content, the mediaserver is networked to one satellite and one cable tuner streaming HD channels off-air to it.

If I want real quality there's a cinema 5 minutes down the road.....

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But, as the quality retrograde step that MP3 is compared to the 25 year old format that is CD audio proves - ultimate quality is not the deciding factor in format wars.

MP3s (or AACs) won because most people don't listen to music on costly stereos; they use in-ear headphones and car stereos. :D

And while I agree with most of what you're saying, we still have a format war, it's just not the HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray that everyone thought it was: It's downloads (legal/illegal/on-demand) vs broadcast (cable/satellite/digital TV) vs media (dvd/blu-ray).

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Unfortunately the clip no longer works.

However this is all a very interesting conversation, here in Oz the big player is still HD-DVD with very little being said about Blu-Ray at all, but an article I read in the electronics section of the paper claims there is nothing that sets Blu-Ray apart and that it is in fact the second time around for it's release.

The article states that China has to push it for all it's worth as they have invested so much into it and it is their one chance to dominate the market.

Well that's what it said anyway. :blink:

Ken

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