Comments on: Daily Blog – John E. Johnson, Jr. – February 29, 2008: THE FUTURE OF HD DVD PLAYERS.

By: Maurice J

Maurice J — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 15:26:03 +0000

Toshiba can do the same as Pioneer did with their Laserdisc combo player and make it available for purchase on its website. Or if BD decides to max the encoding on the disc, make final spec players available, and price the disc the same as DVD then those HD DVDs will be reissued as BDs and you can upgrade to a better disc. For me Bluray must do this because I won’t pay the higher cost since the “war” is over. But I will take advantage of BOGOF on titles I want if Amazon has one again.
It’s the same thing that was done with LD and DVD disc as the technology advanced and features were added for value. A way to get you to spend your money and feel good about it. I feel good about the money I saved on HD DVD and some BD.

By: John Johnson

John Johnson — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 04:53:27 +0000

Well, I suspect the reason that the studios are so much more concerned about copies of movies getting spread around is that movies cost a hundred million dollars to produce, while a recording is about a hundred thousand dollars.

By: Kieran

Kieran — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 04:27:10 +0000

Thank you for talking about it! I agree with you. I remember in the late 90′s, tools that allowed you to rip an audio CD were hard to find, and often sites that hosted the software were taken down in a matter of days. Now, it has become entirely commonplace to rip one’s CD collection to mp3 or some other compressed audio format, for use on portable music players, or on a media server. I know a lot of people who’ve recently been transferring their entire CD collection to a lossless codec format on their media servers. Why is this exact same action taboo, when it’s done with movies? Hopefully, the day will come soon when ripping your video disc collection (dvd / brd /hddvd) to your hard drive is as common and as acceptable as doing so with CDs is today.

Last year, I traveled a LOT for work. I would bring my laptop with me, and I would enjoy watching movies on it during the evenings. Thing is, I didn’t want to bring 5 or so DVDs with me, and risk breaking them or scratching them in my luggage. But a ripped DVD took too much room on my laptop’s small HDD. Compressing the videos to DivX or XviD format worked great. A 4GB movie could be shrunk to ~1GB with no loss in quality (especially when viewed on a laptop screen), and I could fit several movies on my laptop to last me for the week without taking too much working space from my HDD.