Tuesday, March 11, 2008

There can be only one

I recently found out that Blu-Ray is more then likely going to be the next video medium that will replace DVDs in the coming years. All the major movie companies have sided with exclusize Blue-Ray distribution rights. This came after a brutal war between Song (along with Samsung) and Toshiba – HD-DVD vs. Blue-Ray. It’s a wonder Song pulled this win out of the hat considering all their attempts in the past to push a new medium. Betamax failed miserably and recently they took considerable loses when UMD’s, discs made specifically for their portable gaming system the PSP, failed to move movies to the consumer. Unlike these previous match ups where either A. Sony’s product was vastly inferior or B. Their marketing was off the mark completely (They were releasing movies like Pride and Prejudice on the PSP) Sony’s product not only stood up the competition but surpassed it in quality and marketing design.

The name “Blue-Ray” sounds cooler while HD-DVD sounds like more of the same. While both offer the same high quality definition and sound – the big difference is that Blue-Ray discs hold 50gigs of information – HD-DVDs can only hold 30 gigs ( while normal DVDs hold 7.3 gigs ). To put this size difference into perspective – any 4 minute song you rip from a CD is probably around 3-5 megabytes big. It takes 1000 megabytes in order to make 1 gigabyte. The sheer amount of volume the movie companies can put on the Blue-Ray discs just allows more flexibility when it comes to compression settings and extras.

I think I just found my reason to get a Playstation 3.

The format war put into WWII terms (NSFW!)

1 comment:

MRL said...

I meant to tell you ages ago that there's a funnier (to my mind--maybe it's because it's the one I saw first) version of this clip about the Cowboys: http://youtube.com/watch?v=vYu68SHWh64