how do you wish the HD wars went?
 

this is a standard we're going to live with for a long time. if the industry had waited a year or two and collaborated more wouldn't things be much better in the long term?

what things do you wish were different?



i wish interlace was no more
i wish there was only one final hdmi spec



EDIT (for clarity):

i was thinking of HD in general (tv's included) when referring to HD war.

i don't think there should be issues like the playstation3 1080i scaler problem.

or more than that i wish users didn't have to configure anything with the video or audio. just connect hdmi cable and go. the equipment should figure out the highest matching configuration.

ideally the industry could have planned out 3 simple specs for all hardware (tv, receiver, consoles, etc):

1) 480p/i, stereo/5.1 dd [for legacy]
2) 720p72, 7.1 dd+ [as stopgap for 1080p or more content]
3) 1080p72, 7.1 true-hd

anything with higher spec has to be backwards compatible. only one hdmi version.

then as consumer you only need to know two numbers: 720 or 1080

Interlace is no more on the HD disc formats. Both are 1080p24.
If you mean 1080i TVs being no more well I think we are moving more and more to 1080p and 720p TVs being the norm. However, broadcast TV is probably never going to support 1080p due to bandwith restrictions so expect 1080i and 720p to be important for decades.
HDMI is backwards compatible, but that is a format that will probably continue to evolve. However, HDMI 1.3 is really not that important if you have a player that can decode DD TrueHD.

I also wish HD DVD and Blu-ray could have come to an agreement, but with both formats doing a fairly decent job to establish themselves I would expect combo players to be the norm eventually and for one format to simply die off. At that point it won't matter how much of your collection is one or the other since it will still work and still look as good as the other.

:confused:

Are we really going to get stuck with both formats?

Im in a bit of a dilemma. I want to get an HD-DVD for my xbox but some movies I really want to see are listed for BD. If BD takes 5 years to fail does that mean I wont be able to get my movies on HD-DVD for 5 years?

Should I just accept that at this point its going to be both or none (for my home theater)?

Well, I think there will definitely be one, but I wouldn't at all be surprised if there were always 2 formats. I'm not sure this is such a bad thing either, if a dual format player comes out. It's possible (though I'm not holding out hope) that having 2 formats will drive each side to make their discs the best they possible can, and maybe get prices down a little faster.

Well, the war starts later this month. Perhaps. Maybe next year. So I think you need to change your verb tenses.

Has Sony sent out the "The War Has Officially Started" memo yet?

J6P sends the memo. I haven't seen it, yet. And if he never does, there is no war.

The only thing i wish for is complete studio neutrality. The studios picking sides crap is lame and childish and they should just let the consumers decide for themselves but i guess that might be asking too much for some people.

That's actually a great description of most business dealings these days.

That would be bad for BD because when you have competing products of similar performance, the consumer always picks the cheapest. The only way for BD to justify their price premium is to put out products that can take advantage of it's technical superiority, not products that show that they are equal to the competition. If that doesn't happen, BD will go down as another one of Sony's failed formats.

So will there be a clearer picture of a 'winner' after january?

The best way to cover all the bases is to simply say, "the war starts Real Soon Now".

January 2007 is still too soon to call. Definitely by January 2008. My understanding is that the BD camp is sticking with primarily MPeg2 encodings for the near future which precludes any advantages for BD. If they continue on that path, market momentum for HD-DVD will be difficult to overcome. At that point, it will be hard for the BD exclusives to remain exclusive.

This "war" started and has been going on for a few years now. The big battle however is about to begin.

No, just whether there is a war. Compare to SACD vs DVD-Audio. "Gentlemen, we regret to inform you the war is off. No one showed up to fight."

Well, in board rooms, yes. Not yet for consumers, which is what most of us care about. Nor on income statements, which is what most investors will care about.

Yeah, I guess the 'war' has been going on mostly 'behind the scenes' [to the customer], and it's mostly a draw.
HDDVD has some momentum and had a better launch and hardware pricing and the Xbox thing; BD has Sony/PS3, and technically better specs for the most part; and a big thing--it seems to have more B&M store buy-in/support, from what I can see. That could hurt HDDVD a lot.
What I "wish"? I wish they agreed on one format, that has the best of both worlds--specs/space of BD, initial cost of HD, and all the studios [Disney is one I'm worried about], and that you could do more with component.

I'm still confused as to how either of the points made by the OP in any way relate to the current format war. Both do 1080p and HDMI is completely independent of it.

Brings to mind something I heard once...

What if we had a war and nobody showed up?

None of my friends could tell you what HD-DVD or Blu Ray is. They are perfectly happy with DVD. They won't even be concerned with HDTV until the TV they have dies (the 2009 deadline doesn't mean anything to them, they have cable). I think they are representative of your average middle class consumers.

I'm beginning to wonder if HDDVD will be a niche market until the next quantum leap comes along... Flash memory maybe. Your movie on something the size of an SD card?

Just my .02, and probably not worth that.

HD-DVD/Blu-Ray is here to stay and will replace DVD. The reason is the copy protection. They're losing billions to pirates every year and the sooner they get people to switch over, the better. Expect to see heavy promotions in the near future.

Will I be able to buy a region free version ofthe HD/BD players.

I'm not sure if the OP was saying he wanted 1080p output on all players, or if he didn't want any interlaced video support, period, on any players.

The second wouldn't be feasible because there is still a lot of content that is interlaced (extras shot on video, for instance), and they need to support 480i to be backwards compatible with SD TVs. It's also kind of important that they are able to just copy over their existing extras to the discs. While they could save space if they re-encode them using a modern codec, it does cost money to do that, and that could lead to things being left off discs.

HD DVDs are not region coded. An HD DVD purchased from Japan or Europe will function in an American player. Blu-rays are region-coded, but it's a bit less restrictive than the DVD model. Blu-rays from Japan fall into the same region as the US, for example.

Both HD DVD or Blu-ray players do enforce standard DVD region coding, however. If you want an HD player that's region-free for standard DVD playback, no that's not available.

Whether he knew it or not, I think he meant TVs rather than players. Or maybe old content.

If they've developed unbreakable copy protection, maybe they should start working on cold fusion next. -wink-

My point was that they can push it all they want, but the consumer is in the driver's seat. Even if they can get the price point down to current DVDs and players (and I don't see that happening), most people won't have a compatible TV for a long time. And nobody is complaining about having to rewind a DVD or pay $100 for a movie they love (as was the case with VHS vs DVD).

sorry for confusion. clarified in OP

This is basically how it is. Most TVs adjust any TV resolution to their native output without user intervention. Some will take most computer resolutions, too. A few older TVs do not accept certain resolutions because of the marketplace at the time those models were made. But that is growing pains as the market switched from SD to HD. I'm not sure where you see the problem.

I'm not sure what the PS3 1080i issue is, but there will always be varying quality levels. You sound like you want all scalers to be great at scaling. But companies are too cheap to put quality into everything, and many consumers are too cheap to pay for the better ones that exist.

There is also the issue that HDMI goes through a handshake, and some equipment is flaky when doing this. This is also a quality issue, as their firmware is not good enough. But the intent of HDMI is still exactly what you propose, to simplify everything.

The PS3 issue is that if you're TV cannot accept 720p then it will downgrade it to 480p rather than upscale it to 1080i. That's how I understood it anyway, and I have no idea how many TVs that affects.

That would be annoying to certain older RPTV owners. But it is still just a lack of quality. There are many TVs (current ones, not obsolete models) that do this in order to create 1080i from 720p. They chop down to 540 and then interlace/double to 1080. Cheap, cheap, cheap. So it may not be all that different for any 1080i TV owner.

So, recap of video for this game generation:
360: No HDMI. No 1080.
PS3: No 1080. And no proper scaling to 1080.
Wii: Not even 720, let alone 1080.

Obviously video is not a big concern. I think we just have to not worry about it at this point. Worry about video for movies, instead.

Where are you getting "no 1080" from for 360 and PS3?

The games.

There are 1080 games coming out, they're just few and far between. NBA 07 on the PS3 is a 1080p game. It may look awful, but it's 1080 progessive lines of awful. I do remember Microsoft announced some game or another would also be natively 1080p.

One thing I wish they would have done is require the players to remember preferred audio tracks. I can understand making DD+ the default track, but it would be nice if we could select a track like TrueHD and check a box to have it play automatically the next time the disc is inserted. If they can have persistent storage for bookmarks, they could do the same for audio tracks.

Also, the menu button sounds were not needed at all, but they should have made these defeatable in the players' menus. Making the selection stick on the discs' menus would have been good, but not as good as having an option to turn them off for good in the player. As it is now, you have to turn them off every time you put the disc in, so you might as well leave them on.

The bookmark feature is nice, but they should have also made returning to a bookmark as easy as pressing one button. One of the A,B,C,D buttons (on HD-DVD players) could have been used for creating a bookmark while another would bring up that bookmark.

Been wishing that for years on DVD players, too.

720p gaming is probably going to be the norm for some time. The developer of Resistance said flat out that they would have had to make a lot of compromises to the game to get it to run in 1080p. Even the PS3 has limits. You pull the processing power for 1080p you have to lose it somewhere else in the game.