Webeye

June 19 2008 – Blu-ray Wins The Day

In Elseware on May 19, 2008 at 12:54 pm

Over the years there have been many wars fought, in the entertainment industry, over formats. There was the battle between 45RPM and 33 1/3RPM records. Neither won outright, with the result being both singles and LPs. Then there was the skirmish between cassettes and 8-track cartridges. They were both seen as a replacement for reel-to-reel tape recording. The 8-track cartridge never really took off outside the USA, with the cassette being the more popular of the two formats. A real fight ensued between VHS and Betamax, two different formats for video cassette recording, and even though Betamax was the superior of the two, VHS won. Vinyl didn’t put up much of fight when CDs came along, but lately vinyl seems to be adopting a rearguard action. The DVD was announced as an attempt to replace VHS. The war of attrition has been so prolonged that the DVD is now going to disappear, while VHS tapes still appear in the shops, although in ever decreasing quantities. A replacement for the DVD has been on the cards for some time now, but the champion was only announced a while ago. The two formats slugging it out were HD DVD, a high definition format of the DVD, and Blu-ray, another high definition format, that gets its name from the blue light of the laser that reads the disc.

The majority of readers would be totally unaware that Sony and Toshiba have been trying to convince Hollywood to accept their format for all future movie releases. This spat between the companies has been going on since the turn of the century, and Toshiba finally threw in the towel in February of this year, announcing that they would no longer make HD DVD players. This means that Hollywood will be using Blu-ray, and leaves the path clear for consumers to make a decision about which player to buy, without having to worry about which format will have more discs on the video shop shelves. One problem is that the Xbox from Microsoft was designed with the HD DVD drive in mind, and Microsoft still say there are no plans to go with Blu-ray, leaving owners of the Xbox in a quandary. Meanwhile the PS3, from Sony, is already Blu-ray equipped.

Blu-ray promises the same, high definition picture that some TV programmes already appear in, on Freeview. Of course, not only will you need to replace your DVD player with a Blu-ray player, but also a new HD capable TV is required to get the full benefit. Audio quality is claimed to be much better than CDs. Neil Young, who has always been a critic of CD, and MP3 audio quality, has announced that he will be releasing a 10 disc collection on Blu-ray. Some Blu-ray machines will play CDs and DVDs, so need to worry about replacing your whole collection again.

Two other features that come with Blu-ray are, BD-Live, which will allow connection to the Internet for downloading of content that was not on the original disc, for instance the trailer for a new film in the same series, and BD-Java, which adds an interactive capability to watching films.

A bone of contention, for many, may be the digital rights management (DRM). Each disc contains a virtual machine, software that runs as a small computer within the Blu-ray player. This allows the Blu-ray system to check if the player has been tampered with allowing pirating of the content. Sounds like Hollywood is assuming that every customer is a criminal.