Posted by Jay G. on 06/24/06 02:22

On Thu, 22 Jun 2006 23:25:25 -0400, Joshua Zyber wrote:

> "poldy" <poldy@kfu.com> wrote in message
>>
>> But is that reason to dismiss the format? Were DVD releases always
>> pristine from the start?
>
> That's not an excuse. The DVD format is 9 years old now and has fully
> matured. HD DVD is a natural evolution of that development and has
> jumped out of the gate ready to go. HD DVD has learned from DVD.
> Blu-ray, on the other hand, has decided to start over from scratch for
> no sound reason, forgetting everything that DVD taught us for the past 9
> years, and is now stumbling around like an infant with no idea what it's
> doing or where to go.

That's a bit unfair. The same could've been said of DVD in its infancy,
which had some difficulties with dual-layer discs at first at well. In
fact, let's see your paragraph rephrased fo DVD:

> That's not an excuse. The CD format is 14 years old now and has fully
> matured. VCD is a natural evolution of that development and has
> jumped out of the gate ready to go. VCD has learned from CD.
> DVD, on the other hand, has decided to start over from scratch for
> no sound reason, forgetting everything that CD taught us for the past 14
> years, and is now stumbling around like an infant with no idea what it's
> doing or where to go.

The DVD spec could've easily been a pared down version that was basically a
modification of existing CD format with smaller pit lengths. They could've
just ignored dual-layer and gotten the product out the door faster with
less problems. And it probably would've been enough at first, a lot of
early DVDs were single layer. However, there would've been very little
space to grow or expand as a format, and the quality wouldn't have improved
as drastically as it did. DTS probably would've never gotten a foothold at
all due to space restrictions.

-Jay

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