I'm on a posting streak lately, huh?
Ok, Blu-ray and HD-DVD. They're both pretty decent media formats. Both are capable of outputting in 1080p, with Dolby TrueHD 8.1+ channel audio. Both store a heck of a lot of media. So what's my beef?
Well, first off, neither seems terribly space efficient. Granted, the H.264 codec is pretty solid. But 8.1 channel audio? How the hell many speakers does dolby think the average joe is going to surround himself with? Frankly, I watch most of my movies without my surround sound system even on. Ooh, I can hear rain drops pitter pattering behind me! It's like being in the movie--except I'm not, I'm sitting on my couch eating potato chips!
Don't get me wrong, I dig surround sound. It's a pretty kickin' idea, really. But I had a hard enough time setting up my two surround speakers up behind my couch and at the right positions and distances and all that. Now they expect me to find a home for another 3 speakers? I think Dolby's ultimate goal involves building little rooms made of nothing but speakers and a screen at the front (which is also a speaker) and having 267.1 surround sound.
Beef the second: I just bought a dvd player like 10 years ago! This isn't like high def tvs replacing standard def--I got my money's worth out of my old tv. And it isn't like dvd replacing VHS--there was a huge difference between the two: not only was quality better, but dvds didn't wear out, dvds had chapter skipping, dvds has interactive menus, dvds had extra features, etc.
Now I like high quality video as much as the next guy, but I have no intention of buying a new video player every 10 years. Frankly, I'd just assume save my money and buy more dvds with it.
My third issue: unless you get a movie sourced in 1080p, the video is just going to be upscaled. Most decent dvd players will do that without requiring fancy-pants new discs. So frankly, unless your movie was made in the past 5 or 10 years or so, its probably going to suck as much as it did before.
My final issue with Blu-ray and HD-DVD: there are two friggin formats!!!
I don't really give a flying hoot whether Blu-ray or HD-DVD wins this format war. Frankly, the only people who do either own Toshiba or Sony stock, or are fanbois. I don't care if the next video format to take root involves etching data into cat turds. So long as its universal.
See, I'm not interested in investing hundreds of dollars into equipment that may end up only supporting a discontinued format. This is one of the main reasons I refuse to buy a PS3: it costs so much because it has a blu-ray drive, and I'm not at a point where I'm willing to bet $600 on the future of blu-ray. Its also the single greatest reason I refuse to buy the HD-DVD addon for the 360: I'm not at a point where I'm willing to bet $180 on the future of HD-DVD.
And the kick is, I don't think I'm alone on these concerns. Look at how suq the sales have been for HD-DVD and Blu-ray. Hell, if anything I'm most surprised at the sales HD-DVD has: at least people who got a ps3 for games might be tempted to get blu-ray movies since they have the player anyhow. But otherwise, who wants to be stuck with the 21st century version of the beta max?
So my advice for Sony and the DVD forum is this: give it up already. Pick a format, cut costs, and settle in for the long haul. But this 2 format crap has gotta go.
2 comments:
I think there are merits to putting a higher storage capacity device in a game console. As graphic quality goes up (and developers get lazier) having the extra spaces allows us consumers 'better' games potentially. And disc formats (CDs, DVDs, etc.) are the cheapest, quickest way to do that.
Still, I agree with you in general. I think there is a lot more potential in download / over the wire media for movies, tv, and games. Not only is it more robust (downloading patches, updates, play from a hard drive), but it's materially more efficient because boxes of games don't have to sit on retailers' shelves gathering dust.
I sometimes wish the heavy weights had just gone with flash media devices as the solid storage format. FMD continues to get more storage space in a smaller body, and they don't require an energy hungry motor, a DVD storage box, or scratch free protection to function
While my post was mostly about movies, I think video game consoles have become the 'de facto' media player in enough households that game storage is an issue.
By and large, I'm not sure we're at a point where we need larger storage media for video games . . . yet. When's the last time you installed a pc game, only to find that it requires more than 9.blahblah gigs of HD space?
Someone could make a game that requires more space. Consider Epic and their upcoming Unreal Tournament title. They are planning to ship with so many maps that some may have to be cut for the 360 version. But Epic is the minority; the majority of devs probably fill the majority of their discs with textures. Don't count on that going up, since each next gen system has relatively little ram. By the next next gen, when (God willing) MS, Sony, and whoever decide to invest another nickel in their units and have 1 gig+ in ram, then either blu-ray or hd-dvd will be needed.
Digital distribution with media stored on flash memory . . . at the outset, it sounds like a killer idea. They're small, quiet, scaleable (there's no hard-cap on size), low energy, won't cause your GPU to overhead *cough!* *Xbox360!* *cough!* But I don't think it's cost-effective.
For starters, that's an awful lot of bandwidth. I own 5 games for my 360. At 9 gigs each, that's 45 gigs of download bandwidth. The publishers would need a killer server farm for that, not to mention a provider with some serious power under the hood. Although there are many digital distribution networks running now (xbox live arcade, ps3 store, nintendo's virtual console, etc), the only one up that distributes massive data (that I'm aware of) is Valve. Maybe Gametap too, I'm not sure.
Second, SSDs are still very expensive and low capacity. The highest capacity SSDs come in is 32 gigs (which wouldn't even hold my relatively meager game library), and costs $400. Of course, you could find a 200 gig SATA-150 for $136 and hold 22 full 9 gig games . . . mmmmmm :)
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