7 ms·

Ah, the good old days. There was a brief moment after the format died where they allowed you to trade in your hddvd’s for the blu ray version.

majikandy 4y ago
And this time the better format won right? Unlike Betamax which I hadn’t realised was actually invented 2 years before VHS and it’s fizzle-out was basically because of Sony patents.
- jackvalentine 4y ago
  Used to work for a regional netflix knock-off DVD mailing house. Blurays were more hardy and required less scratch fix buffing. I think they had an extra layer on it. Were there any other differences between the two?
  - Lammy 4y ago
    > Were there any other differences between the two? Bluray menus are Java, and HD-DVDs' are JavaScript/XML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Content HD-DVD uses Microsoft's WMV3/VC-1. Bluray (non-UHD) supports both AVC (h.264) and VC-1, but AVC is more common https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_H.264_and_VC-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_H.264_and_VC-1
    - realityking 4y ago
      HD-DVD supported H.264 and VC-1 (and MPEG2). Initially there were plenty of VC-1 and MPEG2 releases on Blu-ray as well. HD-DVD simply died before the universal shift to H.264. There was however a difference in max. bitrate (~40 Mbit/s for Blu-ray, ~30 Mbit/s for HD-DVD) The differences between the two standard were more interesting when it came to sound formats. HD-DVD had mandatory support for Dolby Digital Plus and Dolby TrueHD (allowing the audio on a disc to use these without a fallback). Blu-ray on the other hand supported a higher max. bitrate for DTS-HD Master Audio.
      - Lammy 4y ago
        > HD-DVD supported H.264 TIL! http://www.dvdforum.org/images/Forum_HD_DVD_Universal_24.pdf#page=2 http://www.dvdforum.org/images/Forum_HD_DVD_Universal_24.pdf...
- jraph 4y ago
  > And this time the better format won right? Can't say Blu-Ray won with a resounding success neither… possibly because of Sony patents. DVDs were still heavily used as compared to Blu-Ray, because people buying Blue-Rays were mostly people who had a PlayStation that could read them. And a few years later, streaming services probably pushed the idea of buying a movie on a physical media a bit out of the window anyway.
  - pdntspa 4y ago
    I don't know about that last bit, go to Walmart and they have most everything new and current on Blu-Ray. Plus the less-compressed video beats the pants off of streaming.
    - sborra 4y ago
      Tons and tons of Movies and TV shows are streaming-only releases nowadays. Also, a bunch of old movies get restored in HD and released on streaming services only. First example that comes to mind is the classic 1993 comedy Look Who's Talking Now. Adding insult to injury, a bunch of old movies get remastered physical releases... on DVD only. That's right. SD content encoded with a 30 year old codec. So if I want to watch a movie from my childhood in HD, more often than not my only legal course of action is to subscribe to a streaming service. Very sad, really.
      - pdntspa 4y ago
        In terms of things that appear in theaters. I don't expect to see Netflix exclusives on the aisles. And the market for discs isn't what it used to be. The long tail seems nonexistent now, it's a shame old remasters aren't coming through it any more. The last one I bought was the Star Trek TNG remaster, which was on blu-ray (and looked fantastic)
- hexmiles 4y ago
  Kinda... The story (of Betamax) is a bit more complicated than that, the main reason of why it failed is that Sony did not understand the market where it was selling. Also, the thing about Betamax having superior quality is a bit overblown, while Betamax at speed 1 (or A, I don't remember what it was called) DID have better quality, nobody used it! (and Sony discontinued quite quickly, favouring speed 2 and 3) since the recording time was so low. (also the professional Betamax format is a completely different beast from the consumer one, at some point it switched to being digital)
  - trollied 4y ago
    Sony have always made strange decisions surrounding storage. Not selling Minidisc as a floppy drive successor, when the competition was gigantic ZIP discs, was a biggie. (I am aware of the NetMD etc, I had one)
    - goosedragons 4y ago
      They did. MD Data was a thing. It just flopped super hard. It was way too expensive over Zip disc for a minor storage increase and size decrease. LGR did an Oddware video about it a few years back: https://youtu.be/CzwtCBj5jEs https://youtu.be/CzwtCBj5jEs
      - trollied 4y ago
        TIL, thank you!
- msla 4y ago
  Betamax was behind VHS in a critical metric: Original Betamax tapes could only fit an hour of recorded TV, whereas the original VHS tapes could do two hours. This mean that a single VHS tape could fit a whole TV movie, for example, or a whole sports game, whereas Betamax could not. Recording off TV was a major use case for home videotapes in the era before the movie rental market existed, to the point Sony and Universal fought all the way to the Supreme Court to decide the legality of time-shifting, so VHS having double the capacity with identical or nearly-identical picture quality pretty well decided the market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc%2e https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive... https://medium.com/swlh/vhs-vs-beta-the-story-of-the-original-format-war-a5fd84668748 https://medium.com/swlh/vhs-vs-beta-the-story-of-the-origina...
  - ZiiS 4y ago
    VHS was significantly cheeper which also helped.
- voxadam 4y ago
  The YouTube channel Technology Connections has a few good videos talking about how and why Betamax failed. Why Sony's Beta Videotape System Failed--and failed hard (Part 1) - https://youtu.be/FyKRubB5N60 https://youtu.be/FyKRubB5N60 Why Sony's Beta Videotape System Failed--Part 2 - https://youtu.be/v019trxfcmg https://youtu.be/v019trxfcmg The VHS cassette was more clever than Beta - https://youtu.be/hWl9Wux7iVY https://youtu.be/hWl9Wux7iVY
Aaronstotle 4y ago
Microsoft even sold an HD-DVD extension drive for the 360 for a short period of time
- Lammy 4y ago
  It's a Toshiba drive internally. Rumor at the time was that the 360 Elite would have the HD-DVD drive built in, but that didn't happen. The external can't run 360 game discs, just movies.
  - tempoponet 4y ago
    When they went on fire-sale I thought it might be useful for having two games available to run on the console at once. I'm glad I didn't pull the trigger on that.
  - Arrath 4y ago
    Loading times were bad enough from the internal drive, I shudder to think how bad they would be when streaming data in over usb.
- gbil 4y ago
  I still have a couple of HD-DVDs but not that drive any longer and if memory serves me right, I was able to connect it to a PC and play a HD-DVD movie in mplayer or something
  - pgh 4y ago
    I bought an XBox HD-DVD drive expressly for the purpose of, err, "preserving" my movies once the format died. It works well connected to a PC.
reaperducer 4y ago
I still have some swag from when Microsoft was convinced that HD-DVD was going to beat Blu-ray, and become the preferred information delivery mechanism for business and entertainment because the internet was "just a fad." One of the items is a large, metal, locking suitcase like you'd see in an old spy film with the logos on it. I use it to store important paperwork.
- JosephRedfern 4y ago
  > .. and become the preferred information delivery mechanism for business and entertainment because the internet was "just a fad." Was it not as much a case of network limitations making such delivery impractical, rather than the internet being considered a fad? I was just about on 512Kb DSL at that point (if not, dial up). Downloading games and streaming movies would have been totally impractical.
  - reaperducer 4y ago
    Was it not as much a case of network limitations making such delivery impractical, rather than the internet being considered a fad? The internet being a passing fad was just how Microsoft thought in those days. Remember that Windows didn't get built-internet access until around Windows 98, while Macs were on the internet almost a decade earlier. I used a Mac to access USENET at a college in 1989/1990. It wasn't about bandwidth limitations, but about Microsoft's long-term goal of moving everything to a subscription model. MS was preaching the virtues of "recurring revenue" decades before most of the rest of the tech industry figured that out. Microsoft's philosophy was that people would subscribe to information services like Encarta, that would deliver regular updates on optical disc via the mail. A lot of people, at the time, believed that Windows would eventually go to a full-subscription model where you'd pay a monthly fee to use Windows, even on your own machine. The notion was that people don't like paying $200 for the next version of Windows, but they would be less unhappy paying $20/month, or even $10/week. That was ruined by a number of factors, including free Linux, Apple delivering operating system updates for free, and of course, the internet delivering the equivalent of Encarta and all of Microsoft's other planned information subscriptions for free.
FireBeyond 4y ago
Not sure the mechanics behind the scenes, but I bought a HD DVD player (and am still bitter that it lost - everything was CSS and JS, not weird bastardized Java), shortly before it was discontinued, and Best Buy sent me a check for $150 or $200 out of nowhere as a result.

majikandy 4y ago

And this time the better format won right? Unlike Betamax which I hadn’t realised was actually invented 2 years before VHS and it’s fizzle-out was basically because of Sony patents.

jackvalentine 4y ago
Used to work for a regional netflix knock-off DVD mailing house. Blurays were more hardy and required less scratch fix buffing. I think they had an extra layer on it. Were there any other differences between the two?
- Lammy 4y ago
  > Were there any other differences between the two? Bluray menus are Java, and HD-DVDs' are JavaScript/XML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Content HD-DVD uses Microsoft's WMV3/VC-1. Bluray (non-UHD) supports both AVC (h.264) and VC-1, but AVC is more common https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_H.264_and_VC-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_H.264_and_VC-1
  - realityking 4y ago
    HD-DVD supported H.264 and VC-1 (and MPEG2). Initially there were plenty of VC-1 and MPEG2 releases on Blu-ray as well. HD-DVD simply died before the universal shift to H.264. There was however a difference in max. bitrate (~40 Mbit/s for Blu-ray, ~30 Mbit/s for HD-DVD) The differences between the two standard were more interesting when it came to sound formats. HD-DVD had mandatory support for Dolby Digital Plus and Dolby TrueHD (allowing the audio on a disc to use these without a fallback). Blu-ray on the other hand supported a higher max. bitrate for DTS-HD Master Audio.
    - Lammy 4y ago
      > HD-DVD supported H.264 TIL! http://www.dvdforum.org/images/Forum_HD_DVD_Universal_24.pdf#page=2 http://www.dvdforum.org/images/Forum_HD_DVD_Universal_24.pdf...
jraph 4y ago
> And this time the better format won right? Can't say Blu-Ray won with a resounding success neither… possibly because of Sony patents. DVDs were still heavily used as compared to Blu-Ray, because people buying Blue-Rays were mostly people who had a PlayStation that could read them. And a few years later, streaming services probably pushed the idea of buying a movie on a physical media a bit out of the window anyway.
- pdntspa 4y ago
  I don't know about that last bit, go to Walmart and they have most everything new and current on Blu-Ray. Plus the less-compressed video beats the pants off of streaming.
  - sborra 4y ago
    Tons and tons of Movies and TV shows are streaming-only releases nowadays. Also, a bunch of old movies get restored in HD and released on streaming services only. First example that comes to mind is the classic 1993 comedy Look Who's Talking Now. Adding insult to injury, a bunch of old movies get remastered physical releases... on DVD only. That's right. SD content encoded with a 30 year old codec. So if I want to watch a movie from my childhood in HD, more often than not my only legal course of action is to subscribe to a streaming service. Very sad, really.
    - pdntspa 4y ago
      In terms of things that appear in theaters. I don't expect to see Netflix exclusives on the aisles. And the market for discs isn't what it used to be. The long tail seems nonexistent now, it's a shame old remasters aren't coming through it any more. The last one I bought was the Star Trek TNG remaster, which was on blu-ray (and looked fantastic)
hexmiles 4y ago
Kinda... The story (of Betamax) is a bit more complicated than that, the main reason of why it failed is that Sony did not understand the market where it was selling. Also, the thing about Betamax having superior quality is a bit overblown, while Betamax at speed 1 (or A, I don't remember what it was called) DID have better quality, nobody used it! (and Sony discontinued quite quickly, favouring speed 2 and 3) since the recording time was so low. (also the professional Betamax format is a completely different beast from the consumer one, at some point it switched to being digital)
- trollied 4y ago
  Sony have always made strange decisions surrounding storage. Not selling Minidisc as a floppy drive successor, when the competition was gigantic ZIP discs, was a biggie. (I am aware of the NetMD etc, I had one)
  - goosedragons 4y ago
    They did. MD Data was a thing. It just flopped super hard. It was way too expensive over Zip disc for a minor storage increase and size decrease. LGR did an Oddware video about it a few years back: https://youtu.be/CzwtCBj5jEs https://youtu.be/CzwtCBj5jEs
    - trollied 4y ago
      TIL, thank you!
msla 4y ago
Betamax was behind VHS in a critical metric: Original Betamax tapes could only fit an hour of recorded TV, whereas the original VHS tapes could do two hours. This mean that a single VHS tape could fit a whole TV movie, for example, or a whole sports game, whereas Betamax could not. Recording off TV was a major use case for home videotapes in the era before the movie rental market existed, to the point Sony and Universal fought all the way to the Supreme Court to decide the legality of time-shifting, so VHS having double the capacity with identical or nearly-identical picture quality pretty well decided the market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc%2e https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive... https://medium.com/swlh/vhs-vs-beta-the-story-of-the-original-format-war-a5fd84668748 https://medium.com/swlh/vhs-vs-beta-the-story-of-the-origina...
- ZiiS 4y ago
  VHS was significantly cheeper which also helped.
voxadam 4y ago
The YouTube channel Technology Connections has a few good videos talking about how and why Betamax failed. Why Sony's Beta Videotape System Failed--and failed hard (Part 1) - https://youtu.be/FyKRubB5N60 https://youtu.be/FyKRubB5N60 Why Sony's Beta Videotape System Failed--Part 2 - https://youtu.be/v019trxfcmg https://youtu.be/v019trxfcmg The VHS cassette was more clever than Beta - https://youtu.be/hWl9Wux7iVY https://youtu.be/hWl9Wux7iVY

Aaronstotle 4y ago

Microsoft even sold an HD-DVD extension drive for the 360 for a short period of time

Lammy 4y ago
It's a Toshiba drive internally. Rumor at the time was that the 360 Elite would have the HD-DVD drive built in, but that didn't happen. The external can't run 360 game discs, just movies.
- tempoponet 4y ago
  When they went on fire-sale I thought it might be useful for having two games available to run on the console at once. I'm glad I didn't pull the trigger on that.
- Arrath 4y ago
  Loading times were bad enough from the internal drive, I shudder to think how bad they would be when streaming data in over usb.
gbil 4y ago
I still have a couple of HD-DVDs but not that drive any longer and if memory serves me right, I was able to connect it to a PC and play a HD-DVD movie in mplayer or something
- pgh 4y ago
  I bought an XBox HD-DVD drive expressly for the purpose of, err, "preserving" my movies once the format died. It works well connected to a PC.

reaperducer 4y ago

I still have some swag from when Microsoft was convinced that HD-DVD was going to beat Blu-ray, and become the preferred information delivery mechanism for business and entertainment because the internet was "just a fad." One of the items is a large, metal, locking suitcase like you'd see in an old spy film with the logos on it. I use it to store important paperwork.

JosephRedfern 4y ago
> .. and become the preferred information delivery mechanism for business and entertainment because the internet was "just a fad." Was it not as much a case of network limitations making such delivery impractical, rather than the internet being considered a fad? I was just about on 512Kb DSL at that point (if not, dial up). Downloading games and streaming movies would have been totally impractical.
- reaperducer 4y ago
  Was it not as much a case of network limitations making such delivery impractical, rather than the internet being considered a fad? The internet being a passing fad was just how Microsoft thought in those days. Remember that Windows didn't get built-internet access until around Windows 98, while Macs were on the internet almost a decade earlier. I used a Mac to access USENET at a college in 1989/1990. It wasn't about bandwidth limitations, but about Microsoft's long-term goal of moving everything to a subscription model. MS was preaching the virtues of "recurring revenue" decades before most of the rest of the tech industry figured that out. Microsoft's philosophy was that people would subscribe to information services like Encarta, that would deliver regular updates on optical disc via the mail. A lot of people, at the time, believed that Windows would eventually go to a full-subscription model where you'd pay a monthly fee to use Windows, even on your own machine. The notion was that people don't like paying $200 for the next version of Windows, but they would be less unhappy paying $20/month, or even $10/week. That was ruined by a number of factors, including free Linux, Apple delivering operating system updates for free, and of course, the internet delivering the equivalent of Encarta and all of Microsoft's other planned information subscriptions for free.

FireBeyond 4y ago

Not sure the mechanics behind the scenes, but I bought a HD DVD player (and am still bitter that it lost - everything was CSS and JS, not weird bastardized Java), shortly before it was discontinued, and Best Buy sent me a check for $150 or $200 out of nowhere as a result.