Adam Carden • User • The Register Forums

Plunging player prices to reveal Blu-ray vs HD DVD winner?

Saturday 22nd December 2007 18:49 GMT Adam Carden

Physical Media

Everyone here keeps focusing on the physical media as this is what is being pushed and in that respect Blueray is the superior format.

However lets actually take a look at whats on the disc.

Blueray: MPEG2 - Lower quality, more artefacts, more space. However it will be easier to get lower in price as the hardware for the drive itself falls, there are plenty of MPEG2 decoders around and they cheap to manufacture. Due to Bluerays capacity they can deal with some of the quality problems via bitrate alone.

HD-DVD: MPEG4 - Higher quality (more modern compression algorithms), less artefacts, less space. However it will be harder to keep dropping the price on these due to the fact that MPEG4 decoding uses a massive amount of processing power, as an example a dual core 64bit processor with the best software decoding available today still takes around 60% of each cpu.

I Own: HD-DVD because I got it practically free when I swapped the XBOX 360 accessory pack for a HD-DVD addon and 5 HD-DVD's. Not that I evangelized HD-DVD at all and if Blueray starts to take a major major lead I will avail myself of a Blueray drive (which ever is cheaper a PS3 or standalone)

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Virgin Media network collapses nationwide

Wednesday 19th December 2007 05:20 GMT Adam Carden

Ex Telewest

Well the 'North' bit is complete rubbish, I live in south london and lost my cable connection from 21:30 on the 17th until at least 05:00 on the 18th.

Being ex telewest (cable) I used to suffer almost no downtime at all, however since Virgin have taken over I have suffered 10 outages so far, the service from my point of view is certainly degrading over time.

If the UK did not have such crappy providers accross the board I probably would have switched ISP's but even at Virgin's level it's still better than most...

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Dismantling a Religion: The EFF's Faith-Based Internet

Friday 14th December 2007 05:15 GMT Adam Carden

Funny That

I find it quite strange that americans think cable sucks, I find over here in good old blighty that what used to be Blueyonder (now consumed by NTL and rebranded) beats the pants of any available DSL connection, from what I used to hear the NTL cable while a poorer service that Blueyonder was/is superior again to any other DSL connection.

I suspect BT is probably the answer here with their poor network, when almost the whole country uses the BT backbone for DSL things are likely to be poor.

I am going to assume you have the opposite situation, almost everyone on cable leaving DSL to be a better option (when available)

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