6 ms·

Bluray did decisively win over its contemporary rival HD-DVD.

SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
Was Bluray technologically superior and more expensive? I don't remember that being the case, but it may have been. I think the ubiquity of the PS3 was the decider for that generation, so I guess, if it was more expensive, it's a decent example.
- Zandikar 5y ago
  Bluray was generally superior yes. It wasn't flat out better in all ways, but it was at least on parity if not better to HD-DVD. Cost wise, it depends on what exactly we're talking about (Cost of disc, cost of licensing, etc), but blu ray succeeded largely due to Sony willing to take an estimated ~$3B loss on the hardware sales of the PS3 and leverage it's media partnerships to see the format succeed in the long term. Selling the PS3 at a deficit was instrumental in getting BluRay players into peoples homes en-masse, which then in turn allowed Sony to better negotiate media partners to use their format. So was it cheaper? No, I don't think so, but Sony was willing to eat a loss to make it "cheaper" for the end consumer. Technically, people paid more for a bluray than for an HD-DVD player, as a PS3 was definitely more expensive than a standalone player/drive for either, but the value proposition was definitely there, as many people wanted a PS3 regardless. In short, the value was there, both for the media companies and end consumers, for bluray as opposed to HD-DVD, but I'm not sure it was explicitly "cheaper".
  - cinntaile 5y ago
    HD DVD was released with the xbox 360 by Microsoft earlier than Sony's PS3, so that value proposition goes both ways. HD DVD was cheaper too. The number of consoles sold isn't that different (Sony sold ca. 15% more over the entire lifetime of the console). At the time there were many claims that the porn industry would be the deciding factor.
    - Zandikar 5y ago
      Being earlier doesn't mean it has a better value proposition. It just means it had an opportunity for entrenchment before a competitor can bring their product to market. Had they successfully leveraged that opportunity, that would be valuable, but they didn't. Microsoft/HD-DVD decidedly squandered that opportunity considering the PS3 (primary BR player purchased pre 2010) launched a year later than Xbox but had sold as many units in ~1 yr as the xbox had in 2, effectively eliminating any such market advantage in it's first year. > HD DVD was cheaper. Correct. Which is why my comment talked about value, and why "X is cheaper" as an individual metric in and of itself is not useful in measuring success. BR and the PS3 was decidedly more expensive. People still bought more of them than HD-DVD/360. > At the time there were many claims that the porn industry would be the deciding factor. Which was almost as laughable then as it is now.
      - cinntaile 5y ago
        You claimed the reason why Blu Ray won was mostly because it was bundled with the PS3. I counterclaimed by saying that HD DVD had the same advantage. PS3 sold about 87.3 million while xbox 360 sold about 84 million, the difference is not that much. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_consoles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_cons... edit: It looks like my claim was not correct, a HD DVD accessory was required to play HD DVD content on the xbox 360.
        bombcar 5y ago
        Yeah, if the 360 had included an internal HD-DVD drive at the same price point we might be somewhere very different. (Thought to be honest BluRay would probably still have won as dual-format drives based on BluRay appeared later).
        jerf 5y ago
        "a HD DVD accessory was required to play HD DVD content on the xbox 360." Once again demonstrating the murderously huge difference between hardware that ships with the platform and attempts to add on hardware to the install base later. Exceptions will leap to mind, like the rumble pack for the N64 or the Dualshock controller, but in general, add-on attempts fail and fail miserably for gaming consoles. They don't leap to mind precisely because they failed.
  - nebula8804 5y ago
    Did HD-DVD use Java like Blue-Ray? To this day I found it absurd that they require publishers to ship a Java application along with the content. It is probably the reason there are so many lousy menus. 4K UHD is even worse as many publishers have downright just given up. Everyone is using the same sample code. At least DVD did something interesting when it was released. I don't know if this is a problem that can be solved. The framework has to accomodate the lowest common denominator and you know some manufacturer will cut costs to the bone so you can't mandate some fancy graphics chip in the spec because it will kill the format before it can become the standard. Is this why they went with Java?
    - dlp211 5y ago
      TBF to 4k UHD, the 4k stream is already being compressed significantly on those discs so every byte that doesn't go to content means that that you are compromising the content just a little bit more. That's also why so many 4k UHD discs don't have any bonus content on them and usually pack a Blu-Ray in.
      - nebula8804 5y ago
        Really? I rip 4K UHD so I can toss the disc and their crap software in the attic and typically I get 60-80GB per movie. From what I understand, these are 100GB discs right? Are they seriously cutting corners on the quality? If this is the case, now I am royally pissed. I am paying a premium to avoid the Netflix/Streaming compressed garbage and to know that they cut corners here when the whole point is about uncompromised quality...well that is just another blow to any shred of trust I have in these companies.
        dlp211 5y ago
        I mean, the RAW 4k (or 6k or 8k) footage is typically multiple terabytes (almost 15 TB for 2 hours at 8k). That is then compressed down to under a Terabyte for use in the movie theater (typically 200-800GB depending on features and length), and then compressed further to get it onto 100 GB disc. It's important to remember that length is going to play a big part (there is a reason that Snyders Justice League is on 2 discs) and a consistent quality is going to be desired within a catalog.
- StillBored 5y ago
  Was Bluray technologically superior and more expensive? It wasn't really superior, in some ways it was better (more capacity per layer) but then lost out by using less efficient codec's, and requiring a significantly more powerful processor to run java rather than having a custom scripting/overlay function while lacking various features (like networking). Much of what HD-DVD had out of the box didn't manage to make it into the bluray specs until a couple years later (revision 2.0 IIRC https://www.cnet.com/culture/blu-ray-profile-1-0-1-1-2-0-explained-ask-the-editors/ https://www.cnet.com/culture/blu-ray-profile-1-0-1-1-2-0-exp...). Some things never made it, like the fact that HD-DVD was region free. The PS3 was a contributing factor but a minor one, In what basically was a studio fight over consumer friendliness (DRM, region locking, backwards compatibility with DVDs since they could be pressed on the backside, instant play requirements, etc), and which camp was willing to pay larger bribes to "win" before the dual mode players became the majority since the later hardware requirements for bluray made it basically capable of also playing HD-DVDs. Plus, streaming was becoming an ever more present topic. To this day, the bluray experience tends to be worse than HD-DVD as so few blurays ever behaved like HD-DVD (universal iirc being the notable exception since they appear to have ported their HD-DVD interfaces to bluray for a while) when it comes to just playing the movie when the disk is inserted and overlaying menus over the movie as its playing.
  - phonon 5y ago
    > but then lost out by using less efficient codec's They used the same codecs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_high-definition_optical_disc_formats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_high-definition_...
    - StillBored 5y ago
      Now they do, but originally all the blurays were mpeg2, it was part of the discussion around quality, and the vc1 codec was used on most HDDVDs vs MPEG2 on blurays nullifying the bitrate differences. IIRC of course, since i'm lazy.
      - phonon 5y ago

Was Bluray technologically superior and more expensive? I don't remember that being the case, but it may have been. I think the ubiquity of the PS3 was the decider for that generation, so I guess, if it was more expensive, it's a decent example.

Zandikar 5y ago
Bluray was generally superior yes. It wasn't flat out better in all ways, but it was at least on parity if not better to HD-DVD. Cost wise, it depends on what exactly we're talking about (Cost of disc, cost of licensing, etc), but blu ray succeeded largely due to Sony willing to take an estimated ~$3B loss on the hardware sales of the PS3 and leverage it's media partnerships to see the format succeed in the long term. Selling the PS3 at a deficit was instrumental in getting BluRay players into peoples homes en-masse, which then in turn allowed Sony to better negotiate media partners to use their format. So was it cheaper? No, I don't think so, but Sony was willing to eat a loss to make it "cheaper" for the end consumer. Technically, people paid more for a bluray than for an HD-DVD player, as a PS3 was definitely more expensive than a standalone player/drive for either, but the value proposition was definitely there, as many people wanted a PS3 regardless. In short, the value was there, both for the media companies and end consumers, for bluray as opposed to HD-DVD, but I'm not sure it was explicitly "cheaper".
- cinntaile 5y ago
  HD DVD was released with the xbox 360 by Microsoft earlier than Sony's PS3, so that value proposition goes both ways. HD DVD was cheaper too. The number of consoles sold isn't that different (Sony sold ca. 15% more over the entire lifetime of the console). At the time there were many claims that the porn industry would be the deciding factor.
  - Zandikar 5y ago
    Being earlier doesn't mean it has a better value proposition. It just means it had an opportunity for entrenchment before a competitor can bring their product to market. Had they successfully leveraged that opportunity, that would be valuable, but they didn't. Microsoft/HD-DVD decidedly squandered that opportunity considering the PS3 (primary BR player purchased pre 2010) launched a year later than Xbox but had sold as many units in ~1 yr as the xbox had in 2, effectively eliminating any such market advantage in it's first year. > HD DVD was cheaper. Correct. Which is why my comment talked about value, and why "X is cheaper" as an individual metric in and of itself is not useful in measuring success. BR and the PS3 was decidedly more expensive. People still bought more of them than HD-DVD/360. > At the time there were many claims that the porn industry would be the deciding factor. Which was almost as laughable then as it is now.
    - cinntaile 5y ago
      You claimed the reason why Blu Ray won was mostly because it was bundled with the PS3. I counterclaimed by saying that HD DVD had the same advantage. PS3 sold about 87.3 million while xbox 360 sold about 84 million, the difference is not that much. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_consoles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_cons... edit: It looks like my claim was not correct, a HD DVD accessory was required to play HD DVD content on the xbox 360.
      - bombcar 5y ago
        Yeah, if the 360 had included an internal HD-DVD drive at the same price point we might be somewhere very different. (Thought to be honest BluRay would probably still have won as dual-format drives based on BluRay appeared later).
      - jerf 5y ago
        "a HD DVD accessory was required to play HD DVD content on the xbox 360." Once again demonstrating the murderously huge difference between hardware that ships with the platform and attempts to add on hardware to the install base later. Exceptions will leap to mind, like the rumble pack for the N64 or the Dualshock controller, but in general, add-on attempts fail and fail miserably for gaming consoles. They don't leap to mind precisely because they failed.
- nebula8804 5y ago
  Did HD-DVD use Java like Blue-Ray? To this day I found it absurd that they require publishers to ship a Java application along with the content. It is probably the reason there are so many lousy menus. 4K UHD is even worse as many publishers have downright just given up. Everyone is using the same sample code. At least DVD did something interesting when it was released. I don't know if this is a problem that can be solved. The framework has to accomodate the lowest common denominator and you know some manufacturer will cut costs to the bone so you can't mandate some fancy graphics chip in the spec because it will kill the format before it can become the standard. Is this why they went with Java?
  - dlp211 5y ago
    TBF to 4k UHD, the 4k stream is already being compressed significantly on those discs so every byte that doesn't go to content means that that you are compromising the content just a little bit more. That's also why so many 4k UHD discs don't have any bonus content on them and usually pack a Blu-Ray in.
    - nebula8804 5y ago
      Really? I rip 4K UHD so I can toss the disc and their crap software in the attic and typically I get 60-80GB per movie. From what I understand, these are 100GB discs right? Are they seriously cutting corners on the quality? If this is the case, now I am royally pissed. I am paying a premium to avoid the Netflix/Streaming compressed garbage and to know that they cut corners here when the whole point is about uncompromised quality...well that is just another blow to any shred of trust I have in these companies.
      - dlp211 5y ago
        I mean, the RAW 4k (or 6k or 8k) footage is typically multiple terabytes (almost 15 TB for 2 hours at 8k). That is then compressed down to under a Terabyte for use in the movie theater (typically 200-800GB depending on features and length), and then compressed further to get it onto 100 GB disc. It's important to remember that length is going to play a big part (there is a reason that Snyders Justice League is on 2 discs) and a consistent quality is going to be desired within a catalog.
StillBored 5y ago
Was Bluray technologically superior and more expensive? It wasn't really superior, in some ways it was better (more capacity per layer) but then lost out by using less efficient codec's, and requiring a significantly more powerful processor to run java rather than having a custom scripting/overlay function while lacking various features (like networking). Much of what HD-DVD had out of the box didn't manage to make it into the bluray specs until a couple years later (revision 2.0 IIRC https://www.cnet.com/culture/blu-ray-profile-1-0-1-1-2-0-explained-ask-the-editors/ https://www.cnet.com/culture/blu-ray-profile-1-0-1-1-2-0-exp...). Some things never made it, like the fact that HD-DVD was region free. The PS3 was a contributing factor but a minor one, In what basically was a studio fight over consumer friendliness (DRM, region locking, backwards compatibility with DVDs since they could be pressed on the backside, instant play requirements, etc), and which camp was willing to pay larger bribes to "win" before the dual mode players became the majority since the later hardware requirements for bluray made it basically capable of also playing HD-DVDs. Plus, streaming was becoming an ever more present topic. To this day, the bluray experience tends to be worse than HD-DVD as so few blurays ever behaved like HD-DVD (universal iirc being the notable exception since they appear to have ported their HD-DVD interfaces to bluray for a while) when it comes to just playing the movie when the disk is inserted and overlaying menus over the movie as its playing.
- phonon 5y ago
  > but then lost out by using less efficient codec's They used the same codecs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_high-definition_optical_disc_formats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_high-definition_...
  - StillBored 5y ago
    Now they do, but originally all the blurays were mpeg2, it was part of the discussion around quality, and the vc1 codec was used on most HDDVDs vs MPEG2 on blurays nullifying the bitrate differences. IIRC of course, since i'm lazy.
    - phonon 5y ago