Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD: and the winner is...

I've been told by someone whose opinion I trust that Adobe's Encore, which can burn blu ray, is just horrible, very simplistic. The bad thing for me is that, at this point, there are really no blu ray burners for Mac and DVD Studio Pro does not yet have Blu ray compatibility.

Question, will an HD DVD or a Blu Ray HD DVD play on a regular DVD player that is not HD compatible. Does it downconvert to a regular viewing?

Steve B)

This quote just in "Not a good day for Encore, crashed about 8 times. I did manage to build and

burn three different test DVDs (over the past two days). DVDs played

correctly. Very little control over the encode settings.

There are a number of functions that don't work or don't work correctly.

There is one nice feature where you can turn any art object into a button

with just one click."

I've been told by someone whose opinion I trust that Adobe's Encore, which can burn blu ray, is just horrible, very simplistic. The bad thing for me is that, at this point, there are really no blu ray burners for Mac and DVD Studio Pro does not yet have Blu ray compatibility.

I hear that. Encore is not great, but I may give it a whirl or boot DVDIt in Parallels to see if it works. (FWIW some people have had good results with Encore and a blu-ray burner on a Mac. Going to get the Suite soon and start trying, have held with CS2 Suite but with new tower coming time to burn more money it looks like

Question, will an HD DVD or a Blu Ray HD DVD play on a regular DVD player that is not HD compatible. Does it downconvert to a regular viewing?

Steve B)

Nope will not do that HD will play SD but not vice versa

Toshiba to give up on HD DVD, end format war

http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssConsume...643184420080216

Toshiba to give up on HD DVD, end format war

http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssConsume...643184420080216

Still looks unofficial like the Hollywood Reporter link above, but this one seems closer to being official unofficial as oppossed to unofficial unofficial

Toshiba to give up on HD DVD, end format war

http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssConsume...643184420080216

Argh - I had a feeling my new Qosmio HD-DVD drive would be short-lived...

Argh - I had a feeling my new Qosmio HD-DVD drive would be short-lived...

More and more reports are trickling in and Toshiba shares climb as it seems they will drop HD DVD. It now said it is reviewing its business strategies. Toshiba Shares Climb Link

Analysts said that an end to the war meant Toshiba could refocus on other areas and the industry would gain too.

 

"There have been media reports that Toshiba will discontinue its HD DVD business," a Toshiba spokesman said.

 

"In fact, Toshiba has not made any announcement or decision. We are currently assessing our business strategies, but nothing has been decided at the moment."

I was reading speculation about it all .. and most people are syaing HD DVD is definitely gone and Blu Ray won the Battle ..

seems most think that Downloads will win the war though.

Makes me feel happy I have my Wifi DVD player .. which does everything that will be left.

I was reading speculation about it all .. and most people are syaing HD DVD is definitely gone and Blu Ray won the Battle ..

Looks that way still not REALLY REALLY official. Toshiba is still the hold-out PS3 was a major force for the win and Sony made a very good move - they made it real easy for people to get into blu-ray, xBox did not.

seems most think that Downloads will win the war though.

That is my thought also, it will be downloads. blu-ray may sneak in for a bit, but the battle hurt. Regular SD DVD sales had a downturn as people paused waiting for the next thing to take hold and I would guess that a portion of the same people know about downloads. Steve and others point out certain things that do make blu-ray attractive to some degree and if titles are released at better price points it may work to make a market since downloads are not quite there yet. The brick and mortars may try to keep it going, though there has been some rumblings that they also see the writing on the wall. It seems that everyday things are being improved are the download side - though I can think of some people around here who may have issues with download, though it is offset by living is cool places with great diving.

Makes me feel happy I have my Wifi DVD player .. which does everything that will be left.

I have an HD DVD Player solely because they were basically giving them away ($99 with three HD DVDs) a year ago at a trade show. At that point it looked to me like they were in trouble. Will probably also pick up a blu-ray player just to have one to fool around with, not sure if I will stock up on titles though. Maybe I should just get a PS3

And the most recent news, guess we will see very shortly, it is now Tuesday

After initially denying widespread media reports that it was dumping HD DVD, Toshiba is reportedly gearing up for an official announcement Tuesday that it is, in fact, planning to end production and sales of HD DVD players, reliable sources say.

 

Japan's Nikkei business daily says Toshiba also will announce plans to build new NAND factories in an effort to overtake Korea's Samsung Electronics Co. as the world's No. 1 manufacturer of NAND flash memory.

And it is now over

R.I.P. HD DVD, we heardly knew ye....

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.p...ft=1&f=1001

http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=1348

etc.

Too bad for HD DVD. They came out before Blu Ray, the picture quality is the same, HD DVD players were several hundred dollars cheaper and you could burn 30 minutes of full resolution 1080i footage onto a standard DVD with a standard DVD burner that would play on an HD DVD player.

I'm sure a players will still come out from China that plays both formats still for $99. Then all the big brand companies will have to follow as no one will buy their players. Maybe they will drop the price of blank HD DVD's to 99 cents too so people can make HD disks instead of having to pay $34 for one blu-ray disk. So the HD DVD format could survive but just for the small business and home makers.

It was a grave situation, people were dying to get in, but they needed a skeleton key to uncover the plot. I didn't have a ghost of a chance and had to bury all hope.

Steve B)

It was a grave situation, people were dying to get in, but they needed a skeleton key to uncover the plot. I didn't have a ghost of a chance and had to bury all hope.

 

Steve B)

So you think you are punny Mr. Steve?