Moderator: Thanas
I think that's the problem (imho) with the next gen formats, DVDs still work fine for a good deal of people, not to mention there's still quite a bit of movies and series out there that you can't even get on HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, and most aren't gonna sit around until someone bothers to do it.SirNitram wrote:Meh. The format war ends when someone dethrones DVD, not before.
Not even close to movie theatre resolution, unless your local movie theatre is run by retarded monkeys who can't focus the projector. 35mm film will resolve something like 3500 line pairs across its width, a 35mm movie camera uses half of the 35mm frame used in a film camera, giving about 1700 line pairs top to bottom, or about 3400 lines of resolution. The movie cameras used by Hollywood have seriously good lenses, as in you could buy yourself a Mercedes for the cost of the lens, they will get every last bit of resolution that the film can handle. DVD doesn't come close, neither does HDTV nor BluRay.Dennis Toy wrote:Tell you the truth, Like yourself, i just don't see what's really supposed to be special about both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD anyway? Some would say it has 1080i with more resolution lines... BIG DEAL... what's wrong with DVD's definition anyway? Its the most clearest picture ever! It's movie theatre definition DAMMIT! What more can you ask for? It has 5.1 Surround, Movie Theatre quality! Menus, multiple languages and interactive content, Again what more can you ask for?
I would love that. It would be great to have even higher capacities and better products. The problem is that HD-DVD's and Blu-Ray already push the limits of what modern HDTV's are capable of, and so not only would the subjective difference between such a format and the two "warring" parties wouldn't exist, but OBJECTIVELY there wouldn't be a difference, either. I don't think that the PC-capacity crowd would be enough to drive development of a whole new format.Darth Wong wrote:Wouldn't it be funny if the next "big" format completely bypassed both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, which never became more than niche products?
I've been toying with that idea for a while, since TVersity's release for the Xbox 360 last software update actually makes this not only possible (it was already), but functional and visually attractive. The big problem is the insane amount of storage space needed to build a library. I have almost one Terabyte in total, and it's nothing compared to what it is needed to store the movies and series I own on DVD.. it works amazing, though.Darth Wong wrote:Unfortunately, the next format change that would truly revolutionize the way we receive media is also one that the content providers would fight tooth and nail to destroy: in-computer storage of some sort. Let's face it, the ideal home entertainment medium would be a networked storage device with multimedia output capabilities. You download or copy movies onto it, and then select from your movie library with an on-screen menu. Ideally, it would have a storage medium with no rotating parts, hence limited noise and high shock-proofing. You could distribute it physically with large-capacity flash devices.
What you've described as a hypothetical has already taken place almost to the letter. Kaleidescape makes ridiculously high-end network storage for movies to eliminate the DVD "middleman." In order to keep with Fair Use, you ALSO had to buy the DVD--they just copied it over to your massive hard disk space, and then the device streamed it to a TV or set of TV's around your house. And they STILL got the shit sued out of them by the DVD industry (they eventually won the court case, but still...). If I had several tens of millions of dollars, Kaleidescape would be an utterly awesome product. Alas... to be rich...Darth Wong wrote:Unfortunately, the next format change that would truly revolutionize the way we receive media is also one that the content providers would fight tooth and nail to destroy: in-computer storage of some sort. Let's face it, the ideal home entertainment medium would be a networked storage device with multimedia output capabilities. You download or copy movies onto it, and then select from your movie library with an on-screen menu. Ideally, it would have a storage medium with no rotating parts, hence limited noise and high shock-proofing. You could distribute it physically with large-capacity flash devices.
The spinning disc is a pain in the ass. Far less of a pain in the ass than magnetic tape, but a pain in the ass nonetheless. But the movie studios would use every weapon at their disposal to stop such a thing.
We're in a twilight zone of technology that could revolutionize the home entertainment experience and companies that view this technology as the ultimate evil.
The ten seasons of Stargate in high quality (but not HD) format occupies around 300 GB.. and if we consider HD then it's game over.Master of Ossus wrote:If I had several tens of millions of dollars, Kaleidescape would be an utterly awesome product. Alas... to be rich...
Well, thanks to the wonderful invention of the DVD burner, which will of course eventually be updated with larger capacities and so forth, one can always put the bits onto an actual physical disc.Spanky The Dolphin wrote:As a cinephile and collector, I have to admit that the prospect of downloaded media becoming the primary form of home video really does frighten me. I don't really like the idea of owning stuff if it doesn't physically "exist."
There's also the problem of data loss. Suppose the hard drive all these movies are on becomes corrupted or otherwise damaged, or the target of a malicious virus or some other hardware problem. That's a substantial loss of movies right there, while with DVDs it's almost impossible to accidentally destroy hundreds at once.Spanky The Dolphin wrote:As a cinephile and collector, I have to admit that the prospect of downloaded media becoming the primary form of home video really does frighten me. I don't really like the idea of owning stuff if it doesn't physically "exist."
And concerning the bandwidth issue, it's great and all if you live more in an urban or suburban area, but what about those out in the country? Or for the people who can't really do that kind of multimedia Internet entertainment center stuff due to house layout issues?
Having the movies in disk format in the first place removes that necessity. I prefer the option of having hard drives as DVD backups, not vice versa myself.muse wrote:Well, thanks to the wonderful invention of the DVD burner, which will of course eventually be updated with larger capacities and so forth, one can always put the bits onto an actual physical disc.Spanky The Dolphin wrote:As a cinephile and collector, I have to admit that the prospect of downloaded media becoming the primary form of home video really does frighten me. I don't really like the idea of owning stuff if it doesn't physically "exist."
Uh, those "larger capacities" you're talking about would be HD-DVD and/or Blu-Ray burners. The most you're going to get out of a DVD burner is a dual-layer disc at 8.5GB.muse wrote:Well, thanks to the wonderful invention of the DVD burner, which will of course eventually be updated with larger capacities and so forth, one can always put the bits onto an actual physical disc.Spanky The Dolphin wrote:As a cinephile and collector, I have to admit that the prospect of downloaded media becoming the primary form of home video really does frighten me. I don't really like the idea of owning stuff if it doesn't physically "exist."
Never heard of backups? Digital photography has virtually destroyed film photography in the marketplace despite existing only in electronic form.Spanky The Dolphin wrote:As a cinephile and collector, I have to admit that the prospect of downloaded media becoming the primary form of home video really does frighten me. I don't really like the idea of owning stuff if it doesn't physically "exist."
Hence my mention of using Flash devices for distribution. The real point is that you need to allow people to move this data rather than slaving them to the goddamned shiny disc.And concerning the bandwidth issue, it's great and all if you live more in an urban or suburban area, but what about those out in the country?
Don't be ridiculous; that greatly simplifies house layout issues. Hell, you could move data around by wireless connection instead of running all over the house asking "Hey Billy, where did that DVD go? And what happened to the case for this one? And who scratched it all up?"Or for the people who can't really do that kind of multimedia Internet entertainment center stuff due to house layout issues?
You can now buy a 500GB hard drive for about a hundred bucks. Toss in a second 500GB hard drive in an external enclosure for a backup, and you're still out by only a couple of hundred dollars. If the capacity:price ratio keeps increasing, the idea becomes more and more viable.Admiral Valdemar wrote:Microsoft is focusing on downloadable content from what I've read, so even if HD-DVD flops absolutely, the market seems to be steering more towards downloading content on to your HDD rather than have a physical disk handy except when you want a carbon copy for backing-up. The increasing capacities of flash media and decreasing costs mean you'll get future drives that won't have any moving parts, indeed, many personal stereos play their MP3s and what have you from a solid state system, bar the larger capacity iPods and so on.
The future will likely be a holographic crystalline one, where a solid block of polymer is used rather than ever denser optical discs with higher RPM to off set any time delay on the data bus. We're using flash media more now and the idea of using light reactive systems for holographic storage or spintronics is promising.
If you were allowed to use your account to download another copy of the lost data, then that wouldn't be as much of a problem. (Of course, the media companies will most likely want to restrict that ability so you can't just login to your account at a friend's house and download the movie for them.)General Zod wrote:There's also the problem of data loss. Suppose the hard drive all these movies are on becomes corrupted or otherwise damaged, or the target of a malicious virus or some other hardware problem. That's a substantial loss of movies right there, while with DVDs it's almost impossible to accidentally destroy hundreds at once.
If it were one or two files then it wouldn't be so problematic, but if your entire hard drive and library of movies wind up dying, we could be talking about several hundred gigs worth of data you'd have to re-download. Not a pleasant prospect.Mad wrote:If you were allowed to use your account to download another copy of the lost data, then that wouldn't be as much of a problem. (Of course, the media companies will most likely want to restrict that ability so you can't just login to your account at a friend's house and download the movie for them.)General Zod wrote:There's also the problem of data loss. Suppose the hard drive all these movies are on becomes corrupted or otherwise damaged, or the target of a malicious virus or some other hardware problem. That's a substantial loss of movies right there, while with DVDs it's almost impossible to accidentally destroy hundreds at once.
It's not like you're going to need your entire movie library immediately, though. Just prioritize and stagger the downloads: grab some of your favorite music and a couple movies you might watch soon first, and you won't even miss the rest that you can download later on.General Zod wrote:If it were one or two files then it wouldn't be so problematic, but if your entire hard drive and library of movies wind up dying, we could be talking about several hundred gigs worth of data you'd have to re-download. Not a pleasant prospect.
Either way it's still a considerable amount of data you have to redownload. Replacing hundreds of DVDs would be a huge pain in the ass as well, but the chances of losing all of them at once is considerably less likely.Mad wrote:It's not like you're going to need your entire movie library immediately, though. Just prioritize and stagger the downloads: grab some of your favorite music and a couple movies you might watch soon first, and you won't even miss the rest that you can download later on.General Zod wrote:If it were one or two files then it wouldn't be so problematic, but if your entire hard drive and library of movies wind up dying, we could be talking about several hundred gigs worth of data you'd have to re-download. Not a pleasant prospect.
Holographics may be a newer field than practical spintronics, but if what IBM has claimed to create is true, you could get a terabyte or more on a single side of a standard floppy disk's surface.Darth Wong wrote: You can now buy a 500GB hard drive for about a hundred bucks. Toss in a second 500GB hard drive in an external enclosure for a backup, and you're still out by only a couple of hundred dollars. If the capacity:price ratio keeps increasing, the idea becomes more and more viable.
