DVD to be obsolete soon

[buffgod]

so let me get this straight. 50 gigs os one disc. nice. That means the import busniess is going to produce much better imports. Lets say MAC's standard is 9 25minutes episodes to a 4.4 gigabyte disc at poor quality. That is roughly 225 minutes of video and supposedly an R1 produces a great quality video at 95 minutes, same space. If the import business was to relatively double the amount of space used to copy film then logically us import buyers would be getting R1 quality video. say 10 gigs of space to copy 225 minutes of video at R1 qulaity. now there is 40 gigs left. If the import business was smart they'd either use the rest of the forty gigs to produce something close to hdtv quality video or put an entire 26 episode series with R1 quality with some space to spare. Dang that sounds nice. If the imports do something like this i would be first in line to buy and I'm sure any good business men would see the potential for something like this....... Food for thought

[Zagatto]

This has only briefly been touched on but I think that the extra storage room on the disc would most likely be used to finally make discs with HDTV resolution.
Currently, even the best DVD on the market is nowhere near HDTV quality. DVDs still use Mpeg2 compression.
It will be interesting to see if we get something that uses Mpeg4 encoding or some other more secure format.

The funny thing is that studios are enjoying better sales than ever and they still complain about losing money to piracy. I could see if sales were declining that they would say piracy is evil and all of that. Instead they say "we aren't making enough money".

whiners

[Schultz]

I can't see DVD being Obsolete in a year.. the Blue ray discs are more for high capacity for supporting HDTV resolutions.. compared to the standard resolution.. Also DVD's will only be obsolete when consumers stop buying them and start buying Blue Ray type equipment.. which i think will take a while.. it took 3 or 4 years before dvd's became mainstream.. and with people still getting into dvd's i don't see them going out in a year..

Also Blue Ray is only sony's format.. There are like 3 different Competing formats for HDTV DVD's also.. which ever one wins who knows.. Some are looking at using WMV 9 instead of Mpeg compression also..

[DARK OSAMU]

Well at least a Box set of Futurama or Family Guy or just some tv show will look even more awesome. It's no surprise to me this new DVD technology. I figured we have mini discs with like 90 gigs on it by now. Maybe next year.

[matthewmalay]

Whatever the new format is I'm sure the next generation of players will be able to play DVDs also. People will not be open to a new format if it renders their DVDs useless.

[Vile]

Schultz hit this one right on the head. industries can't force consumers to switch without killing themselves in lost sales while/if people upgrade to the new equipment. this will also spawn more pirate companies that will take blu-ray content and put it on dvd at standard quality. so no, dvds will not be obsolete in a year, it will be quite some time before the market is ready to take on a new format.

besides, blu-ray will probably go the way of the laserdisc if they try to introduce it before the market is ready, because it wont be successful, and when the market is ready, newer, better technology will be there instead.

the only conceivable way they will be able to introduce this format in a year would be if the media is all HDTV and the equipment is backwards compatible with dvds.

-Vile

[Liete]

Im not switching formats, I just started getting into dvds about 2 years ago.

[kakomu]

I'm just curious if the HK companies will get ahold of the Blu-ray discs, rip all the video, and just put them on regular DVDs. Rather than a direct copy, we have them do a bit more work...

[Jaded God]

They will obviously make the players capable of playing DVDs too though. So no worries.

And by the way, Bluray technology isn't really that new... It has been in discussion for a long time now.

[Liete]

I am not ever switching to Blue Ray, Sony can flop over and die.

[Vile]

Originally posted by Liete
I am not ever switching to Blue Ray, Sony can flop over and die.

some of people said that about switching from VHS to DVD. they dont get to buy many movies anymore.

technological standards are inhibited in adoption by the market, but lagging consumers are left behind by both the market and the technology. eventually, youll have to switch to whatever new standard there is, or your collection will cease to grow.

-Vile

[Liete]

Wrong.

You can transfer any fomat to any format and im not changing to another format any time soon.

[Jaded God]

Originally posted by Liete
Wrong.

You can transfer any fomat to any format and im not changing to another format any time soon.

agreed.

[CrayonShinChan]

Blu Ray won't make that much difference to current releases probably, quality wise. Eg. the early eps of the Simpsons on dvd aren't exactly dvd quality. So transferring to a new format = better quality only works if there is a source for higher quality stuff.

You must also factor in that alot of the time non-pirate companies do no cram a dvd to the max as it is.

I can see how this would benefit pirates though. A current 26 eps series will fit comfortably on a blu ray disk. Longer series will see shorter disk counts. They just need to raise the price of a blu ray disk. The price margin between an official and pirate disks becomes interstellar. Currently i often buy reasonably priced official disks and boxsets but space is an issue for me so blu ray bootlegs are right up my alley.

How long will it take for it become industry standard? DVD is so prevalent due to the fall in dvd player prices and dvd becoming the industry standard. Can blu ray become industry standard without dropping player prices and while dvd does not become generally unable to meet market demands.

Harder to pirate would only remain true for probably for home consumers and probably only for a certain amount of time. I doubt they can stop the big bootleggers. If they think they can stop piracy they are dreaming (x 50GB).

[Zagatto]

The other thing to keep in mind is that BluRay is currently a proprietary format that only Sony has rights to. This is similar to what they did with BetaMax.
It's interesting that Betamax died given that it had much better picture quality. The thing that held it back was that VHS didn't need to be licensed to be produced so it ended up being much cheaper.

Looking at history, it's not always the best format that ends up going the distance. Given the number of peripherals that currently use DVD/CD technology, I think it's going to be very hard to get consumers in general to switch to a new format in the near future.

One thing that did happen with the latest Terminator DVD release is that they included the first ever HDTV movie transfer in the package. The movie is encoded using Windows Media 9 and can only be played on fairly high end computer systems for the time being. The best part of this is that the whole movie fit on a standard DVD so I would expect this to be the route taken in the future instead of making an entirely new disc format.

Watch all of us be wrong... I can also see a future where discs are made obsolete by something that doesn't have to move similar to the memory cards that are being used for digital cameras. As memory prices continue to nosedive I don't think it's a far stretch to see movies pressed on little ROM cards or something similar.

At this point, I'm looking at what we have available to us today.
DVDs are in stock.
DVDs are being released.
DVDs are being devoloped.
Any time spent whining about new developments is a waste of breath until they actually have some impact.

I'm looking forward to seeing what happens in the next decade.