Posted by Doug Jacobs on 01/26/07 19:59

In alt.video.dvd MassiveProng <MassiveProng@thebarattheendoftheuniverse.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 25 Jan 2007 01:40:50 -0000, Doug Jacobs
> <djacobs@shell.rawbw.com> Gave us:

> >Don't these idiots understand that one of the reasons
> >DVD was so successful so fast was that there was only ONE format?


> Yeah. It's called low res & poor audio. Old school.

> Or that was then, this is now.

> There's a new kid in town.

Technology marches on - this is a good thing. I'm not against the move to
a HD format.

However, I don't see how making consumers participate in the format war
between blu-ray and hd-dvd is beneficial. Multiple formats just cause
confusion and splits the market. DVD - whether you think its specs were
good or not - presented consumers with a single format. You bought a "DVD
Player" and it played "DVDs". Simple. No worries about which format to
choose, buying multiple players or a more expensive combo-player.

Consumers - and I'm talking your average consumer, not the high end early
adopter types - like things simple.

What's worse is that the only major difference between these is that they're
backed by different companies. From the simple consumer's point of view,
both formats play HD movies with surround sound. Differences in terms of
what codec, compression, or even how many channels of audio (7 vs. 9?)
just aren't going to make a very noticable difference to most. Instead,
they'll just buy a combo solution - meaning they aren't making a choice at
all, and now the silly corporations are stuck supporting their own
proprietary formats out of pride.

Going back to the difference between DVD-R/+R, wouldn't it have just been
easier if there had just been 1 burnable DVD format, as their was with
CD? Remember how fast CD burners dropped in price and suddenly all new CD
devices supported CDR? There wasn't confusion about what sort of CDR. It
wasn't like the DVD-R/+R mess where some DVD drives would recognize ONE
burnable format, but NOT the other.

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