Euro HD DVD camp clams up on format sales figures

The European HD DVD Promotional Group has refused to back up claims that the next-generation optical disc format it's backing is the movie buff's favourite by revealing how many HD DVD players have been bought over here. Register Hardware asked it this question because earlier this week the organisation announced that numbers …

[James]

Surely GfK must know

In order to work out that 3.8 discs per player have been sold, they must have taken the total number of discs sold and divided it by the total number of players sold? If both figures aren't included in the study then surely there's no proff it's anything but smoke and mirrors?

[Anonymous Coward]

I still don't

...see the advantage of paying premium bucks for what mostly old, bad, or old & bad movies in high def while drowning in DRM.

[Alex]

have to agree...

Have now got both the HD DVD drive for the Xbox and a PS3. It's much a muchness (so to speak) and really can't see either having a vastly stronger hold over the other.

Still, just because there are more PS3s around doesn't mean it's the winner... Watchers will probably pick a format due to the films available rather than what format they are on. Could see this as a 'Studios' battle rather than a format battle.. maybe, maybe not. Either way, I'll be happy with either format, or more probably a device that plays both (don't see how this will be sorted.. see it as a 7" vs 12" battle but with differing stylus needed.... god I feel old right now...)

[ssu]

Upcoming 'cheap' HD DVD players as well

The cheaper PS3 should help the BluRay sales. But Toshiba have the EP30(£200 online) and EP35(£270 online) coming out next week which may also help HD DVD sales - both bundled with 7 HD DVDs.

BTW do these figures include the films that have been bundled free with players?

[Mark]

The new formats do nothing for me

It was introduced purely for the benefit of the media companies.

Hi-Def video can be stored easily on a DVD9 for a movie and the 50GB or whatever is patently overkill: if they filled the 50GB with worthwhile "content" it would be so expensive nobody would buy it.

The only reason for the new format is so that they can redo DVD CSS and add even more problems for us, the putative customer.

And for this new format benefiting the studios, we have to

pay more for the player

pay more for the disk

pay more for the TV

pay more for the connections

have less use

No wonder the format is failling.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bluray outselling HDDVD 71%:29%, Nielsen

Nielsen Videoscan to the rescue:

http://www.engadgethd.com/2007/11/09/nielsen-videoscan-high-def-market-share-for-week-ending-november/

The lead of Bluray over HDDVD disc sales seems to have increased.

[Anonymous Coward]

re: have to agree

"Watchers will probably pick a format due to the films available rather than what format they are on"

I disagree with that. I bought a PS3 (for games more than Blu-Ray but it definitely entered in to the equation) and there's no way I'm ever going to buy a HD-DVD disc AND a new player to play it unless Blu-Ray completely disappears... If it's a film I want comes out that isn't on Blu-Ray I'll simply buy it on DVD rather than buy another player.

I imagine a lot of PS3 owners are like me, if they want a film it'll be Blu-Ray or DVD all the way.

[Anonymous Coward]

93% of players sold are Blu Ray

Hey I just realized we can estimate player sales.

71% of discs sold are Blu ray, at 0.6 discs per player.

29% of discs sold are HD DVD discs at 3.8 discs per player.

Gives 118.3 blu ray players vs 7.6 HD DVD players.

Or 93% of the players sold are Blu Ray players.

[Anonymous Coward]

The sales are up and down

The sales go up and down on a weekly basis I look at the chart at the top of http://www.bluwars.com because this lists the nielsen numbers which are the most accurate sales numbers so far

[Chris]

@ Mark

Are you sure a 2+ hour film with 7.1 Uncompressed audio will fit onto a single DVD9? I can't see how, I thought 1080p was around 4 times the size of 480p?

[Joe Stalin]

Which...neither

If you put a gun to my head I'd go for Blu-ray as it appears to do playback at 24 fps, the way movies are supposed to run.

Just one prob, Blu-ray is backed by Sony and I can live without the root kit thank you very much.

But I'll wait 'til I can get a player for under 50 bucks and the disks are under a tenner, then I really decide.

[vincent himpe]

hd-dvd

toshiba hd-dvd player on sale at costco 169 $ ...

sony blueray player on sale at costco 449 $.

gues which one will get bought for christmas ...

[Sean Aaron]

end of physical media for film...

Unless one of these formats takes off it will probably be the end of the road for physical media sales of films in HD. The studios are already looking forward to a pay-per-view future; lack of interest in next-gen media by the general public would justify any decision to keep the keys to the HD palace.

[Salvatore Inglima]

Are you happy with your HD equipment ?

I bought the Samsung BDP1000 in august and so I was fortunate enough to learn new concepts such as "Mechanical Turkey" and playback stutter. Impossibilty to read brand new discs (I have upgraded the firmware twice) has made me decide after two weeks to promote the player to the loft.

My son bought himself a Sony PS3 to use with a seven year old old NEC 4250W plasma in component with results too good to be credible. Unfortunately compatibility issues with the plasma doesn't allow for PAL dvds to be visualized but only (and not all NTSC dvds).

Combined with the Panasonicc PTAE900 VPR though, the results are so stunning either in DVD as in Blu Ray that I wonder that if I should upgrade to full HD will I be able to appreciate the difference.

Another question is that my impression (having tried three other players- including Toshiba HD-DVD- in shops) and having read a few opinions, that the playstation is at the moment the only player out there that has fast and reliable access, seamless stutterless playback with all dvds and blu ray discs as far as today. I am saying that I believe the only stand-alone player worth buying at the moment is Sony PS3. Am I right? And if so, isn't that a bit too little for the industry to hope changing costumer attitude.

[Joerg]

Everyone is buying Blu-Ray hardware, that's the point.

Just look at how many manufacturers are releasing HD-DVD drives and burners for PCs. Practically none. Just some slim type Toshiba units for notebooks and the XBox360 USB2 add-on.

It's practically impossible to buy HD-DVD burners and media on the market. Manufacturers have been producing Blu-Ray burners since the beginning, media is getting cheaper and cheaper. The recently announced 4-layer 200GB Blu-Ray capable discs that could be compatible with current hardware at least at the reading level is just going to increase popular demand.

It's all about available space in the first place. The best optical format is the one which offers more space and since 500GB-1TB holographic discs are still far away, then Blu-Ray is the best option for the years to come.

And 90% of those buying a PS3 are going to use it as a Blu-Ray player and as soon as Sony will have included more codecs and containers support, the DiVX one has just been announced, it will start selling more among HTPC enthusiasts and those usually buying or wanting to buy mediaplayers like Netgear EVA8000,Pixel Magic MediaBox, TViX 5100/4100 and similar units. If Sony adds more support then the PS3 sold for multimedia playback purpose will just increase and so more actual Blu-Ray movie players will be on the market.

Many people are selling their HD-DVD XBox360 units nowadays... and more PS3 40GB are getting bought overall... more BD-ROM players are going to be released on the market for PCs .. Toshiba lacks manufacturers support in the first place. Manufacturers prefer Blu-Ray technology and that is only good for people because it's the technology offering more space to end users.

[Joerg]

@Mark: What ? HDTV on 9GB ? Not even H.265 will do that...

...and I mean it. H.265 currently in early development/proposition stages is supposed to achieve no more than a 50% better compression over H.264, so 9GB won't cut it anyway.

If you are referring to x264 opensource encoded rips floating on the 'net of HDTV contents at a low bitrate... do you really believe that there is no decrease in quality ? Then you're just wrong. Lower the bitrate, higher the artifacts. H.264 is the best codec so far but it's no magic, it still has to obey signal theory and compression rules.

50GB it's the bare minimum to achieve some true studio quality HDTV video streams by using the maximum allowed bitrate. Let's hope Blu-Ray dominates and studios will start re-releasing movies in the 4-layer 200GB Blu-Ray format in the next couple years. H.264 with that much space would really lower compression artifacts so much that only on future OLED displays and current very expensive professional projectors anyone could notice any artifacts.

[Frank Bough]

Title

DVD-9 isn't big enough for high-def - have a look at Disney's recent Pirates of the Caribbean BDs - the AUDIO ALONE weighs in at 6.9Mbps!

Crap film, but that 24bit PCM surround is what I want - and the 1920x1080 H.264 picture is nothing to be sniffed at, either.

[Anonymous Coward]

Some actual figures

Back in early September, a French site published standalone player sales for UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Switzerland.

Turns out sales since inception through June were...

...drum roll...

13,186 HD DVD and 5,469 Blu-ray players!!

No wonder they don't want anybody to see those figures. They are embarrassing!

Link: http://www.cinemotion.biz/informacion.php?iinfo=285

[Anonymous Coward]

So 95% of disc players are PS3s?

Assuming those numbers are correct from that French site that means that almost all of the current high res discs players sales are PS3s.

Something like 95% (bigger than the 93% in order to swing the unit sales firmly in Sony's favour and counter the stand alone unit sales).

[Scott Mckenzie]

PS3

The PS3 is the only saviour of Blu Ray.... it probably is the best one out there at the moment, it has the most frequent updates etc mainly because it's easier to do and it's backed by Sony, the people backing the entire product.

For me HD-DVD is the better bet, due to the fact it has proper standards, from the start...

But we'll see!

[Mark W]

US Discs

You all seem to forget a little thing called 'Region Coding'. It was the one sticking point with DVD's which made quite a few people lots of money to 'region free' your machines until most DVD manufacturers built in a simple remote control hack.

HD-DVD's are, by design, region free. I also happen to have a region free DVD player ('adjusted' Panasonic DVD-R).

So I can buy my daughter 'Ratatouille' which is already out on DVD in the USA and play it on my DVD player here at 480p. I don't think it's finished in the Cinema here in the UK. And although it's rarer now, it still happens quite alot, and I still buy the odd DVD from the USA, or HD-DVD.

However if I had a PS3 or UK Blu-Ray player, I couldn't buy the US Blu-Ray copy of Ratatouille and play it in my player because it won't play. And worse luck if I try to amend or 'hack' the player to do so, it reputedly has the option to brick the player as the player occasionally authorises the playback online and updates encryption keys.

Compare that to the HD-DVD of Shrek 3 which I've also had for a couple of weeks also from the USA, which comes out next week, and plays quite nicely at 720p on my Xbox360's HD-DVD drive (as does the full series of Heroes which I also have on HD-DVD which has been out in the USA for months).