I don’t know about you, but I’ve stayed out of the so-called next generation DVD wars. I’m old enough to have actually bought a Betamax VCR and paid the price. Besides which, neither of these formats will enjoy the dominance DVD has had for the last ten years because they’ll be replaced by digital downloads before they gain that sort of foothold.
A series of nails seems to be getting nailed into the coffin of Toshiba’s HD-DVD format so I wasn’t surprised to see an article predicting that Toshiba were about to admit defeat. But I was amused while reading the article in The Age website to see an ad for HD-DVD prominently placed in the same article pronouncing it dead in the water.
There’s an old advertising joke that says “50% of all advertising money is wasted – if only we knew which 50%.” He’s a tip: the money spent advertising a product next to an article saying that product is dead? That’s probably wasted.
As the advertising for sites like The Age is dynamic this little gem of irony will be a fleeting thing. If you have a similar sense of humour to me, you may appreciate the fact that I saved a screen shot of this little piece of advertising magic:
For the pedants:
- I know nobody at Toshiba said “please place an ad for our product next to an article saying our product is dead”
- I know nobody at The Age said “Let’s put an ad for HD-DVD next to an article saying it’s dead” – Toshiba simply bought an set amount of advertising and the ad was placed an arbitrary number of times in a particular section of the website
- Get a fucking sense of humour
- No, your sense of humour isn’t fine, if you can’t just appreciate a simple joke without deconstructing it and finding fault you are fucked up!
- If you’re the sort of obsessive dweeb who behaves this way, here a few more to set you off:
- Ron Paul is a gay nazi paedophile drug-smuggling terrorist
- Open source software is a communist plot designed to destroy our way of life and murder kittens
- Your mother fucks truck drivers for 50c a throw and most of the time they ask for their money back
Can anyone tell I’ve had to deal with some really stupid obsessive-compulsive pedants recently?
Angry 365 Days a Year 
I’m in the digital format period. The whole Blu-Ray/HD DVD format issue doesn’t really concern me anymore.
I personally love the line “The move would mean that consumers won’t have to worry about choosing a format that could eventually become obsolete.” It’s in an article about one format being squished out by another format, both of which were competing to replace an older format, which replaced yet an older one before it… The cycle goes back to thirty years ago and they’re assuaging fears of obsolescence. It adds another layer of pointlessness to the ad, albeit a more philosophical one.
The Blu-Ray/HD-DVD war may be of little significance as a multimedia platform, however there is still the issue of media for archival purposes. While it may seem that Toshiba my be throwing in the towel in the DVD war, it is still an significant loss for Toshibas HD-DVD format, as DVDs are still the preferred archival media for many consumers.
Even if we go with all digital downloads, there is still a large amount of data that we will need access to, regardless of internet connectivity, for which optical media would be ideal.
……..just get a HTPC and save the need for HD-DVD or Blu-Ray… movies on solid state storage drives are the future. …plus optical drives make more noise than Compact Flash drives.
DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are over-priced compared to formats such as Matroska Multimedia Container and H.264 😀
Oh and I should add; you could build an awesome HTPC for the price of a budget Blu-Ray player… and use it for unlimited amounts of other things.
I think you are confusing your formats. 🙂 The Matroska, MP2/VOB, MP4, H.264, etc. formats are media container formats that specify how multimedia data is stored in a file.
The DVD/HD-DVD/Blu-Ray formats, on the other hand, are specifications that determine the physical characteristics of the optical media and the hardware that is used to access them.
They are two completely different things. You would actually store your Matroska, H.264, etc. encapsulated multimedia files on a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD disc.
Which is my whole point. Even if you have an HTPC with a solid state drive, if you have large amounts of valuable data on that HTPC that you wanted to make backups of, just in case your hard drive crashes your best bet would be to back it up to some form of high density optical media, most likely Blu-Ray discs, since Toshiba is bowing out…
No, I’m not confused.. I’m trying to illustrate the question; “Why waste money on Blu-Ray or HD-DVD?”
Both cost money, whereas the avi (yes with Matroska container) look exactly the same quality and are *kinda* free. I can’t see Blu-Ray being at all useful for PC users (yet).
… and RAID6 > optical storage!
well toshiba did throw the towel to the ring and gave up. blu-ray is in my opinion better due to its higher capacity .
Range: you’re ahead of the curve – it’s the way to go.
E0157H7: Yeah, “not being obsolete” is a bullshit line
Phyreblade & goatsoup: you’re both way more into the technology than I’l ever understand
Shadow: here’s hoping so because it’s the winner
One day no one will be using dvd players anymore, everyone will just use their computers for watching everything. And one day we won’t use the computers we have now, it will be a tiny little pencil sized thing that will zap your movie up on the wall for you. And one day we won’t be using those anymore, we will have microchips under our fingernails that will read our thought processes and send emails, take photos, play movies etc without us having to punch into anything. And one day we won’t even be using those because we’ll all be half robot and have it built into us at birth. So don’t buy anything, it’s all obsolete already.
99% of all humans are obsolete. So the fact that some pesky discs go out of style is probably not all that important.