My eyes may deceive me, but is Sony is trying to play the nice guy in a format war? What about the other times, Betamax vs. VHS and the still on-going SACD vs. DVD-Audio? Have they finally realized that these wars risk losing the consumers interest, for either format? “Listening to the voice of the consumers, having two rival formats is disappointing, and we haven’t totally given up on the possibility of integration or compromise,” according to the soon to be president (Sony Electronics Business Worldwide), Ryoji Chubachi. Wow, I didn’t know Sony even knew the word “compromise”.

Analyst are trying decide what Chubachi meant by this statement. It is obvious, isn’t it? Sony is trying to act like they do not want a war; they are not keeping the fight alive. They are also giving themselves a “well, we tried” excuse if neither format is a big hit by 2006. Sony is probably thinking that this tactic of “compromise” would have been great when SACD was in the works. Now they can only blame themselves for making a CD format that is just about as universal as the Mini Disc.

Maybe the new president is trying to turn over a new leaf for Sony. Maybe he is genuine in his want for integration of the two formats. Or maybe he is smarter than his successors and realizes that the consumers are going to decide the future of next-gen HD discs. Let’s come back to the real world though.

The release of these next generation discs and players, for the US, are only about 7 months away. How can Blu-ray & HD-DVD possibly come up with integration by that point? How are they going to explain to their supporters, thus far that they have decided to go this other route and by the way, thanks for wasting your money on one format? It’s not going to happen. If it was, Sony would have come out with a plan or better yet they would have discussed this with Toshiba & NEC and both camps would have announced a plan of integration. HD-DVD turned them down once before and they still have no plan of compromise. They (Toshiba/NEC) seem to be okay with that.

A more likely scenario would be a universal player, which plays both formats as they are, but even this wouldn’t be an easy feat, as it would add another 30-40% to the cost of the players. In my opinion this whole talk of “compromise” is too little, too late.

R.Hollis

If this pans out to be true, it changes everything we’ve been told, about the impending Blu-ray, HD-DVD format war, considerably. Heise online a German technology site, appears to report that Samsung intends to “marry” a Blu-ray and HD-DVD drive together (sorry the translation was a bit rough). This fly’s in the face of everything we’ve been told so far, which includes “the rival technologies aren’t similar enough to combine into one device” and “it wouldn’t be feasible to make a high definition universal DVD player”.

I can’t speak to the validity of the report from CeBIT by Heise, but it goes without saying, that if Samsung can pull this off then the whole “Format War” may end before it ever began. This is one story I’ll be following closely.

Michael.G

As of March 10, 2005, Apple has jumped on the Blu-ray gravy train. This should not be a huge shock to anyone as most major computer companies have already joined the BDA right at its conception. Blu-ray is the obvious choice for Apple because, according to Steve Jobs, “Consumers are already creating stunning HD content with Apple’s leading video editing applications like iMovie HD and are anxiously awaiting a way to burn their own high def DVD’s.”

With Blu-ray storage capacity at 50GB, instead of HD-DVD’s mere 25GB, and the up-coming release of Apple’s QuickTime software, QuickTime 7 which has been adopted for some high definition DVDs, not to mention their continuous “efforts to drive consumer adoption of HD,” it seems like Apple should have joined sooner.

Is this another nail in the coffin for HD-DVD? No, of course not. HD-DVD still has it’s share of promising backers such as major movie studios Warner Bros., Paramount, and Universal. Many experts are still sighting the movie studios has being the deciding factor in this format war. Although with the computer companies siding with Blu-ray and Hollywood siding with HD-DVD, it is very possible that both will co-exists in the market of next generation optical disc for storing High Definition movies, photos and other digital content. I mean, can’t we all just get along?

R.Hollis

To be honest the sites hiatus was due to nothing more, than lack of things to talk about. But the time passed since my last entry, is a story unto itself in a sense. It has now been nearly two months sense the initial HD-DVD titles were announced from Paramount, Universal and Warner, and still no initial Blu-Ray titles have been announced from Columbia, MGM or Disney.

Now I wouldnt have you read anything into this, but it does strike me as a little odd, we’re now some 6-8 months away from some form of high definition DVD, and only one camps titles have been announced. If I had to speculate, I’d say that the offerings from the HD-DVD side gave Sony pause, and their waiting to get enough titles lined up to make a similarly impressive press release, but this is just pure speculation.

Michael.G

With all the articles and announcements about HD-DVD at CES you have to wonder, where is Blu-ray? They have not announced yet which movie titles they will release on their next gen. DVD format (probably because it will be the entire catalogue of MGM and Sony Films) but they are getting the word out on Blu-ray.

The BDA (Blu-ray Disc Association) camp is showing off some potential films such as ‘I, Robot’ and ‘Hero’ on Blu-ray hardware which are manufactured by companies like Pioneer, HP, Mitsubishi, Phillips, and of course Sony. If you would like to hear more of “what Blu-ray can do for you” check out the BDA site for the Blu-ray at CES 2005 Press Conference, Coverage and Press Kit which includes video clips at CES and where some of the BDA members are set up.

R.Hollis

Samsung announced their BD-R1000 will ship sometime this month (in Japan). This marks the first major rollout of a Blu-ray product, from a company other than Sony. The BD-R1000 includes both ATSC digital and NTSC analog recording and playback. Samsung states a recording time of 2 hours in HDTV quality or 12 hours in SD quality.

One key feature of Samsungs BD-R1000 recorder is the ability to record and playback all BD, DVD and CD formats with a single disc pickup.

Michael.G

Earlier this week, Disney announced their pick in the DVD format war, well at least for now. In a non-exclusive deal with Blu-ray, Disney said it would start releasing movies on the format as soon as players became available in North America and Japan, which is expected in late 2005, early 2006. Disney also stated it would release content in the rival format HD-DVD if it met the studio’s needs, mainly copyright protection. This announcement may make you think that Blu-ray is ahead of their competitor HD-DVD, but keep in mind that all the support from the movie studios are non-exclusive. It is still a war and it is still going to be a consumer choice. Hopefully, HD-DVD and Blu-ray will make it easy for us but, I wouldn’t count on it.

Disney includes Buena Vista Home Entertainment, Walt Disney Home Entertainment, Hollywood Pictures Home Video, Touchstone Home Entertainment, Miramax Home Entertainment, Dimension Home Video and Disney DVD.

R.Hollis

Sony’s Blu-ray technology may not have received any new studio support this week, but that is not stopping them from pressing on. Singulus Technologies, a system integrator of optical disc replication equipment, is joining Sony to develop mass-production equipment to make Blu-ray discs.

Singulus will design and manufacture the BD-ROM replication lines, enabling replicators worldwide to have the ability to manufacture pre-recorded Blu-ray discs. According to Singulus, prototype machines will be available in early 2005 for single-layer and late 2005 for dual-layer.

R.Hollis

Hewlett-Packard is stepping up their support of Blu-ray from financial to full on production. HP announced on Tuesday that their media center PC’s, desktop, and personal workstations will include Blu-ray disc drives by late 2005, followed by notebooks in 2006. HP is set to launch with three different formats; BD-ROM, a read-only format; BD-RE, a rewritable format for HDTV recording and data storage and BD-R, the write-once format for HDTV recording and data storage. The Blu-ray drives will have two read heads so it can be backward compatible to read and also write the consumers existing CDs and DVDs. The drives will also offer the company’s LightScribe technology, which allows professional quality text and graphics to be burned directly onto LightScribe-enabled Blu-ray discs using the same laser that burns to the data side of the disc.

HP is one of the first companies, in the long list of Blu-ray supporters, to announce their full commitment to Sony’s next gen DVD format. Even though this is PC support it is a huge step forward for the Blu-ray side. Of course, we still wait for the movie studios to decide before this format war is fully over. We may not be waiting much longer, hopefully.

R.Hollis

Sharp’s new $3000+ Blu-Ray recorder “BD-HD1000″ will be released on December 9th in Japan for 320,000 yen. The BD-HD100 will be the third recorder on the market to support the Blu-ray Disc format and the first Blu-Ray recorder to feature an internal 160GB hard drive. The recorder will have twin optical drives, one for Blu-ray and the other for standard DVDs. This allows copying of content, as long as it’s not copy-protected, between a DVD, Blu-ray Disc, and the hard drive. The machine can record onto rewritable single-layer BD-RE discs, which have a capacity of 25GB.

This basically means that you can transfer the contents of five DVDs (4.7GB) to a single Blu-Ray disc. You can also store 19 hours of HDTV content on the hard drive, which is more than six times the amount of HDTV that can be stored on a single layer Blu-ray Disc. It can also playback DVD-Video, DVD+/-R, DVD+/-RW, DVD-RAM, and several flavors of CD. The only thing it won’t do is record onto or playback dual-layer 50GB discs.

R.Hollis