HD-DVD's coming in March!

[WishMaster3K]

Re: HD-DVD's coming in March!

What about those in the HDDVD camp touting their superiority to BD. . . when they're Double-Sided? (le sigh) Novice mistakes make me hope that HDDVD gives up the ghost quick instead of hurting a lot of consumers and wasting a lot of resources and money. Toshiba should just give more money to curing cancer or something. . . Not competing with the best marketing force on the planet.

[Caspian]

Re: HD-DVD's coming in March!

What about those in the HDDVD camp touting their superiority to BD. . . when they're Double-Sided? (le sigh)

LOL, I know. Might as well just put it on two discs so I can look at neat artwork. If I'm gonna have to get up and flip the disc over what difference does it make. Unless they have a player that flips it for you, I really don't see the point.

[Caspian]

Re: HD-DVD's coming in March!

Sorry, been meaning to post this, just kept forgetting. Its dated 3/23

Well... we're certainly excited to finally get our hands on HD-DVD here at The Bits, and I know we're not alone. However, it's looking like it'll be a few more weeks before anyone gets to really kick the tires. In the wake of Warner delaying their initial HD-DVD titles until 4/18... Toshiba has now officially announced that it's delaying their first HD-DVD players too. The HD-A1 and HDX-A1 are now tentatively expected to arrive in stores in mid-April, to coincide with the release of Warner's first discs. All this means that the HD-DVD camp is losing more of its valuable first-to-market edge over Blu-ray Disc, which is expected to debut in May (with Lionsgate and Sony's first discs due on 5/23, along with players from Samsung and Pioneer). Toshiba's move has apparently forced a few retailers to pull advertising/media buys that had been planned for next week to promote the launch. You can read more on this at the link provided above (at Video Business), as well as here (at Home Media Retailing) and here (at ars technica).

View it here.

This begs the question: Why does MS keep making such crappy decisions on entertainment devices all of a sudden? Does Sony just tilt them off-center or what?

[WishMaster3K]

Re: HD-DVD's coming in March!

Keep the info coming! ;o

I think the timing with the PS is perfect, because it will delay hype, even from those in the camp that JUST want a BD player. The fact that the PS3 will be 1/3 the cost of average BD players is perfect, and it's also coming out around Holiday season. I'm not too worried (as a supporter of BD) about first-to-market, because they will be comparitively priced and have more or less the same content. But the fact that Sony might single-handidly swoop this rug from under Toshiba is quite foul.

[Caspian]

Re: HD-DVD's coming in March!

HD-DVD hit stores today. Same website has already had a chance to check it out and give a review here

Well, here we are on the first day of class with HD-DVD... and Toshiba has announced that initial sales of their HD-A1 HD-DVD players are strong (click here and here for more on that). In fact, many stores carrying the hardware sold out this weekend. I drove over to a local Best Buy store here in Orange County this morning, and sure enough... there were a few diehards waiting to throw down their money at 10 AM.

As luck would have it, I managed to secure a loaner HD-A1 to use this week, while we wait for Toshiba to ship us official review hardware. I've also got three pieces of review software... Warner's The Last Samurai and The Phantom of the Opera, and Universal's Serenity (Warner's Million Dollar Baby is due later this week - it's apparently slightly delayed and is not in stores yet). What I'm going to do now is just give you some initial thoughts. Rest assured, I'll be posting more detailed reviews later this week.

First, the player. The construction of Toshiba's HD-A1 is fairly solid - not as good as my Pioneer Elite DV-59AVi DVD player, for example, but still better than most other entry level players. Setup is very easy and intuitive. I've had trouble with other DVD players in the past - I'm using HDMI to drive a native 1080 LCD video projector, and typically most upscaling DVD players need you to go into the setup menu to activate the HDMI output and upscaling. The HD-A1, however, recognized the HDMI connection right out of the box - there was no need to hook it up to a regular display via component cables and go into the menu screen to turn on the HDMI. The setup menus themselves are very simple and easy to use - very few settings, if any, needed to be changed in order to start viewing the discs.

The player does have a couple of big downsides right off the bat, however. The first is that the remote is absolutely awful. Just really a mess. It's basically the same as the one that's going to be included in the more expensive HD-XA1, except that it's not backlit. BIG mistake. The button labels are impossible to read in the dark, and few of the controls on the remote are intuitively laid out. At least on the cheaper unit, they could have labeled the remote in brighter paint or something. It's a disaster.

The other major downside is the time it takes the player to get into operating mode. When you first turn on the player itself, it takes a full minute to boot up into a usable configuration. You can't even open the disc tray during that time. Very irritating. Once it's ready to go, however, and you insert a disc, it takes about another 30 seconds to boot up the software. Again, very irritating. Still, it's worth noting that this is the kind of thing that's only going to get better as newer firmware becomes available, and as second and third generations of hardware hit the market.

Speaking of firmware, the player is designed so that you can connect it to the Net via a standard broadband LAN port, which will allow you to make fast and easy firmware upgrades to the hardware... and I suspect there's going to be a lot of them needed to add full interactivity and functionality.

In terms of backwards compatibility, the player seems to handle existing DVDs and CDs well. Its upconversion of standard definition DVD video is quite good, but still not quite as good as my Pioneer DV-59AVi, at least on first impression. I haven't really had the time to test and compare this in any kind of depth, however, so don't take that as gospel. I'll let you know more when I do.

Now for the software. Universal's Serenity is basically a port of the existing DVD release, simply with the film in high-definition video and Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 audio. No offense to Joss Whedon fans, but I do sorely wish the first title I'd watched on HD-DVD was something other than this film. Still, the picture quality is absolutely spectacular - vibrant color, fantastic contrast and VERY few compression or processing artifacts (and if you watch a lot of broadcast HD video, you've no doubt seen a lot of those). It's just utterly clean and clear without being too crisp or edgy - a very natural looking and extremely pleasing image. I knew it was going to be impressive, but I'm still surprised at the sheer improvement over regular DVD, at least when viewed in a very large projection format. You notice so much more of the characteristics of the actual film medium rather than any kind of video aspects, which is as it should be. Warner's The Last Samurai is equally impressive in terms of video, though I haven't watched Phantom of the Opera yet (again, not a title I would have chosen to release first on HD-DVD, but what the hell).

The Dolby Digital Plus audio quality on these discs is also stellar, though again I have yet to Phantom of the Opera (which has Dolby TrueHD). The Plus audio is lovely - easily on par with the best DTS tracks I've listened to. In terms of the overall audio quality and experience, you wonder just how much better Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD could possibly sound... and how most people are going to possibly be able to appreciate the difference. I'll have more on this tomorrow, after I've had the time to check out the 2.0 TrueHD the Tosh player will allow on Phantom.

It's worth noting that, like current DVD discs, Serenity has a film-themed root menu. Hitting the 'menu' button on your remote takes you back out to that root menu where you can access all the features and options. Warner's discs, however, do NOT have any kind of root menu. When you start playing them, they simply go right into the movie. Hitting the 'menu' button brings up a menu overlay while the movie continues to play, from which you can select all of the various features via pop-up/sliding menus. It's very similar to how the start/program bar works in Windows XP, except that the look of the bar is themed to the film itself. I do, however, wish the discs had a main menu. Maybe it's just that I've gotten used to the way standard DVD works, but not to be able to pop out to a main menu seems... wrong somehow. Some combination of the way Universal's menus work, and the new menu overlay, would seem to be optimal. The extras I've seen so far are all in standard definition (and they're not anamorphic widescreen either), but I've only really dug through Serenity so far. I will tell you, however, that it's jarring to see the difference in quality going from well-compressed HD video to less well-compressed standard definition video.

One other irritating thing I've discovered about the hardware when playing the discs, is that when you change audio tracks on the fly, there's no on-screen graphic that notes what language you're changing to. So you can't tell what language you're in until someone starts speaking. The 'display' button does bring up a nice read-out of the audio format you're listening to, and what the particular codec and resolution of the video is, but there's still no language indication.

I should also tell you that Warner's discs boot into a little promo video for the format, that explains how the discs work (how to use the menu overlay, etc). Thankfully, you can skip past it. Warner's discs also include a promotional flyer touting some 50 titles that are coming for Summer 2006 to the format from the studio, including The Matrix, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Full Metal Jacket, The Perfect Storm, The Shawshank Redemption, Batman Begins, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Troy and The Dukes of Hazzard: Unrated.

Anyway, those are just my initial impressions. Overall, I would say that this is a pretty solid start for HD-DVD. I've experienced nothing so far that would, in theory, cause me to warn early adopters away from the format (other than what I've already said recently about the wisdom of waiting given the format war). And it's worth noting that even those things that I think are a little rough, less than fully functional and perhaps non-optimal about my HD-DVD experience so far, are all the same kinds of things I experienced in the very first DVD players and software way back in March of 1997. The picture and sound quality, as it stands, now is excellent and it's only going to get better. Of course, I expected no less from the HD-DVD launch... and I expect no less from Blu-ray Disc when it arrives in May/June.

I'm going to take the rest of the day to really soak all this in and try to process my thoughts more, so I'll have more to say about it tomorrow. I'll work on getting full reviews of the software posted over the next couple of days as well

So, usual stuff to expect from brand new hardware. Little buggy, few glitches and general slow run time etc. I figure it will, but I hope BD won't have the same issues. I guess what I can really hope for is that they'll have a lot of it figured out before PS3 hits the market.
Funny thing about the remote he talks about, I have a couple Toshiba dvd players and two Toshiba tv's (very few problems with any, I like the brand). Thing is both tv remotes are pretty nice, easy to find most buttons (except for the random crap like PiP and a few others). However, for the most part the layout on the dvd remotes flatout sucks. Nothing is where it should be, on one the cursor buttons are in a weird spot and you can't feel them out in the dark. Definately should give the boys at Sony a call on how to set up a dvd remote.

[Caspian]

Re: HD-DVD's coming in March!

Saw this today. From the same site: The Digital Bits. Kinda made me laugh. Really wanted to draw attention to this paragraph.

Before we go on, this has nothing to do with sore feelings about not getting hardware. Frankly, in talking with the PR agency, it just sounds as if there's not many review units available at the moment. What that tells us is just how seriously rushed the HD-DVD format launch has been. Toshiba, desperate to get HD-DVD onto store shelves before Blu-ray Disc, has stretched itself pretty thin. Buggy and less than fully-featured and compliant hardware, uneven PR support, lackluster software selection, VERY limited hardware and software availability at retail outlets... all of these things have resulted in a lot of frustration among early adopters and many in the early adopter press. Our own experience with HD-DVD here at The Bits has been a decidedly mixed bag thus far, and the reviews we've seen elsewhere in the press, along with the reports of our own readers who have purchased players and discs, seem to corroborate this. I'm not ready to declare the HD-DVD format launch a disaster... but it's been significantly less smooth than we (and, I suspect, the HD-DVD camp - despite enthusiastic press statements to the contrary) might have hoped, and far less smooth than the current DVD format's launch was back in March of 1997.

This just made me laugh. Remember that Microsoft is one the main backers of this format. Apparently they learned nothing from the 360 release and are still trying to make an impact with an early release rather than getting good, quality, bug free equipment out the door when its actually ready. I also still think the movies they've released so far just seem odd when you want to attract customers who want dazzling visuals and stunning audios. Sony seems to have a slightly better grasp of that with them releaseing The Fifth Element right out of the box. From what I can tell, most early adopters (as well as most people more into big home theatres and such) seem to be more into action movies and scifi and the like than other people. Anyway, BD is getting closer, looking forward to see how it will stack up. Ready for my PS3 so I can see it all for myself.

[Macht]

Re: HD-DVD's coming in March!

Lol, man that's a riot. HD-DVD shoots their foot and what do they do? KEEP PULLING THE TRIGGER!

Guess they figure eventually one of those bullets will miss... well yeah I guess it will once the foot is completly gone!

[Caspian]

Re: HD-DVD's coming in March!

I think the psychological term for it is 'denial'.
Its not just a river in Egypt ya know.

[Caspian]

Re: HD-DVD's coming in March!

Welp, BD is here. Same website I always link to has started doing a little testing on it. First impressions? Not very good. But its what was expected. View the website here.

Well... I've had my first experience with Blu-ray Disc, and Samsung's BD-P1000 Blu-ray Disc player. For the record, I have four titles on hand... The Fifth Element and The Terminator (from Sony and MGM) and Lord of War and Crash (from Lionsgate).

You know how I keep saying that these formats are being rushed to market about a year before they're ready? And you recall how hard I was on the HD-DVD camp for their klutzy launch and buggy hardware? And you know how I said that Blu-ray Disc looked like the superior format, at least on paper? Well... unfortunately, the Blu-ray camp has dropped a dud with their big launch too. Every bit as klutzy as HD-DVD. Think Clark Kent klutzy, or Gerald Ford klutzy, or Chevy Chase playing Gerald Ford klutzy.

Let's start with the Samsung player. Nice box, nice packaging. You pull the BD-P1000 out of said packaging and it looks pretty badass. Love the lines. It's a much nicer looking player than Toshiba's HD-A1, though it's lighter and feels a little less solid. The BD-P1000's remote is nicer too... not backlit unfortunately, but it feels better in your hand and the buttons are laid out more conveniently.

Connection via HDMI is pretty easy. You fire the BD-P1000 up and the first thing you notice is a sexy blue glow from the various openings on the player. Nice... except I have yet to find a dimmer. And it's just a little too bright, you know? Anyway... the player fires up very quickly. You get a welcome screen within about 5 seconds of power-on. BIG improvement over the Tosh HD-DVD player. You can load a disc after less then 30 seconds, also an improvement over the Tosh. I also like that when it's loading or thinking, you get a little onscreen icon to let you know, rather than just nothing. At least you feel like the thing is doing something. For whatever reason, the player defaults to 720p output via HDMI... you have to go into the setup menu to select 1080i. Okay, so that's what I did.

Now it's time to look at my first Blu-ray Disc. Naturally, my hand swerved towards The Fifth Element. The title was an amazing bit of reference work on standard DVD, and that Superbit version was awesome. Obvious choice, right? Should look amazing in HD. Yeah... it should. But it doesn't. In fact... I'm not going to come out and say it looks like crap, but it is easily the worst looking high-definition title I've seen yet, and I've seen 30+ titles now. The image is muddy looking, lacking in crisp, clean detail. The colors don't quite pop off the screen like they should. Just a mess. Okay... I will say it. It looks like crap. Sony should never have released this title like this. In fact, they should be embarrassed about this disc. Seriously, if you compare the upscaled Superbit standard-definition DVD to this, the Blu-ray Disc looks only marginally better. This should have been a reference title in high-def and it's not even in the ball park. My brow furrowed in troubled surprise at this point. Wow... and not the good kind.

Next, I tried The Terminator. A big improvement. This is easily the best quality I've ever seen The Terminator looking before. Still... it's a little bit soft and gritty looking, but then it's an older film and that's the nature of the film stock used. The disc is very good looking, but not blow-you-away good. In any case, this is probably not the best title to test the video quality of Blu-ray Disc, so let's move on.

Now these two Lionsgate titles... they're much better looking. Crash and Lord of War have significantly improved clarity, crisp yet clean detail, vibrant color... they're much more like what I expected Blu-ray Disc would look like. Both have a more film-like image. And yet...

There are some problems I'm seeing right away with all of the Blu-ray Disc titles on the BD-P1000. First, when I switch to 1080i, I'm noticing some very obvious scaling issues that I don't see when the player is set to 720p. I also don't see anything like this on the Toshiba HD-A1 at any resolution, so this is specific to THIS player, which may be why Samsung ships it with 720p set by default. Second, I'm noticing a very slight "studdering" problem. About once a second, or maybe once every few seconds, the video seems to hesitate for just a instant - a tiny fraction of a second. You notice it most when the images on screen are moving quickly, or when the camera is panning. It may be that this issue is related to the first. Still trying to figure out what I'm seeing here. Lionsgate's Lord of War was the title where I noticed it first, and I'll have to check them all before knowing whether it's just this title or all of the discs. Again, it's not something I've seen on any HD-DVD titles thus far.

By the way, I haven't tested the Samsung's standard DVD upconversion capability to any real degree yet. Just FYI.

If I had to compare my initial impressions of Blu-ray Disc to those of HD-DVD... well, I certainly need to see more Blu-ray titles and spend more time with the player. I'm really just giving you my initial, off-the-cuff comments, based on less than 10 hours of viewing time with the Samsung. It's worth noting that we've only seen one player for each format, so it's hard to say what issues are specifically related to the players, and what are format related. But right now... I think I may end up giving Round One of this format war to HD-DVD, and that surprises the hell out of me. Sure, that Tosh HD-DVD player was a lemon until the firmware upgrade, but it's worked like a charm since. And the first 25 or so HD-DVD discs I've viewed just look better overall than the first 4 Blu-ray Discs I've seen. The HD-DVDs also have a LOT more extra features than the Blu-ray Discs (even if you consider that most of the extras are recycled from standard DVD). For the record, Terminator on Blu-ray has 7 deleted scenes and 2 featurettes, recycled from standard DVD. Fifth Element has a pop-up trivia track, again from the standard DVD. The Lionsgate titles have nothing. I keep hearing these comments (both official and unofficial) from Blu-ray execs saying that they're leaving off the extras so they can give all the extra disc space over to the best video quality possible. Which tells me that Blu-ray is having major disc space problems. I've heard from more than a few industry sources that Blu-ray is having trouble getting the dual-layered BD media to work, which means that discs with lots of extras and good video quality aren't an option now. It also means that longer movies aren't an option now either. Both are problems for this format that don't seem to be troubling HD-DVD at the moment - at least not at first glance, based on the initial title offering.

What all of this goes to prove, of course, is just what I've been saying all along: These formats are being rushed to market before they're ready. And it also proves that the best option for the vast majority of you out there is just to save your money. Don't even bother with Blu-ray Disc and HD-DVD for at least a year, because there are significant bugs to be worked out yet. Wait until better hardware and software is available at a better price, and the early adopter types have dealt with the problems and getting the manufacturers and studios to fix them. Anyway, I'll have more to say about Blu-ray Disc and the Samsung player in the next few days, as I spend a little more time with it. But so far, I'm less than impressed.

[Macht]

Re: HD-DVD's coming in March!

Welp, BD is here. Same website I always link to has started doing a little testing on it. First impressions? Not very good. But its what was expected. View the website here.

Really though compare it launch to how the HD-DVD was the BR was a bit smoother and look at the issues it has at launch are less. I'd ignore his comment about his first 4 not comparing to the first 25 of the other, that's pure opinion and could easily change from person to person (Seriously review places and such really need to work on being unbias).

So overall the only real problems that can be possible attributed issues are:

Dimmer for players glow
1080i scaling issue (easily software/firmware related)
Slight skipping (probably the only potentially serious issue, if this is hardware related and not just bad firmware that can be a major problem)

Last two could even be interrelated, 1080i scalling because of bad coding and bad coding straining the system causing the skipping. So could just need better firmware and solves that. Compare that to Toshiba's HD-DVD and Blu-Ray seems to be off on a better foot.

[Caspian]

Re: HD-DVD's coming in March!

Yeah, I think he had kind of higher expectations for BD and was disappointed when it wasn't clearly better. I'm waiting until ps3 anyway, so they should have a lot of this taken care of by then.

[WishMaster3K]

Re: HD-DVD's coming in March!

Yes, because Sony pwns all of us. I'm in the process of replacing my Maxwell CDRWs with Sony >.>

And my nasty Panasonic TV with a Sony TV <.<

And my stoopid Dell with a Sony.

Oh, what about the Laptops with BD players in them? Have those been tested?

[Macht]

Re: HD-DVD's coming in March!

Yes, because Sony pwns all of us. I'm in the process of replacing my Maxwell CDRWs with Sony >.>

And my nasty Panasonic TV with a Sony TV <.<

And my stoopid Dell with a Sony.

Oh, what about the Laptops with BD players in them? Have those been tested?

As long as sony is using an AMD processor with a Western Digital HD and Nvidia chipsets I'd say go for it. My PC isn't a Sony, it isn't Alienware, or anything like that but it's a quite decent game system. In comparison to ones my brother bought thinking they were good for gaming and what my Uncle (Who ironically is has a PE in electronics and works for Dell) thought were good gaming systems it totally kicked both their butts. To bad I can strip that P.E. degree from him starting to feel like I deserve it more then he does.

Then again could just be an ego issue, who knows....

[WishMaster3K]

Re: HD-DVD's coming in March!

Tell him you're 96% nerdier than he is and he will bow to your mochismo.

Moving on, both formats were lackluster, but long term thinking-

Well, Sony hasn't released THEIR player yet, and we all better hope that the PS3 is a pretty damn good BD Player, or we'll be stuck with it for an unnecessarily [long time].

And if I'm not mistaken, Phil Harrison said that Sony/MGM make up for 50% of the movies shot in color >.>

That's a lot of movies. Oh, what company has been making the Marvel movies lately? That's a dumb question, nevermind. Sony had SpiderMan incorporated in thier PS3 demo at last years E3.

Ok, well a better question is which production company do Batman Begins and Superman fall under? I'd LOVE to have those bad babies in HDTV.

[Eohmer]

Re: HD-DVD's coming in March!

Aren't Blu-Ray drives/players for PC coming out before the other hardware type?