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Well, it’s been a wild ride up and down (and mostly down) on the HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray DVD format war roller coaster, and now all hope of a unified DVD format is officially lost.
Sony and Toshiba have totally given up all efforts to continue the unification talks.
Looks like the war will officially be waged in the market, with plenty of potential home theater installation casualties likely. It’s gonna be bloody

TOKYO--Groups headed by Toshiba and Sony offering competing technologies for next-generation DVDs have given up efforts to develop a unified format, the Yomiuri newspaper reported Tuesday.

For three years, the two groups have pushed to have their respective technology standards adopted to gain dominance in the multibillion-dollar markets for DVD players, PC drives and optical discs.

Toshiba, along with NEC and Sanyo, has been promoting HD DVD, while Sony and Matsushita, the maker of Panasonic brand products, have been developing a technology known as Blu-ray.

The two groups have held negotiations on unifying their formats to persuade consumers to shift to advanced discs and to promote growth in the industry. But negotiations fell through as neither side yielded, and time ran out to develop a format before the launch of new products from both groups, the paper said.

"Late August is the practical time limit (to unify formats)," Yoshihide Fujii, Toshiba's corporate senior vice president, was quoted as saying in the paper.

A Toshiba spokeswoman said Fujii just meant that the company needed to start developing software by late August for its HD DVD-based players, scheduled for release at the end of 2005.

A Sony spokesman said it has become harder to unify formats after failing to reach an agreement in negotiations in May.


Both officials agreed, however, that a unified format is still a possibility. They said a single format would be the best way, and added they would release their products as scheduled.

Sony plans to put a Blu-ray disc drive in its new PlayStation game console next year.
Sony's Blu-ray technology is also backed by Dell and South Korea's Samsung.

At the core of both formats are blue lasers, which have a shorter wavelength than red lasers used in current DVD equipment, allowing discs to store data at higher densities needed for high-definition movies and television.

Toshiba's then president, Tadashi Okamura, had said in May producers of next-generation optical discs would eventually use one format, although products based on the two competing standards may be around for a limited time.

Alyeska wrote:Here is an interesting little tidbit. The DVD consortium is apparently going to pick HD-DVD as their choice of the next standard and put their stamp of approval on it. This could pretty much cement the Toshiba format as the winner.

Darth Wong wrote:

Alyeska wrote:Here is an interesting little tidbit. The DVD consortium is apparently going to pick HD-DVD as their choice of the next standard and put their stamp of approval on it. This could pretty much cement the Toshiba format as the winner.

Not by a long shot. Customers in stores don't give a shit what the DVD Consortium says. What matters is which movies are coming out on which format, how expensive the players are, and how well they perform.

Blu-Ray, by offering nearly twice the theoretical maximum capacity, looks like it will be the technically superior format. HD-DVD may well be cheaper. So the question boils down to: will customers go for the more expensive, higher-performing format, or the cheaper, lower-performing format?

Darth Wong wrote:Not by a long shot. Customers in stores don't give a shit what the DVD Consortium says. What matters is which movies are coming out on which format, how expensive the players are, and how well they perform.

Blu-Ray, by offering nearly twice the theoretical maximum capacity, looks like it will be the technically superior format. HD-DVD may well be cheaper. So the question boils down to: will customers go for the more expensive, higher-performing format, or the cheaper, lower-performing format?

Sony has been on the losing end of this sort of contest before, with VHS defeating the technically superior Beta format. But I would hesitate before applying historical precedent here: during the original VHS wars, customers were pretty much oblivious to issues of picture quality. The term "home theatre" had not yet entered the popular lexicon, and most people were blissfully unaware of video and quality issues. Even simple things like subwoofers for home theatre were considered specialty items, unheard-of in mainstream electronics stores. But today, who's going to buy a hidef DVD player unless he's interested in video quality?

It's going to be a very interesting ride.

Darth Wong wrote:Regarding the pornography angle, I wouldn't hold my breath for HD-porn. Most porn is still shot on camcorders and then transferred to DVD, which is why the vast majority of porn DVDs aren't really that sharp even for standard DVD. I can count the number of DVDs I've seen using 16x9 mode on the fingers of one hand.

Silver Paladin wrote:One reason to why Sony lost the Beta Vs. VHS war (from what I read) was that Sony tried to exert control over what could be sold on Beta and what could not.

Genii Lodus wrote:I think its a similar situation to DVD recorders which, while not particularly popular or widespread, only really took off once multiformat recorders became available.

Darth Wong wrote:Which kind of DRM will be built into this format? Is it just something like the CSS that's currently built into DVDs and can eventually be cracked once someone gets a few keys? Or is it something like the failed Divx standard (the pay-per-view system developed by Circuit City before the modern Divx codec which was named as an ironic poke at the previous standard)?

If you have to order hidef DVDs which are encoded to work only with your particular player, this technology will fall flat on its face. Nobody will buy it. But if it's relatively transparent, then it could take off, albeit slowly.