Chefelf.com Night Life: Paramount & Dreamworks drop BluRay - Chefelf.com Night Life

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Paramount & Dreamworks drop BluRay

#1 User is offline   blueoceans Icon

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Posted 21 August 2007 - 06:43 AM

I recently learned of this story, and found it to be rather interesting

http://news.com.com/...-9762761-7.html

I actually read the story from USAToday on my cell phone at work, but its all pretty much the same story,..paramount and dreamworks are dropping bluray in favor of hddvd.

This was the same story about 20 years ago, when consumers were confused whether to go with BetaMax or VHS (the latter obviously won).

Im not an expert on either BluRay or HD DVD, but if they are both as spectacular as both claim to be, why cant they both co-exist in friendly competition? Why must one die out so that the other reigns supreme. Im not saying this will ultimately be the outcome, but its certainly headed that way.

..and what gets me, is the vagueness of the bullshit corporate responses we as consumers are fed as to the reasoning for why both dreamworks and paramount both decided to drop bluray support.

the response went something like this: "we decided to go with hd dvd because we want our consumers to have the best in home entertainment experiences,.and thats what hddvd is all about."

no..i bet the real reason is that there was a lot of damn money involved somewhere on the table, that convinced and/or coerced both studios to execute this decision. they were probably thinking: "gee, sony's not selling a lot of their ps3's,.and if people arent buying a game machine w/ a built in bluray player,.why would they want to buy a bluray player alone around the same price?,..we better jump off of the bluray ship before it sinks fast"

i hope that hddvd doesnt become the standard, just for the simple fact that i hate looking at that hideously ugly chocolate brown color thats on every hddvd jacket..i would much rather look at sony's soft electric blue color anyday.

if paramount & dreamworks think that they can force people to buy hd dvd players by only releasing newer films only on the hd dvd format...and not on traditional dvd..they are dead wrong. the only thing that will encourage will be more bootleging and piracy. some genuis will figure out a way to transfer the films from the hd dvd format and put them on a standard dvd and sell them on the black market illegally.
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Posted 21 August 2007 - 09:58 AM

I'm glad to hear that BluRay failed. It sucked. HDDVD too is just a way to make film collections more expensive. Unless TVs get amazingly amazing, like really fast, and I don't think Plasma is amazingly amazing by the way, then for right now I think DVD on its own is fine. And the sale price of DVDs is what I want to see. The price of HDDVD and BluRay discs was too high for folks trying to build collections.

Plus everything you said about the selection not being there.
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Posted 21 August 2007 - 11:06 AM

That's sad: BluRay was the infinitely better format. sad.gif
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#4 User is offline   Slade Icon

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Posted 21 August 2007 - 01:06 PM

Competition is just stupid from a consumer and manufacturing point of view when it comes to video storage formats. First, people need to put up with hoping that their film will be sold in the format of the player they own. Film manufacturers will either have to produce both formats or pick one and make everyone else convert to it. Then, eventually, all players will start accepting both formats, rendering the public just not giving a shit about which format it is anymore.

And yeah, the whole point of DVDs is that the quality is amazingly better than VHS casettes. We don't have the television technology to even really register much of a difference between DVD and HDDVD/BluRay. We don't even need a new format, unless four gigabytes of storage per disk just isn't enough for all of the special features anymore. And maybe I don't want to be able to make out each individual pore on actress X's face on every close up shot? Did they think of that? tongue.gif
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Posted 21 August 2007 - 09:02 PM

The worst thing about BluRay is the artificial sharpness of everything. In the real world, "black" things aren't actually BLACK. At least, they don't appear so to the eye, since they will reflect some light. So too with all colours; some gradient will exist to show differences in the source light. In fact, among other comments I could make, colour variations are one of many monocular depth cues. BluRay images looked like big flat cartoons, and the format was a pile of shit served in a bowl made of ass. Good riddance.
"I had a lot of different ideas. At one point, Luke, Leia and Ben were all going to be little people, and we did screen tests to see if we could do that." -George Lucas, in STAR WARS: the Annotated Screenplays (p197).
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#6 User is offline   Chefelf Icon

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Posted 21 August 2007 - 09:41 PM

To me HD-DVD and BluRay are completely unappealing. I think it's probably because I'm just not an audiophile or videophile. I like to have easily accessible video (streaming from PC to TV) and video on demand-esque capability like IPTV, ReplayTV (which I currently use but is pretty much defunct) and Tivo.

Much like the DVDA format (DVD-Audio, not the crude sexual act or the Trey Parker/Matt Stone band named after said act), I can't see any need. The improvements made in DVDA are barely audible to the human ear even using the $20,000 worth of high-end audio equipment you'd need to enjoy such a format.

I think the CD/DVD format improvements (a non degrading format, ease of use/storage, skipping ahead with an easy to use track-based system) are such a huge improvement over audio/video cassette that it is well worth the upgrade. I think the HD-DVD/BluRay improvements are so small and can be enjoyed by so few people that it's just not worth the upgrade.

I firmly believe that the trend is to a system whereby I can share video between my TV and PC, build a library (using XML/RSS feeds) and feed TV shows, movies, stupid crap my friends record, etc. directly into a menu based system that I can access.

Physical media is on the way out. Who needs it?

When I moved to New York I turned 1500 CD's into MP3s and I have them on my computer. I left the CD's in my parents' basement (much to their dismay). I can't wait until the day I can do the same with my DVD movies and be able to call any of them up over my PC/TV network in a matter of seconds.
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Posted 21 August 2007 - 10:35 PM

QUOTE (Chefelf @ Aug 21 2007, 09:41 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
Physical media is on the way out. Who needs it?


What if there comes a day when all digital medium becomes non-functional?

Who will need it then? mellow.gif
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#8 User is offline   barend Icon

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Posted 21 August 2007 - 11:32 PM

QUOTE (Chefelf @ Aug 21 2007, 09:41 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
When I moved to New York I turned 1500 CD's into MP3s and I have them on my computer. I left the CD's in my parents' basement (much to their dismay). I can't wait until the day I can do the same with my DVD movies and be able to call any of them up over my PC/TV network in a matter of seconds.


Sure, But I prefer to have a physical library. It's nice stadning infront of my proud collection and wondering what I'm going to put on... Allthough thanks to the ipod, my CD collection is really just a trophey collection now.
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#9 User is offline   Chefelf Icon

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Posted 22 August 2007 - 07:50 AM

QUOTE (Bond @ Aug 21 2007, 11:35 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
What if there comes a day when all digital medium becomes non-functional?

Who will need it then? mellow.gif


Physical media (CD/DVD) is digital. And how would you propose that it becomes non-functional? A spell cast by a dark wizard?

QUOTE (barend @ Aug 22 2007, 12:32 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
Sure, But I prefer to have a physical library. It's nice stadning infront of my proud collection and wondering what I'm going to put on... Allthough thanks to the ipod, my CD collection is really just a trophey collection now.


Sure. I did too but when I moved to the city I knew I had to make some choices about what I took with me and what remained behind. I loved having my shelves of CDs but practically I couldn't make any argument for keeping them with me when all of them converted into MP3's fit onto my computer.

And, let's face it, who listens to CD's anymore? When is the last time you put a CD in a CD player and listened to it that way? Every CD I've bought in the past 4 years has come out of its jewel case into my PC DVD-ROM drive, been converted into MP3's, returned to its case and never opened again.
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#10 User is offline   Slade Icon

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Posted 22 August 2007 - 08:47 AM

I still listen to my CDs sometimes. I like to have a physical copy of my digital media because I'm less likely to lose my data on a CD/DVD than on a hard drive. CD players don't tend to eat CDs like VHS players ate casettes, and a lot of different actions will wipe out a hard drive. It's still not all that likely that your hard drive will go down in flames, but it's a nice precaution. You also don't lose any quality when you use your CD/DVD player as you do to compress your audio/video to computer files, and I'm neither an audio or videophile (honestly, I think of those people for the most part as the ultimate obsessive compulsives. I know a guy who can't stand to listen to music on anything less than Really Expensive Headphones, because he says that the poor sound quality is both very noticible and very uncomfortable to his ears/brain. tongue.gif ), but it's nice to have a bit crisper a sound or image once in a while, and to not fill up your hard drives completely with that stuff.

Edit: Yes, you never know when a dark wizard could appear in the world and render all hard drives and various portable audio/video players completely useless while leaving CD and DVD drives intact. Those damned dark wizards!

Edit 2: Did BluRay REALLY use pure black for their blacks?! That's very stupid. That concept is one of those things that I never thought about until this past Spring, but since checking it out, I have discovered that it's an interesting and important observation on how the eye works. Pure black is flatter than a mix of colors that isn't quite black. The people who made BluRay apparently just never talked to any visual specialist, or had really lazy electrical engineers/color science people. tongue.gif

This post has been edited by Slade: 22 August 2007 - 08:53 AM

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Posted 22 August 2007 - 12:03 PM

QUOTE (Slade @ Aug 22 2007, 08:47 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
Edit: Yes, you never know when a dark wizard could appear in the world and render all hard drives and various portable audio/video players completely useless while leaving CD and DVD drives intact. Those damned dark wizards! tongue.gif


No, I meant all digital media. We'd have to revert to vinyl records and film reels to keep the entertainment world alive. wink.gif
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Posted 22 August 2007 - 09:11 PM

Reply to edit2: I never bought any of those damned expensive BluRay discs, or a player, but every sampler I saw in the shops was some terrible travelogue with way too much contrast. Real landscapes just looked like cartoons.
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#13 User is offline   Spann Icon

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Posted 23 August 2007 - 04:18 AM

Sony need to learn - STOP CREATING FORMATS NO-ONE WANTS OR NEEDS

Admittedly, well done on the CD front, but it doesn't excuse:
Beta-Max
Minidisc (And all it's predecessors)
UMDs
and more - there's a few odd mediums that professional audio studios only tend to use.

Their problem is their gear is always the underdog, the one that no one's ever heard of, and (even if Sony's product is technically better, which in many cases, it is) in a world where everyone (for example) knows DVDs, the majority of the world who are not particularly technologically savvy will stick with the DVD name if/when they upgrade.

Having HD ready gear is a trophy - it's all about who can spend the most on their audio/video setups. Well I guarantee you I enjoy watching the same films on an ordinary DVD on my ordinary Cathode Ray TV as you do on your hideously expensive 'Home Cinema' system.

People can't admit that the only place you really need audio/video quality of that level is in a professional mixing/mastering suite. I'm a music technology graduate, and for listening to music i do perfectly fine with a pair of £25 speakers and powered sub from PC world.

On a side note - Sony say the reason the PS3 wasn't selling many was because they were having trouble supplying them. This is bollocks. I work in Game, and I think we still have a machine from launch (May 25th). The Xbox 360 Elite is going to flop like a soggy shit in the UK as well - We've been advertising it for weeks - one preorder.
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#14 User is offline   Spoon Poetic Icon

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Posted 23 August 2007 - 08:20 AM

I never understood this need for everything to be any sharper than it already was, though, either. Like this whole new trend, gotta have a HD television. My friends/relatives that have them are ALWAYS showing them off to anyone they haven't shown it off to yet (sometimes they'll even go ahead and re-show-off it). And I swear, each one of them, each time, will say nearly exactly this: "It's so amazingly clear! You can see each blade of grass, and even the very pores on people's faces!"

What I want to know is, WHO CARES about blades of grass and people's pores and acne? When I'm watching a baseball game, I'm not paying attention to how groomed the field is. And I certainly don't want to see people's pores. I mean, ew! And no one can tell me what's actually practical about these things being so clear.

I feel the same way about the Blu-Ray and all this other mess.
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Posted 23 August 2007 - 11:26 AM

Thing is, Spoon, when you watch one of these babies, you can never go back to your old set again; it won't be even half as good. sad.gif
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