* Posts by Seri

3 publicly visible posts • joined 30 May 2007

Paramount poised to drop HD DVD

Seri
Alert

@matt piechota - you're confirming my point... no?

Matt, the section you quoted is what I was saying that "There is the potential for the specification to be revised at a later time to incorporate some form of RPC but there would be no requirement for any of the manufacturers to issue an update to the players".

All they are doing in the paragraph you quoted is making a nod in the direction of RPC, but nowhere is RPC defined.

Seri
Unhappy

Misguided answers on both sides

Firstly, sorry Alphaman but your answer about region coding on HD-DVD's is wrong. The current HD-DVD specification (v1.0) which is the one in use by all HD-DVD manufactures since the initial release of HD-DVD (both discs and players) does not have any specification for any form of regional playback control.

There is the potential for the specification to be revised at a later time to incorporate some form of RPC but there would be no requirement for any of the manufacturers to issue an update to the players, and, as the HD-DVD specification explicitly states that subsequent versions of the specification must not make older players and implementations obsolete, I doubt that we will see RPC on HD-DVD in action.

At the moment only a very small fraction of Blu-Ray discs have regional playback control, however, 100% of the players have the implementation of it in place. This means that once the format war is over then the studios can release RPC enabled discs and then we'll be in the same place that we currently are with regular DVD's.

As for the Blu-Ray specification being complete, this is "technically" true. The specification for Blu-Ray is complete and has been since release, unfortunately, Blu-Ray doesn't call the player implementation as "specification" they call it a "profile" and this is still not up to 100%.

As an example, when Blu-Ray first officially launched, the only profile that was 100% defined was profile v1.0, however the Blu-Ray specification referenced 3 other profiles which were not yet finalised.

The v1.0 profile did not specify picture-in-picture, any additional codecs or even an internet connection. This profile was superseded by profile 1.1 (aptly named "Final Standard Profile") in November 2007, and the new Blu-Ray films being released are making use of some of these new capabilities. Unfortunately there is not a single Blu-Ray stand-alone player capable of being upgraded to the new profile. So, early adopters for Blu-Ray are left high and dry.

As for the software required for the interactivity. The HD-DVD and Blu-Ray specifications are both open, so there is no form of proprietary lock-in from either side. There is however one large advantage that HD-DVD has over Blu-Ray in this arena however. The HD-DVD interactivity specification is based on HTML, XML, JavaScript, CSS etc, which are all very light-weight standards and require very little processing power or memory to display and run. The Blu-Ray specification uses a nearly feature complete Java implementation including a custom Java Virtual Machine. As I'm sure we've all experienced, even on a pretty high spec'd current laptop, Java still runs like a stuck pig when trying to do anything multi-media related.

There are quite a few other little features in the HD-DVD spec that I feel give it the edge over Blu-Ray. For instance there is no requirement in the Blu-Ray specification for discs to have a lossless audio format, however all HD-DVD's must have a lossless audio option.

There is no requirement for Blu-Ray players to have an ethernet connection or any current player profile to make use of one. However you only have to look at the HD-DVD release of the latest Harry Potter film to see how this component has been utilised.

There is no inclusion in the Blu-Ray specification to allow the Java components of an interactive disc to remember the current playback state to allow auto-resume. Look at the interactive picture-in-picture features of the 300 release to see how much of a problem this is.

As it happens, I own both the HD-DVD add-on for the 360 and I also have a PS3. However, the only reason I purchased the PS3 was a gaming console, and the only reason anyone has for purchasing the HD-DVD add-on is to watch films.

Microsoft waves in Minority Report-style computing era

Seri

Microsoft's most inovative product marketing uses... flash?

So where's the much touted Silverlight being used then?