"Sonnova" wrote in message
According to industry sources, HD-DVD players outsold
Blu-Ray players in 2007 by a more than 1/3.
.... not including the fraction of 5 million Blu Ray players in PS3s that were
sold in 2007.
As far as
titles are concerned, they are about neck and neck at
about 400 titles each. However, There is four times the
replication capacity online for HD-DVD as there is for
Blu-Ray and Sony has only one replication facility that
can make the 50-gig discs.
http://www.electronista.com/articles...eating.hd.dvd/
"Sales of Blu-Ray movies in 2007 have nearly crushed those of HD DVD so far,
Reuters reports. According to data from Home Media Research, 2.6 million
Blu-Ray titles were sold between January 1st and September 30th, while only
1.4 million HD DVD titles were bought in the same timeframe."
Blu-Ray authoring is more
difficult, more expensive and more error prone than is
HD-DVD as well.
That is hard to believe, because digital authoring is largely medium
independent.
Both Dream Works and Paramount have dropped their support
for both formats and have announced that forthwith, all
of their HD releases will be HD-DVD only.
Politics.
Allan Bell, Paramount's chief technical officer also said
that while Blu-Ray's higher capacity is better suited for
raw data, movies need "minutes" and due to the fact that
Blu-Ray uses less efficient Codecs such as MPEG2 video
and PCM audio, the potential for greater capacity is
lost.
Wrong. Blu Ray is not limited to MPEG2 video and PCM audio:
http://www.blu-ray.com/faq/#bluray_video_codecs
What video codecs will Blu-ray support?
MPEG-2 - enhanced for HD, also used for playback of DVDs and HDTV
recordings.
MPEG-4 AVC - part of the MPEG-4 standard also known as H.264 (High
Profile and Main Profile).
SMPTE VC-1 - standard based on Microsoft's Windows Media Video (WMV)
technology.
What audio codecs will Blu-ray support?
Linear PCM (LPCM) - up to 8 channels of uncompressed audio. (mandatory)
Dolby Digital (DD) - format used for DVDs, 5.1-channel surround sound.
(mandatory)
Dolby Digital Plus (DD+) - extension of Dolby Digital, 7.1-channel surround
sound. (optional)
Dolby TrueHD - lossless encoding of up to 8 channels of audio. (optional)
DTS Digital Surround - format used for DVDs, 5.1-channel surround sound.
(mandatory)
DTS-HD High Resolution Audio - extension of DTS, 7.1-channel surround sound.
(optional)
DTS-HD Master Audio - lossless encoding of up to 8 channels of audio.
(optional)
Confirmed by:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc#Codecs
http://www.videohelp.com/hd
etc.
According to Bell, using VC-1 or AVC a 30-gig
HD-DVD can provide up to four hours of HD playing time.
Blu Ray supports both codecs - see above.
If one needs more, one simply adds another disc to the
package, and it will still be cheaper and easier than
trying to get a 50-gig Blu-Ray disc out of Sony.
Wrong.
Add to this the price disparity between Blu-Ray players
and HD-DVD players ($499 for Blu-Ray vs $199 for HD-DVD)
This weekend's newspaper flyers show Blu Ray players being sold this weekend
by several retailers at a regular price of $299. Same lowest price as they
are selling HD DVD players.
and the writing is clearly on the wall for the eventual
emergence of HD-DVD as the HD format of choice.