Selling any sort of media is tough in China due to piracy.
Blu-ray Disc has yet to take off in China due to a couple of factors. One being price, with Blu-ray players costing many times that of a DVD player. Pirated movies in China are predominantly on DVD and cost just a fraction of what a legitimate copy would cost.
Even pirated high-definition movies that are meant to play on Blu-ray players are pressed on regular DVDs. Such DVDs contain recompressed and downsampled versions of the original encode from a Blu-ray Disc, but possess image quality noticeably better than regular DVD thanks to using a more advanced codec.
But Blu-ray Disc may have more than just piracy to contend with in cracking the Chinese market. China now also has its own high-definition disc format called China Blue High Definition (CBHD), which is backed by the China High-definition DVD Industry Association (CHDA), as well as the Optical Memory National Engineering Research Center. Interestingly enough, the technology shares similarities with HD DVD, so CBHD is also backed by the DVD Forum.
Like HD DVD, CBHD discs have a capacity of 30 GB and can use existing DVD production lines. According to Gizmag’s report, the CHDA boasts: “(The) CBHD disc can be compatible with the DVD disc in physical format so that they can share production lines. It is well known that China is the country with the largest yield of DVD discs. Chinese manufacturers produce around ten billion DVD optical discs every year, which is about 30 percent of global yield.”
Does this mean that movie pirates will take to CBHD better than it has to Blu-ray Disc? After all, legitimate or not, producing a Blu-ray Disc requires new production hardware.
Consumers, on the other hand, will definitely need new hardware. CBHD players are expected to cost 40 percent less than current Blu-ray Disc players, largely thanks to the difference in licensing fees.
Gizmag reports that Warner Bros. is on-board the format with plans to release 100 CBHD titles in China this year, such as the Harry Potter, The Golden Compass and Speed Racer selling for between $7.25 and $10.15 (50-70 Yuan).
Neither is worth crap. Digital distribution is the only way to go for soooo many reasons. Unless we all get "capped"
Does it make me a bad person?
have a control over it.
google clone, russian rockets, processor, even wifi security standards, ... list goes on...
why should others buy Chinese made stuff? Think about it...
Does it make me a bad person?
THe 4th paragraph is written like a 1990's motherboard manual
" GE microholographic storage promises cheap 500GB discs, Blu-ray and DVD compatibility "
"Ah, holographic storage -- you've held so much promise for cheap optical media since you were first imagined in research papers published in the early 60s. Later today, GE will be trying to keep the dream alive when it announces a new technique that promises to take holographic storage mainstream. GE's breakthrough in microholographics -- which, as the name implies, uses smaller, less complex holograms to achieve three-dimensional digital storage -- paves the way for players that can store about 500GB of data on standard-sized optical discs while still being able to read DVD and Blu-ray media. Better yet, researchers claim a price of about 10 cents per gigabyte compared to the nearly $1 per gigabyte paid when Blu-ray was introduced. The bad news? We're talking 2011 or 2012 by the time microholographics devices and media are introduced and even then it'll only be commercialized for use by film studios and medical institutions. In other words, you'll likely be streaming high-def films to your OLED TV long before you have a microholographic player in the living room."
from engadget
Neither is worth crap. Digital distribution is the only way to go for soooo many reasons. Unless we all get "capped"
Russell Peters quote ftw.
As for CBHD, I actually would agree upon this innovation. Bluray is too expensive to implement in China, the CBHD actually makes more sense and is more cost effective. Both the HD DVD and Bluray uses the same compression techniques. So if the CBHD uses HD DVD compressions, their quality will be almost the same as a Bluray.
So, in the Chinese standpoint it makes more sense to go with the cheaper alternative. If the CBHD couldn't be read in North America or any other regions, this format just made it regioned and of course, publishers will love it.
MP4 compared to MP2 takes up a lot less space.
delete some audio tracks, and screeners / trailers / behind the scenes, and you could compress a 60 minutes HD movie to 2GB with ease!
Sounds like apple.
Tayb go say it again to someone else. I personaly love bluray. Course i wasnt stupid enough to buy a new format out of the gate but hey. i didnt even buy a dvd for some years after it came out. The only player i thought was any good for a first run was the large mini disk player.
1. Compressing the information that resides on a Blue-ray even further would degrade the information. Not that it isn't already compromised but you have to realize that the compression is already 20x to 30x. Try compressing that even more and you will really be loosing information. (Unless a new way of compressing information comes along...)
2. One of the reasons that it takes so long for the Blu-ray player to initialize is all the crazy DRM and copy protection stuff that is built into it. Besides the money that was thrown around, the extra layer of copy protection built into Blu-ray players was a reason they won the battle with HD DVD.
3. Digital distribution may become a factor when the new level of technology is implemented. New multiplexing? for cable or FiOS. The stuff they distribute now as HD is no where near true HD. Go back and look at some of the original HD wmv files Mircosoft posted when they were bringing that out. 100-200MB for 1-3mins of video. Now they are going to try and tell me that a 1-2 GB file will hold a movie. Not happening.