Why BR won

[SameSelf]

Maybe some revisionist history here, but certainly some tidbits of knowledge that I was completely unaware of:

Blu-Ray also had two other features that Hollywood liked.

1) Mandatory AACS encryption. HD-DVD made AACS optional, which meant "amateur" videographers could publish their own HD-DVDs without paying for an expensive AACS key. This also meant that self-publishing via HD-DVD recordables was possible.

2) Profile Locking. A Blu-Ray movie uses the BDMV profile which gives you full access to interactivity features of Blu-Ray. This was only possible through pressed media enforced by ROM-Mark. People who burned their own Blu-Rays were forced to use BDAV instead, which meant you basically got a collection of videos. Again, it's not an attempt at the home videographer, but more for the independent filmmaker - because they couldn't make Blu-Rays as slick as what Hollywood could.

The whole point of it all was less about home videos, and more about locking out the indies - if you weren't part of the MPAA, you couldn't make your own Blu-Rays, effectively. Of course, many third party publishers eventually bought their own AACS keys and mastering hardware and have contracts with (highly-regulated, again, supposedly to limit piracy) Blu-Ray disc pressers these days, so it's no longer a limitation.

But back then, Hollywood used it as a way to block indie films from high-def. Heck, you couldn't put a burned BDMV disc into a commercial player other than a PS3 (because the players needed to read the key from ROM-Mark, and you couldn't burn that).

These days, most players don't bother anymore - all that excess protections aren't used or needed because the original goals have been defeated - we can rip Blu-Rays even with BD+, indie filmmakers have lots of publisher choices to make their own professional Blu-Rays, etc.

(And Blu-Ray took a couple of years for Profile 2.0 to come out - something HD-DVD had at launch).

The extra space Blu-Ray had was because the tools were immature (HD-DVD forced their hand) so the only format available for compress was... MPEG2, while HD-DVD used either AVC (h.264) or VC1 (WMV9), and HD-DVD also had the space advantage - 30GB on a dual layer disc while Blu-Ray only had 25GB because pressing dual-layer BDs wasn't available and yields were too low.

Link

[KarMa]

And then streaming grew up and took away their fun.

[_Al_]

Blu-Ray is a tool for industry (Hollywood, Sony etc.) and people here or elsewhere always think it is some sort of standard that they have to follow or even getting camcorders (especially in the pas 5 years back, recording interlaced footage only camcorders) because it is a Blu-Ray standard etc.

I have another one for you, that you might already know, not sure, in the beginning for Blu-Ray specs they omitted HDV - mpeg2 1440x1080, not mentioning its mpeg1layer2 audio, so all camcorder users of that time were screwed up as well. Intend to screw up. Sony's standard was blocked by Sony. That was a hint for me in 2009 to get WDTV player and completely ignore the whole Blu-Ray thing.

[SameSelf]

I have another one for you, that you might already know, not sure, in the beginning for Blu-Ray specs they omitted HDV - mpeg2 1440x1080, not mentioning its mpeg1layer2 audio, so all camcorder users of that time were screwed up as well.

Yes, I am well aware of that limitation along with the fact that 1080p30 doesn't fit either. The only reason I am wanting to author Blu-ray is, not so much for viewing, but for archive purposes. I have a ton of ProRes HQ footage that I shoot, and I need to get it in a more high quality, viewable format other than mp4s sitting on my hard drive or uploaded to Youtube. At this point I will feel comfortable nuking the original footage from my hard drive. The thing that I find interesting is how the authoring process forces your hand to pay closer attention to details. It is a labor of love to be sure. I never paid much attention to BR before this, but the learning curve has been pretty steep to say the least.