Update: It's Blu-ray for Disney

[beric3236]

Just thought I would pass this along.

http://www.videostoremag.com/news/html/breaking_article.cfm?sec_id=2&article_ID=6931

It is somewhat interesting.

[skullfullomagots]

12 months and ticking!
I support whatever that is affordable to my pocket

[kirpen]

Yippeeeeeeeee they will be able to fit hours of ads on the disc. Here's hoping it wont be illegal to skip them.

[PITBULL]

I wonder how hard they will be to backup ?

[Greg12]

we have dvd+-rw now, i forsee

HD-DVD+Blueray players

[iooi]

Here we go again another format to rip us off with....

[MrMoody]

Chapek said. “It also has the side benefit of being a little more difficult to pirate ..."

Side benefit? This is Di$ney we're talking about, it's their sole criterion. Better quality? Don't make me laugh.

[MrMoody]

Chapek also cited the Blu-ray Disc group’s “receptivity to our plan to include, in the specifications, a new application layer that we’ve been pushing for.” This application layer, Chapek said, “affords us unprecedented levels of interactivity” and provides additional benefits to consumers “that go beyond the HD picture alone.”

Oh, no, nightmares of nasty licensing schemes and locked-out, extra-cost content are flashing through my head. Interactive as in interacts with Disney.

[RottenFoxBreath]

yeah disney should be spelt $$$$$$.
thats all there interested in,well that and making more ads for more movies .

[BobK]

>yeah disney should be spelt $$$$$$. thats all there interested in

Bad news. That's all any business is really interested in. Disney just happens to be better at it than most.

All the business that give you great customer service and do the things you like aren't doing it because they want to be nice guys. They're doing it because they think they make more money that way. If they decided they could make a bigger profit doing things you don't like, they'd do them.

[MrMoody]

Well, I hope TPTB are reading this, because if Blu-Ray players come with (or need) a telephone/network connection I WILL NOT buy one. Read my lips, no new DIVX.

[NightWing]

Yep. Remember Disney picked Divx with about 0 titles on DVD untill it sunk!....

So if history is correct then HD-DVD will win.

[Nilfennasion]

All businesses are primarily concerned with how to make money, true, but many prefer to do it in a somewhat ethical manner. Columbia Tristar, for example, started out on DVD by taking their masters and testing them on every encoder available at the time, until they found one that produced the best quality at the lowest possible bitrates. As a result, the video on their discs often looks better at a mere 3 Mb/s than a Paramount or Disney disc will look at 8-10 Mb/s.

The problem in Disney's case is that they don't care about the quality of the product they sell. In fact, they like making a profit from selling crap. The original Region 4 release of StarShip Troopers on DVD was a classic example. No extras, no nothing, and a flip-point that was placed right in the middle of one of the pivotal sequences of the film. And they had the hide to wonder why for every one disc they sold of it, at least five were imported from Region 1, where the home video rights are owned by Columbia Tristar.

Then there is just the quality of their films in general. I grew up watching the Inspector Gadget cartoons, and they were strangely funny if extremely repetitive. In the Disney feature film, they basically took everything that the cartoon was about and crapped on it. They did no research into the characters at all (hence, "just Claw, one word", no Disney, it's DOCTOR Claw). They cast people who were totally inappropriate for the roles (Inspector Gadget, as big a goofball as he was, was meant to be a grown man, not a perpetual adolescent). And to cap that all off, they went with a totally hackneyed, humourless script. It is hard to reconcile the Disney that produced this film with the Disney that created The Gnome Mobile. In fact, I had one friend in America who assurred me that if Walt saw what the company who uses his name was doing now, he'd rise from the grave out of sheer torque.

Hoping that the format Disney supports will fail may not be in our best interests, but if it bankrupts the company or puts it back in the hands of the Disney family, c'est la vie and all.

Honestly, they should just sit down and knuckle out a new universal standard as they did with SD-DVD. The reason the current flavour is now so universal is because, some programming problems aside, the format is universally reliable and produces what has been considered superior results. I'd blow off either proposed HD format if someone would come up with one that is compatible with any player enabled to its specifications and produces progressive video.