Posted by Doug Jacobs on 01/29/07 21:44

The alMIGHTY N <natlee75@yahoo.com> wrote:

> a) pay $500-1000 for new hardware
> b) go into their home theater set-up and yank out the DVD player and
> replace it with the HD player with potentially different cables
> c) pay $20-35 for the HD version of a DVD they already paid $15-20 for

> When you think about it, the only real improvement from DVD to one of
> the HD formats is the upgrade of the visuals and, if you're an
> audiophile, the audio. That's about it.

There's also the fact that if you have a HDTV, you can boost your existing
DVDs' quality with an upscaling player for about $100 - much less than
what most folks probably paid for their old DVD player, and much less than
any HD player on the market (even considering the rumors of a $300 HD-DVD
player.) This won't give you true HD quality, of course, but will
probably satisfy most people.

Even if the HD players drop to $100, there's still the problem of media
and peoples' existing libraries. Would you really want to rebuy
everything just to get it in HD? The majority of my library is TV series
- live action, cartoons, anime, etc. These won't benefit from HD since
the source material wasn't HD, nor even analog. I guess you *COULD* try to
digitally remaster MASH (to pick a random example) to be in HD but what
would be the point? It'd be a very long expensive undertaking that
doesn't really provide anything additional. If anything, I might even
PREFER the non-HD version, as it's closer to the show's original format.

> I think the format wars will become more interesting when a consumer
> recorder comes out that allows people to record HDTV broadcasts,
> essentially being the next evolutionary step up from the VCR. Tivo and
> its ilk are the half-solution... you can record HDTV broadcasts but
> you have limited amounts of space and it's not portable.

The problem is that there'll probably be so many restrictions on the HDTV
signal itself that DVRs may become nearly useless. There's already
reports that Tivo's current HD recorder won't record certain shows because
the studio doesn't want you to record them (whatever happend to that
judge's ruling about VCRs, timeshifting and fair use?!) Also, Tivo-To-Go,
which allows you to transfer recorded material to your computer for
viewing there, is also missing. I can also just imagine the DVR makers
being forced to disallow commercial skipping - either via fast-forward, or
other Commercial Skip(tm) logic. This would essentially make (legit) DVRs
useless, while driving folks to either wait the 6 months to rent the shows
on DVD, or construct a DVR that lacks these DRM "features".

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