Chinese want to create clone of all major innovations happen outside china to
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...

Is it weird that I read the quote in the 4th paragraph with a bad Chinese accent?
Does it make me a bad person?

THe 4th paragraph is written like a 1990's motherboard manual

Lol blu-ray is costly because it's not consumed enough dvd prices used to be blu-ray prices when it was transition years of vhs to dvd.

I heard something about 500gb disk coming out soon. I will take over blu ray.

" 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

Warner Bros wants to charge the Chinese 7-10 dollars for a high def movie and $30 for Americans, and they wonder why piracy is growing in the states. Piracy will continue to grow until they start charging reasonable prices. Its like buying an Intel extreme cpu they are way over priced so people don't buy them, they buy a cheaper one and pirate the extra speed by overclocking.

Blu-Ray is costly because of Sony, not low consumption. If we had educated consumers instead of lemmings, HD-DVD would have won out.

Neither is worth crap. Digital distribution is the only way to go for soooo many reasons. Unless we all get "capped"

I agree with michaelhess. Still Toshiba did shoot itself in the foot on HD DVD by not taking the actions it needed to soon enough.

Lemmings? Blu-ray is the superior technology. It won the war because people didn't want to make the same mistake they did back when VHS won. People care about quality now. Crazy, I know. But it doesn't matter because in a few years (if not sooner) digi-dist will prevail. I hate optical media ;P

Confucius say: You go to jail, bad boyyy!

Where can I pick one of these up? And digital distribution is not the way to go right now. Don't get me wrong, one day it will be, possibly in the next five years, but now it's too soon to claim. After all, they don't even have digital distribution of cd quality music yet, yet alone 1080p video. I'm sorry, but AAC and MP3 still don't come close to CD quality and FLAC hasn't caught on. Also, most Americans get less than 15Mbps and for Blu-ray quality video you need at least 30Mbps for real-time streaming, and at the speeds most people have it would take forever to download. Not to mention that High-def streaming on Netflix is still only stereo sound. For now the only viable format of digital distribution is illegal downloading on bit torrent.

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.

Why don't they just mp4 a blueraydisk, and put it on a 4,33GB DVD?
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!

CBHD will be just a China standard and perhaps spreading to India or South Asia, HK and Taiwan. The Asia market here is big enough for the folks in China to manufacture it. Just like Super VCD. there are some Jap model also support that...

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Blu-ray sucks. I'm still waiting on a next generation format. My humongous loud ass blu-ray player that was ridiculously overpriced and I have to go for a jog while it boots up can't possibly be "next generation." It's a travesty to all consumers that Sony and Friends were able to buy their way to a format victory.

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.

Ya they want to create their own version of thigns with LEAD and other dangerous additives

bloody copycats, stole the hd dvd technology and now producing it under their own name!

Technologically speaking, HDDVD was always the "superior" format, and it was manufacturer and cost friendly. Blu-Ray simply won out due to a huge marketing campaign and the massive gamble and financial loss (which still hasn't ended) that Sony took on the PS3. Without the PS3 though, there would have been a strong possibility that it would not have won out. At least this huge gamble panned out well for Sony though (for now). They still have to fend off digital and streaming content however, which that one they cannot. It is getting stronger every day, just as long as the ISP companies don't tighten down and start leeching off of the new fad.

Three things
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.

Sony paid off everyone to go Blu-ray & still trying to recoup the costs of doing so.
It's kind of funny that the #1 counterfeiter out there has to come up with their own format.

Call me naive, but isn't it true that Blu-Ray was a better format then HD-DVD?

I thought that Blu-Ray won primarily because of the PlayStation 3's distribution that made the hardware more readily available than of HD-DVD players.

You guys seem heavily anti-Sony if this is the case. Could be that you all bought stock in HD-DVD too. Anyway, correct me on this before I walk away with a negative opinion of the average Tom's reader!

Sorry if I sound negative, but I want that to replace the shitty blu-ray legal mess we have in the "western world".
Cheaper, easier to deal with, and won't have as many legal issues!

"Chinese want to create clone of all major innovations happen outside china to
have a control over it.

google clone, russian rockets, processor, even wifi security standards, ... list goes on.."

lol... pretty much like apple

lol, this is actualy quite funny as China already produce copy blu-ray disks and movies. I bought 2 of the same movies, one an original blu-ray and another a Chinese copy that cost exactly 1/4 the price and the image quality was indistiguishable on my 52" Sony. The only difference between them is that the copy is black/dark grey in color compared to the blue of the orig.

Lol, i guess its the players' cost that the chinese are worried about...
(I used a PS3)

Blu-Ray only won because of PS3 and marketing, which they lost a lot of money from.

Toshiba does not make a gaming system and Toshiba does not have a movie studio. Otherwise, video quality is the same, and HD-DVD's audio quality was superior. Not to mention that HD-DVD menus and web connectivity was much better too.

HD-DVD is also cheaper to implement. Blu-Ray is expensive because Sony refuses to lower prices and cut their loses. Can you blame smart people for hating on Sony?

I'd rather have HD-DVD Come back since I already have the player... though I do like being able to find the HDDVD movies, new, online for dirt cheap. I found NEW, Planet Earth for 20 dollars on HD-DVD and guess what different compared to the blu-ray version (70-110 bucks)... NOTHING.

Get rid of optics and start moving everything over to memory... Pretty soon, with all these different formats, cosumers are going to stop buying all new technology and just resort to stealing everything.

and for those of you that thought that Blu-Ray was the "superior" video format, you would be COMPLETELY wrong. HD-DVD and BD-DVD both use the EXACT SAME VIDEO CODEC (which is compressed and not raw). The reason that Blu-Ray got the win was because 1) the forums through its money around, with the false belief that everyone and their mother would buy one once the war was over. 2) BD-DVD has superior copy protection and 3)the distributors where promised larger profits from sales of BD-DVD since the cost of one disc (at that time) was $3.00 a disc instead of .$10 (hd-dvd) meaning that the BLU-RAY forum was under the impression that they could put a higher price tag on it and consumers would still thrive for it. WOW where they wrong... DVD sales picked up massively after Universal switched/was paid off to the Blu-ray. Blu-ray sales really haven't picked up anywhere close, even on their greatest selling movie (bat man), DVD sales where at least 4x's greater.

> and for those of you that thought that Blu-Ray was the "superior" video > format, you would be COMPLETELY wrong.

Yes, because it is not a video format. However, it is arguably a superior storage format. It has much more headroom than HD-DVD. Does it matter? Well, from a video buyer's perspective, not really. From a data user's perspective, though, it matters who wins the video war.

For the most part, I think movies would fit on HD-DVD. A format that would never have to span two discs is still preferable, though. Even if the codecs are equal, there isn't room on HD-DVD for uncompressed PCM in some cases. So the size actually affects the quality of the data that can be stored...even if theoretically they can both use identical codecs.

-Dan

I am pretty sure that HDDVD and Blu-Ray BOTH had 1080p@24/30hz and 5.1+ sound, but of course the "superior, more advanced" version had to be the one that cost the most, namely Blu-ray. So, regardless of if the picture actually looked any different, you guys seem to prefer rewriting history with your "more is better even if it's just the price" bullcrap. Good luck with that.

Blu-Ray WAS the better format for movies, but not by much. The only really significant advantage that Blu-Ray had was it's support for uncompressed audio.

On the other hand... HD-DVD was significantly ahead in the bonus features game, though recent updates to the Blu-Ray standard have negated most of them.

Overall... I think the right standard won, it's a bit more expensive now but long term it'll be as dirt cheap as dvd's became, and it's got more headroom for data storage.