Dell recall = bad news for Sony

[Lazybones]

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-6106138.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=zdnn

Can Sony do anything right?

[Shayne]

Not as funny as the Blu-Ray player that they released for PCs that doesn't play Blu-Ray movies

[Lazybones]

Ya, but it seems they have bad news in almost all of their product lines.

[Mr. Analog]

They have to sacrifice some MiniDiscs on top of an alter constructed out of Betamax cassettes.

[Shayne]

..and UMDs

[Mr. Analog]

..and UMDs

LOL, exactly!

[Tom]

You're forgetting Blu-Ray. Imo it'll be dead in the water.

It may be better technology overall (Wasn't beta? ) but it requires too many manufacturing changes, is more expensive to make the drives and disks, and isn't even backwards compatible with dvd. Good show sony! (HD-DVD is all of the above, a little smaller, but it can have a regular DVD image and a HD-DVD image on the same disk).

[Shayne]

Not to mention Tom that movies released on both formats look BETTER on HD-DVD

[Tom]

I can't recall, doe BluRay do h264? I know HD-DVD seems to have a ton of options reguarding supported codecs for video and surround audio (up to 6.1 or something).

[Mags]

You're forgetting Blu-Ray. Imo it'll be dead in the water.

It may be better technology overall (Wasn't beta? ) but it requires too many manufacturing changes, is more expensive to make the drives and disks, and isn't even backwards compatible with dvd. Good show sony! (HD-DVD is all of the above, a little smaller, but it can have a regular DVD image and a HD-DVD image on the same disk).

From some recent reports I've seen they are actually having trouble fitting some HD movies on HD-DVD format. This might be what saves Blue-Ray.

[Shayne]

Interesting, I hadn't heard that yet, but I still don't see that as a problem, lots of duel disc DVDs out now and thats not so much of a hindrance

[Ustauk]

You're forgetting Blu-Ray. Imo it'll be dead in the water.

It may be better technology overall (Wasn't beta? ) but it requires too many manufacturing changes, is more expensive to make the drives and disks, and isn't even backwards compatible with dvd. Good show sony! (HD-DVD is all of the above, a little smaller, but it can have a regular DVD image and a HD-DVD image on the same disk).

From some recent reports I've seen they are actually having trouble fitting some HD movies on HD-DVD format. This might be what saves Blue-Ray.

From what I remember, once for the dual mode movie discs one side will be DVD, while the flip side will be HD-DVD.  I imagine if there a little tight on space, they'll just span a movie across multiple discs, as Shayne suggests, like they did with the extended additions of the Lord of the Rings.

[Lazybones]

Interesting, I hadn't heard that yet, but I still don't see that as a problem, lots of duel disc DVDs out now and thats not so much of a hindrance

I some of the studios are releasing their Blueray disks encoded with Mpeg 2 encoding still because the initial disk sizes are too small to fit the movies in the newer compression format.

[Cova]

You can't really compare quality between HD-DVD and Blue-Ray yet - neither is up to the quality that their technologies are capable of.

Just going from memory here - but I'm 90% sure that neither of them are using h264 video encoding yet (both do support it though) - all currently released movies on either format are still using MPEG2.  This is only really a problem for Blue-Ray though, as they are also still stuck at single-layer and so currently have less capacity for storing that very high bitrate older codec.

On the audio front, Blue-Ray is currently getting better reviews as they are using higher bitrate audio streams, while current HD-DVD releases are mostly still just using Dolby Digital 5.1.  Both formats spec's include support for Dolby/DTS HD, lossless Dolby, etc., but like the newer video codecs, no-one is using them yet.  This also affects the video comparison - as HD-DVD has more space left after audio for HD MPEG2, while Blue-Ray with the smaller single-layer disks is also using a larger audio format, leaving even less space for video.

So ya - Sony made a bunch more mistakes with Blue-Ray thats letting HD-DVD get a head-start in the market.  But its not fair to say either format is better than the other just yet.

[Cova]

I some of the studios are releasing their Blueray disks encoded with Mpeg 2 encoding still because the initial disk sizes are too small to fit the movies in the newer compression format.

Ya posted this while I was writing my last reply...

The "newer compression format" is h264, and is smaller than MPEG2 (though requires significantly more horsepower to decode).  They need to hurry up and switch to it to get quality up to a reasonable point within the small capacity that current single-layer disks have.