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Post your comments for Toshiba Halts HD DVD Production, Mulls Future here

[rickcain]

They should have aggressively courted the adult video market. Once it would have taken hold there, HD-DVD's future would have been assured.

[lpspeck]

BTW... It's "Tens of Billions of" YEN... NOT Dollars = Hundreds of Millions of Dollars.

[Rzerona]

To the President of Toshiba: Market HD DVD primarily as a storage medium AND then for video. If it's significantly cheaper I guarantee Blu ray will crater and be relegated to One off movies. Work with LG and make multi-writers for the computer. $20 bucks vs $2 per disk, it's a no brainer for people who need to archive material. Digital photos from a 10MP camera take up a crap load of space and hard drives aren't the best solution. 16 gig flash card needs an HD-dvd solution. Screw the MPAA/ RIAA. Floppy disks didn't need the MPAA/RIAA, Iomega zip disks didn't need the MPAA/RIAA, Porn industry doesn't need the MPAA/RIAA. Make the HD writers so they retail for <$89 and the world will beat a path to your media door. It's all about the media royalties anyway. Make it off of the consumer, not the RIAA. 10 cents a disk can be a crap load of money. Get in bed with Intel/AMD and optimize writers to work with multi-core chips. Do something but don't give up. I'm pulling for ya!!

[Zach]

Agreed. Actually Toshiba should play "spoiler" in this fight.

Nothing is more dangerous than someone with no options. Toshiba should release the cheapest, highest capacity drives and disks for low, low $$.

The world will adopt the Toshiba standard and Sony will be left with an expen$ive format that nobody will ever truly adopt (forget PS3 owners, they're buying a gaming machine first and formost).

Oh, and don't forget PORN. Men love watching it on their PC's. I'm not sure what the ladies perfer.

[RNR19952]

I agree with all you guys on this
It is a shame that HD DVD is going to die
We will never be able to record on Blu Ray the spec requires encryption?
Sony lost the Betamax because of the porn industry I wish the HD DVD camp would of studied history, they might of learned something.
Also how many failed formats has $ony had?
Personally I will never buy a $ony product.

Rootkit fiasco.......Keep your DRM junk........

[mpheadley]

I'm surprised this is coming from Toshiba. I was fairly certain they would wait it out. After all, they just spent millions of dollars on a Superbowl Ad a few weeks ago.
I don't think the porn industry had any bearing at all on this format war. After all, I think the people who watch porn are probably satisfied with DVD. DVD is also much cheaper. I don't think most people would pay extra to watch porn in HD.

Recordable media option is interesting and would be useful for me. But Toshiba would probably have to develop more products at an additional cost, and I think at this point they won't be willing to do that. They would have to produce the recordable discs themselves probably, and they would have to make them dual layer. Another problem is they would most likely have to match Blu-Ray's higher capacity. Besides, recordable dvd drives have gone from 1000 dollars to 30 in only a few years without any real competing formats.

Edit: A quick look on ebay and there are verbatim dual layers for 25 + shipping for a single disc. So dual layers are already out. But would Verbatim be willing to make them and sell them for less than 5 bucks?

[eMJay]

Well don't say i didn't warn anyone. I was here as far back as 2 years ago warning everyone that this would be the outcome. It just goes to show that the cheaper route isn't always the best economically. You have to think long-term as well. HD-DVD was only a quick fix that allowed them to enter the HD market with lower research and development costs- but it was destined to be obsolete in the PC market from it's introduction. BD was always the better format because it's more future-proof and has a totally new data structure- it wasn't built to save money and it has potential for further development that HD-DVD lacks. The cost of BD production will fall over time just like every other new technology that has come and gone. It's time to stop wasting plastic on HD-DVD.

[userblah]

I completely disagree with this. Sure back when it was Beta vs VHS adult video had a huge impact on the outcome. Now though with how big the internet is and with broadband speed the adult video industry on hard copy is NOTHING compared to what it used to be. Majority of people now just use the internet. Even if HD had the entire adult video industry I feel warner bros converting would have ended it no matter what.

[galaxian]

Rzerona said:

To the President of Toshiba: Market HD DVD primarily as a storage medium AND then for video. If it's significantly cheaper I guarantee Blu ray will crater and be relegated to One off movies. Work with LG and make multi-writers for the computer. $20 bucks vs $2 per disk, it's a no brainer for people who need to archive material. Digital photos from a 10MP camera take up a crap load of space and hard drives aren't the best solution. 16 gig flash card needs an HD-dvd solution. Screw the MPAA/ RIAA. Floppy disks didn't need the MPAA/RIAA, Iomega zip disks didn't need the MPAA/RIAA, Porn industry doesn't need the MPAA/RIAA. Make the HD writers so they retail for <$89 and the world will beat a path to your media door. It's all about the media royalties anyway. Make it off of the consumer, not the RIAA. 10 cents a disk can be a crap load of money. Get in bed with Intel/AMD and optimize writers to work with multi-core chips. Do something but don't give up. I'm pulling for ya!!

You apparently don't know much about HD DVD. It's not significantly cheaper. The recordable discs already out cost the same as Blu-ray blanks, and that's for less capacity. Why should any computer user back a format with less capacity? Toshiba has had lots of problems getting HD DVD burners to work, mainly because they have to use older recordable DVD technology that doesn't work very well with blue lasers. The one burner they have been able to stuff in their own computers is much slower than Blu-ray burners, and it took them several announcements and over a year to finally get it from first announcement to market. If Toshiba could do all these things you beg them to do, they wouldn't be in deep trouble. The problem is they can't do any of it. "Do something" because you're pulling for them? They're losing hundreds of millions of dollars. Nothing you say to them is worth that kind of money.

[Rzerona]

Galaxian, I'm surprised that you think HD-DVD isn't cheaper than blue ray. The facts don't support your statement at all. Even before the price cuts it was still less expensive and less expensive to make. Also, using your line of logic, all vehicles that aren't a Lamborghini shouldn't be made. They are clearly inferior. Why should the consumer have a choice to use an" inferior" product. According to you... HD-DVD is inferior as a storage medium. In what way? Less capacity? Is that you're argument? Are you saying no one uses CD-R's or DVD-R's? I have some bad news for you, blank media for CD-R/ DVD-R outsells all the movies people buy on regular DVD's by 1000 to 1 at the lowest conservative marketing estimates. That will be the case for HD formats as well. That the cost of the blank disks for HD/BD are nearly the same are due to market conditions (supply/demand) not due to technological/manufacturing reasons. Also, if you were a media maker and understood the technology you would know that the costs of
converting existing DVD production lines to HD DVD lines are significantly cheaper than supporting Blu-ray ( Apparently I do know a lot about HD-DVD. ) Speed to burn isn't the only metric here. Those improve with development and so does the hardware. The play to wrap up the movie industry was risky. LG played it "write" with the ability to write/play both mediums. There are 3-5 Blue Ray player specs so far and not all are compatible so early adopters got screwed early. Buy an HD-DVD player and it's backwards compatible by spec. To my knowledge both formats use blue lasers. Sony had supplier problems and discontinued manufacturing BD players to keep the PS-3 manufacturing lines going. That was 2006. I'm sure you think Beta is still better than VHS, Vinyl is better than DAT, and the consumer shouldn't be allowed to choose what he wants to use. Who will you whine to when you're PS3 goes obsolete and can't read holographic strorage? The play for HD is cheaper storage. No one cares about the extra content you can throw on Blue Ray disc. When was the last time you watched a movie with the directors comments turned on? Do I care about picking my own ending? I don't do that when I read a book and I don't plan to do it in the future with my movies. For all most people care, throw it on a second disk if you have to, That said, most of the movies will be downloaded in a few years and I started moving to flash cards to store movies for when I travel. They'll be at 32 Gig in a year or so. Nearly 7 moives. More if I shink it. The play to match capacity of the disks to the flash card/ SD card/ is important for people to distribute and share efficiently. A 4 gig card fits on a DVD-R just fine and it's cheap. HD-DVD could be the preferred medium for secondary or tertiary storage. It's sad when the movie industry, the industry where you have no rights, dictates to you what your choices are. Meanwhile you can beg Sony to keep working to eliminate competition. Dual format wars benefit the consumer in the long run. Competition is good.

[DethLocke]

Oh, its YEN not DOLLARS, well that changes everything. I guess Toshiba didnt horribly fail..........

[eMJay]

It's interesting that you brought up the issue of flash memory. That trend just illustrates why HD-DVD is a waste of time....it's stuck at 30GB DL! What person of sound mind is going to invest heavily in double layer HD-DVD R to record data when they could soon pick up a flash card or drive with higher capacity? BD will eventually produce 4 layers per side on their disc (that's nearly 100GB capacity on each side), and it's not just for 'extra' content. Increasing the capacity reduces the degree of compression that is required to fit the data/ movie onto the disc. Compression is the reason why artifacts occur during playback of dvds; reducing the need for video data compression will make artifacts a thing of the past. BD isn't just the upgrade to DVD; it's the upgrade to HD-DVD!

It's true that HD-DVD is cheaper to make than BD. That was the bottom line for HD-DVD backers and it's also the reason why the specs are what they are -mediocre. They cut corners by simply reusing the older DVD standard and didn't try to innovate. In fact, the increase in capacity of HD-DVD over DVD is mainly due to the switch to the blue laser, which allows for smaller pit sizes. BD went further and reconstructed the data structure on the disc from scratch. All of the changes resulted in a necessity for BD discs to be created using new disc manufacturing processes which obviously increase the manufacturing costs in the SHORT TERM. Ultimately, the new BD discs will replace DVD-R as the prefered disc storage, assuming that next-generation flash storage options don't send both to the technology graveyard.

[Rzerona]

The reason you wouldn't use Flash for data storage is integrity of archived material. It won't last. The number of layers (capacity) is largely inconsequential in this discussion. Why not spend more and more and make a 10 layer disk (already done btw). I'm not defending HD-DVD here, I just want a choice. HD-DVD can do three layers last I heard and Ritek says it's done 10 layers. With regard to mobility... Sony only this year demonstrated the ability to generate a lower version movie copy from an BD disk. http://blogs.pcworld...ves/006194.html so you can take it with you on a "memory stick" of course. Talk about out dated technology. Have to wonder what the lawyers are saying about that...promoting violation of the DMCA. Then the article goes on and on about "interactivity" and playing the Men In Black trivia game. Be still my beating heart...can't wait to do that!!. Compression's a hardware/software issue and can be software alone if it has to be. Focusing a laser to generate a bit is just that and has nothing to do with compression. Better optics/mechanics, smaller spots and more bits. Simple as that. Compression only tells the laser when to turn on and off. Using existing technology is not always a bad thing. VMD --see UK-based New Medium Enterprises (NME) is claiming their versitile media disk can do 4 layers like BD using a red laser. that's about 48 GB on a disk. Swap out the laser, adjust the chemistry a bit and your looking at a 200GB disk. Again, final capacity for storage is not the only issue here. It's Sony's play to be the royalty king for all next generation media So the argument comes to.... why do you need BD at all? Do you need 10 layers...maybe. For Sony, it's about the money and it's about locking out fair use. It's a bad thing when the movie industry wants to control the bits they sell you and the bits you create yourself from cradle to grave.

[mpheadley]

This discussion is getting weird. What's with the Sony bashing? As a pro videographer, I never liked Sony's sole format business practices going back to the SVHS days. But lately, with the new EX1 camera and other cameras and the express card/xdcam format compared with Panasonic's P2 format, Sony seems to be getting smart about their products.
But the point is, keep in mind here that Panasonic teamed up with Sony in regards to Blu-ray. Why would they do that when they compete in so many other ways? The Sony only bashing is unfair.
The bottom line is, most people believe that the format war is actually hindering the technological progression of home video. Whether you realize it or not, it does nobody any good if there are competing formats. Why should an event videographer who has enough competition and overhead already pay more money, buy more equipment and software to develop their productions for both formats?

[HarveyDanger]

If by "Sony's getting smart about their products," you mean "using parts from other manufacturers, sticking their own case on them, and then charging more," then you're right on the money.

Nobody's forcing you to choose a format yet. The reason competition like this is good is because it spurs innovation and lowers costs, and in the end those oh-so-expensive pieces of equipment you havce to buy won't be so expensive anymore. One of the formats will win, -eventually-. But you have to wait for that.

I hope Toshiba doesn't throw in the towel now, precisely for that reason. I shudder to think of the price gouging Sony will put upon the consumer if they "win" the war this early.

[Rzerona]

It's not Sony bashing or blue ray bashing. Sony is the driver in the blue ray Bus. If you think other wise and that the specification/development consortium to spread risk has the final say guess again. It's not the IEEE driving the spec in this case. While Sony has help, who here has the most at stake. Panasonic makes hardware, like LG, like BenQ They're not, to my knowledge, major players in music and video and game entertainment. As a vidographer, no doubt you have more concern as to how to keep your customers from duplicating your artistic works. People already have Floppy drives, zip disks, jazz drives, DAT, CD, DVD, VHS, compact flash, secure digital, smart media, and the list goes on an on and on and you're worried as to what format they want to have their material delivered with?! The fact that you could supply both formats or more if you bought the capability is what the market calls "a differentiator". It sets you apart. I've never heard a photographer whine about having to switch lenses and complaining that they make too many different kinds of lenses. It's bad enough customers pay for the work to be done once and then again when they want another copy. What's fair about that?

[mpheadley]

What I mean is Sony is becoming a leader in innovation and technology progression. I'm referring to other types of technology, specifically in the video production (cameras) field. The products that are innovative and that no other brands employ the same type of technology (the EX-1) are worth the extra money that Sony may charge until another brand comes out with the same technology. As far as using other manufacturer parts, tell me an electronics company that doesn't. If Sony is charging much more for the same technology that others are using and people are paying for it, that's their business whether you or I like it or not (I don't, but then I don't buy Sony in those instances).

I think you can relax about price gouging. Other hardware manufacturers set their own prices for their players. They already have deals in play that allows them to use the technology. Why would Sony raise those prices and risk manufacturers bailing out? Nobody is going to raise prices on players that are already out. And they'd be foolish to set ridiculous prices on newly introduced players. What will happen regardless if HDDVD disappears or sticks around is what happened with DVD, and what happened with CD and what happened with any other home video or audio format. Prices will be set according to supply and demand. Other cheapo manufacturers will start making players when more companies start making parts cheaper. More and more customers will buy them, and prices will go down as they always do in this regard. Competition only brought the prices down to realistic new technology prices, not the stratosphere prices both camps had set at the beginning.

[mpheadley]

Of course, they created it, but I think Panasonic is also interested in seeing it succeed also. My point again, is, Panasonic could have went with Toshiba early on. Why didn't they? They must have seen something in Blu-ray instead of hddvd. Why would you team up with one of your biggest competitors in every other type of electronics equipment? Actually, as an event videographer (weddings, etc.), I encourage people to make their own copies. I give them the files to make their own dvd's. Why? because most people see 15-30 bucks for one copy as being too much. So I then have to lower the cost to 10 bucks, and create the label, packaging, etc. It's not worth the time and effort for even the higher cost. So why not let them do it? They can make more for friends and family, and my business gets free word-of mouth advertising for it.

It's inevitable people are going to switch to HD at some point so of course I'm concerned about there being one primary HD home video format. Let's say I shoot the wedding in HD. When it takes 2-4 hours just to render the files for one DVD, think about how much time it would take to render the files for all three formats if one mom and dad has dvd, the other mom and dad has only hd-dvd, and the bride and groom has only blu-ray. There are no shortcuts. That's 6-12 hours that I could spend shooting or editing another project and earning more. It would be absurd not to want one format. Final wedding videos are simply not placed on any of the other flash cards or other formats yet because they are still considered mobile temporary formats. Would you really think people would watch an entire wedding on their ipod? The thing is with a flash card format, it would have to be compatible with a majority of players already hooked up to people's TV's in their living rooms. Even then I would want one common flash card format or a player in every living room that plays all the flash cards.

"It's bad enough customers pay for the work to be done once and then again when they want another copy. What's fair about that?"

Exactly! They would have to pay for all the overhead expenses associated with having to burn to so many differnent formats. Having one format would eliminate that.

Sorry, the lens comment doesn't make any sense at all in any aspect. There are numerous lenses for artistic reasons and zoom funtionality. Each brand of lens has their own type of mount per type of camera. Nor does competition make them any cheaper. Quality determines price.

Toshiba doesn't have hardly a chance at this point, so kill it! The format competition is stifling the progression of consumer video technology.

[eMJay]

I guess i've been talking about the present and future while you were limiting yourself to discussions of the present. Flash memory can't be used in the way that i described at present but they are likely to be more stable in the future, giving the recent improvements made. The three layer HD-DVD plan was scrapped even before HD-DVD was launched. Yes, that whole memory stick option for BD is outdated by years; streaming media onto portable devices is obviously the next major step. But your take on compression is, well, baffling. When i speak of compression I'm refering to MPEG-2 and similar technology. Clearly you were thinking about decoders. Only decoding and decompression take place when a DVD is played back. The compression is performed on the video data of the DVD before it is created, and software or hardware DECODERS are required to view it. The technology that controls the laser has nothing to do with the data on the disc; in fact, that technology is a major part of what is BD and HD-DVD respectively. Compression is directly related to the size of the data on the disc, thus making it relevant in this discussion. The capacity of the disc ultimately determines whether or not lossy or lossless compression could be used on the video data. As MPEG-2 is lossy compression, it inherently is prone to artifacts and errors. MPEG-2 actually works better with the larger images needed in high definition video, but it's still losses data. Because of the limitations on capacity of HD-DVD now and in the future, there is no chance that Lossless compression can be introduced to HD-DVD(in the future), making HD-DVD a poorer choice for high definition video IN THE LONG TERM.

Frankly, I don't really care who's selling the technology; if it were Toshiba that had come up with a superior technology that held promise for future expansion then i would have supported them. I'm simply supporting what is clearly the better product for the FUTURE of optical disc technology. Whether we will still need optical disc technology in the distant future is for another debate. For all we know, Toshiba might end up making the best quality BDs and players five years from now!!! As far as fair use is concerned, there isn't much difference between the two; you're not allowed to copy either one, alhough BD has some extra cards up it's sleeve in that area. The media industry has always tried to control what they sell us, so nothing's changed there either. As for pricing, there has never been a time when a given technology didn't become cheaper over the long term. Only where there are high quality standards have prices remained high. Contrary to popular opinion, it's not good business to keep pricing high for longer than needed to recoop costs, even when you appear to have a monopoly on new technology. That only opens the door for others to sell the same product at a much cheaper price as the manufactured components of the technology become cheaper to make. At the end of the day, whether it's BD, HD-DVD, Sony, Toshiba et al, it's all about the money; still no difference there. Remember that BD is still competing at some level with standard DVD since they share the same markets.