Bluray was generally superior yes. It wasn't flat out better in all ways, but it was at least on parity if not better to HD-DVD. Cost wise, it depends on what exactly we're talking about (Cost of disc, cost of licensing, etc), but blu ray succeeded largely due to Sony willing to take an estimated ~$3B loss on the hardware sales of the PS3 and leverage it's media partnerships to see the format succeed in the long term. Selling the PS3 at a deficit was instrumental in getting BluRay players into peoples homes en-masse, which then in turn allowed Sony to better negotiate media partners to use their format.
So was it cheaper? No, I don't think so, but Sony was willing to eat a loss to make it "cheaper" for the end consumer. Technically, people paid more for a bluray than for an HD-DVD player, as a PS3 was definitely more expensive than a standalone player/drive for either, but the value proposition was definitely there, as many people wanted a PS3 regardless.
In short, the value was there, both for the media companies and end consumers, for bluray as opposed to HD-DVD, but I'm not sure it was explicitly "cheaper".
Did HD-DVD use Java like Blue-Ray? To this day I found it absurd that they require publishers to ship a Java application along with the content. It is probably the reason there are so many lousy menus. 4K UHD is even worse as many publishers have downright just given up. Everyone is using the same sample code. At least DVD did something interesting when it was released.
I don't know if this is a problem that can be solved. The framework has to accomodate the lowest common denominator and you know some manufacturer will cut costs to the bone so you can't mandate some fancy graphics chip in the spec because it will kill the format before it can become the standard. Is this why they went with Java?
HD-DVD's menu software was built primarily by Microsoft and didn't require Java or even support Java. It's menu system was loosely HTML-based XML with some support for CSS-like stylesheets and optional Javascript. Just about everything a movie menu needs (including support for rich animations) could be done entirely declaratively and JS scripting was entirely optional (and rarely used/needed).
It could have been cheaper than Java runtimes needed by Blu-Ray players, but one of the requirements they decided they needed in the menus was live previews of movie content and that wanted multiple active streams of video decompression. These days Blu-Rays fake it with effectively just using animated GIFs in the Java menus, but HD-DVD menus would actually play the movie in things like scene thumbnails (which was neat, but maybe unnecessary). Needing hardware that supported multiple active streams of video decompression to support that is often considered the big reason HD-DVD wasn't cheaper than Blu-Ray especially given the licensing costs and expense of BD-J Java systems.
Thats fascinating! Thank you for the history! It would be cool to see the best implementation of this JS based system however I feel like it would suffer from the some of the same problems as the Java system: namely with so many vendors, how can you ensure that each implementation will contain a robust JS rendering engine? Feels like that would just lead to publishers using off the shelf templates that do the bare minimum as we are seeing on Blueray.
How would the HD-DVD laser cope with having to read multiple streams? or does it read it ahead of time and just cache it somehow? One of the biggest annoyances of DVD was the fact that some player implementation had horrific seek times and so the menu transitions were mind numbingly slow.
I wish they would have watched AVGN's comedic take on DVD and Blu-Ray formats and just created a format that met all those specifications. Have you seen these videos?
> It would be cool to see the best implementation of this JS based system however I feel like it would suffer from the some of the same problems as the Java system: namely with so many vendors, how can you ensure that each implementation will contain a robust JS rendering engine?
Like I said the primary rendering engine was primarily XML driven and XML-based. So far as I'm aware the only implementation in HD-DVD's history was Microsoft's (which was a small complaint among the hardware vendors that there was only one firmware for the "base OS" of HD-DVD players), and it was incredibly performant (because it wasn't using scripting to run animations and such). It supported JS for scripting, but that scripting was almost never used in the vast majority of disc menus, and it was probably a very bare JS engine at that and never needed to guarantee performance. The JS could be under-powered because it was an optional add-on for small bits of interactivity like "games and quizzes", it was not driving hardly anything in day-to-day menus. Think "early days of the web" (or maybe HN itself): almost everything is basic HTML and JS is used sparingly for a minimum for just a small subset of interactive features. But if you built an HTML specifically to be a nicely animated Table of Contents for a movie and had years of DVD movie menus to compare for best practices.
> How would the HD-DVD laser cope with having to read multiple streams? or does it read it ahead of time and just cache it somehow? One of the biggest annoyances of DVD was the fact that some player implementation had horrific seek times and so the menu transitions were mind numbingly slow.
Good questions. I'm not as much a hardware person as a software person, so I don't know the answers beyond that I just recall the approach chosen by the HD-DVD standard was considered expensive in contrast to DVD or to Blu-Ray hardware standards at the time. As a user of HD-DVD, there was some noticeable seek lag in the menus, as I recall, but it was kind of magic when it worked.
No, that was one of the value propositions to HD-DVD: you don't need to update your disc player in order to watch your new movie. Which apparently was a common occurrence in the early days, in that your player needed an update before your player can play that latest release. HD-DVD users were like, "why does a DVD player need an Ethernet port? Uh, oh..."
TBF to 4k UHD, the 4k stream is already being compressed significantly on those discs so every byte that doesn't go to content means that that you are compromising the content just a little bit more.
That's also why so many 4k UHD discs don't have any bonus content on them and usually pack a Blu-Ray in.
Really? I rip 4K UHD so I can toss the disc and their crap software in the attic and typically I get 60-80GB per movie. From what I understand, these are 100GB discs right? Are they seriously cutting corners on the quality? If this is the case, now I am royally pissed. I am paying a premium to avoid the Netflix/Streaming compressed garbage and to know that they cut corners here when the whole point is about uncompromised quality...well that is just another blow to any shred of trust I have in these companies.
I mean, the RAW 4k (or 6k or 8k) footage is typically multiple terabytes (almost 15 TB for 2 hours at 8k). That is then compressed down to under a Terabyte for use in the movie theater (typically 200-800GB depending on features and length), and then compressed further to get it onto 100 GB disc. It's important to remember that length is going to play a big part (there is a reason that Snyders Justice League is on 2 discs) and a consistent quality is going to be desired within a catalog.
Yeah it seems like they are not doing their due diligence in terms of codec and compression strategies being used. Obviously we are not going to get uncompressed data(although that would be a dream one day that would probably never happen as resolution will increase with new storage capacities) but I do wonder if they can choose different compression strategies depending on the film. It they are charging premium prices I feel as if it is their responsibility to put in the effort to deliver the best experience that the format is capable of delivering. Otherwise what "value add" is the publisher actually delivering?
Just because something is compressed doesn't mean it's low fidelity. If you're so concerned about your high quality viewing, you should probably spend a few minutes learning the basics. How exactly do you expect 4k@24fps 32 bit color raw to fit in 100GB?
HD DVD was released with the xbox 360 by Microsoft earlier than Sony's PS3, so that value proposition goes both ways. HD DVD was cheaper too. The number of consoles sold isn't that different (Sony sold ca. 15% more over the entire lifetime of the console).
At the time there were many claims that the porn industry would be the deciding factor.
Being earlier doesn't mean it has a better value proposition. It just means it had an opportunity for entrenchment before a competitor can bring their product to market. Had they successfully leveraged that opportunity, that would be valuable, but they didn't. Microsoft/HD-DVD decidedly squandered that opportunity considering the PS3 (primary BR player purchased pre 2010) launched a year later than Xbox but had sold as many units in ~1 yr as the xbox had in 2, effectively eliminating any such market advantage in it's first year.
> HD DVD was cheaper.
Correct. Which is why my comment talked about value, and why "X is cheaper" as an individual metric in and of itself is not useful in measuring success. BR and the PS3 was decidedly more expensive. People still bought more of them than HD-DVD/360.
> At the time there were many claims that the porn industry would be the deciding factor.
You claimed the reason why Blu Ray won was mostly because it was bundled with the PS3. I counterclaimed by saying that HD DVD had the same advantage. PS3 sold about 87.3 million while xbox 360 sold about 84 million, the difference is not that much.
> You claimed the reason why Blu Ray won was mostly because it was bundled with the PS3
And Sony's partnerships with media companies, yes. Both of these are true.
> PS3 sold about 87.3 million while xbox 360 sold about 84 million
I was referring to sales when xbox been on the market twice as long (2 years) as the PS3 (1 year) at calendar end (2007). If the 360 had an early-to-market advantage, it became irrelevant real quick and never recovered that sales advantage in any meaningful way once a competitor emerged. [1]
> a HD DVD accessory was required to play HD DVD content on the xbox 360.
Yes. Further cements what I was saying about the PS3 being instrumental in BR taking over HD-DVD as a consumer entertainment format. it also further highlights my original point of how "cheaper" doesn't necessarily mean better value, or better selling, or better adaption. There's more to it than "first" or "cheapest". BR/PS3 were more expensive and later to market than their HD-DVD/360 counterparts, and yet both when on to be as successful if not more so than their cheaper first-to-market rivals. The original question of this thread is how important "cheap" is to a technology attaining success. This is a clear example of "it doesn't". There are plenty of instances however where it absolutely helped. This was just an instance where it did not, or at least, not enough to outweigh other factors against it.
"a HD DVD accessory was required to play HD DVD content on the xbox 360."
Once again demonstrating the murderously huge difference between hardware that ships with the platform and attempts to add on hardware to the install base later.
Exceptions will leap to mind, like the rumble pack for the N64 or the Dualshock controller, but in general, add-on attempts fail and fail miserably for gaming consoles. They don't leap to mind precisely because they failed.
So was it cheaper? No, I don't think so, but Sony was willing to eat a loss to make it "cheaper" for the end consumer. Technically, people paid more for a bluray than for an HD-DVD player, as a PS3 was definitely more expensive than a standalone player/drive for either, but the value proposition was definitely there, as many people wanted a PS3 regardless.
In short, the value was there, both for the media companies and end consumers, for bluray as opposed to HD-DVD, but I'm not sure it was explicitly "cheaper".