The Format War Is Over. Blu-Ray Wins.

Toshiba to abandon HD DVD

The Yomiuri Shimbun
yomiuri.co.jp

Toshiba Corp. will abandon its HD DVD format, likely resulting in the victory of Sony Corp. and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.'s competing Blu-ray, in the duel between the new high-definition DVD formats, it was learned Saturday.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., operator of 4,000 outlets in the United States and the world's largest retailer, announced Friday that it would stop selling HD DVD players and recorders.

According to sources close to Toshiba, the firm will hold a board meeting in the near future to formally decide to abandon production of HD DVD recorders and players and other related accessories.

Toshiba is likely to maintain sales of HD DVD recorders and players for a while, but is expected to stop producing players for personal computers and recorders for televisions, and drop the development of new products.

In the battle over next-generation DVD formats, the Toshiba-backed HD DVD has faced off with the Sony-Matsushita-supported Blu-ray, with major U.S. film companies in the middle, for market share to make their formats the global standard.

However, the two formats are incompatible, prompting consumers to adopt a wait-and-see stance while refraining from purchasing players and recorders in either format until the duel concludes.

Technologically and economically, HD DVD format has remained in an inferior position relative to Blu-ray--which is backed by a consortium of Sony, Matsushita Electric Industrial, Hitachi Ltd. and Sharp Corp.--because Toshiba has failed to attract other major consumer electronics companies to its side.

Before last year's Christmas and year-end sales season, the two sides were neck and neck in terms of the number of film titles released in either format, with about 370 titles on the market by then.

However, during the sales season, when both sides engaged in an all-out competition for recorder sales, Blu-ray format recorders dominated more than 90 percent of the domestic market, smashing the HD DVD format.

Last month, U.S. major film company Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. announced it would only release movies in the Blu-ray format, meaning that four of the six major U.S. film studios are backing the Blu-ray format.

In addition, Wal-Mart followed suit Friday. These moves helped the Blu-ray format cement its dominant position over HD DVD.

Toshiba had fought back with major price reductions of its HD DVD recorders and players in the U.S. and European markets, but failed to turn the tide.

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TchuBacha said:

Did any really believe HD DVD would win this war?

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-- OK. You've just bought your new $1300 Sony BDP-S2000ES BD player and you want to connect it to your router so you can access movie-related online content. Oooops!! That's right. It DOESN'T have an Ethernet port because THAT standard hasn't been finalized yet. My $200 Toshiba A30 has a port on it for this purpose because the HDi standard was finalized back in 2004.

The port on your PS3 is useless since, because of the lack of a finalized standard, there isn't any menu navigation FOR online content.

-- 38% of BD movies are STILL encoded using MPEG2 while almost ALL HD-DVDs use AVC or VC-1 because those are way more efficient with the limited storage of HD-DVD.

-- HD-DVD has NO region encoding and CP ( copy protection ) is a SINGLE layer AND optional. BD has regions AND TWO layers of CP.

-- Java ( BD-J ) is such a mis-match for video content that a SECOND set of processing chips ( Profile 1.1 ) are needed JUST to view a PiP window. HD-DVD has no such trouble.

-- Making a 50GB BD disc is a VERY complex process so BD is effectively limited to 25GB. Making a 30GB dual layer BD-DVD is as simple as making a dual layer DVD and the yields are well over 80%. The yields for a SINGLE layer BD are 80% at best and dual layer is around 40%. That is a terrible waste of materials in order to produce a playable disc.

-- A 27GB HD-DVD encoded using VC-1 or AVC is going to look way better than a 23GB BD encoded with MPEG2. Case in point -- Fifth Element -- that was SO bad that disc owners demanded Sony re-encode that one.

-- The ONLY thing BD has over HD-DVD is capacity, which depends heavily on whether studios want to do a 50GB disc. That is why the 50GB movies are $35 to $40 even with the $4 incentive that Sony pays to duplicators. That incentive runs out in May so expect disc prices to go up accordingly.

-- My Toshiba HD-A30 loads a disc in under 30 seconds while a Blu-ray disc placed in my Denon 2500BTci ( a $1000 dumb player ) takes an average of 70 seconds.

-- Watching French porn on my region A BD player is going to be a problem. I guess I have to get the HD-DVD versions of those.

-- Manufacturers have to purchase NEW production lines and test equipment to produce BD. We are talking $3 million per line so don't hold your breath expecting prices to come down any time soon. Standard DVD lines purchased after 2005 can switch to HD-DVD production in 5 minutes. No addition expense needed unless they want to spend an additional $25k per DVD machine for the clear coat module. More machines = more space and I can tell you that the co. I work for can only add 4 BD lines before a physical expansion is needed.

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Betamax was better? I though betamax was utter shite because the casette constantly jammed in the machine, which gave VHS the edge.

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