fanatical partisan bickering
Aziz P
Two sides. Each convinced of its own superiority and righteousness. Each with powerful patrons, and cult-like followings, their unending warring dominates the pages of those media outlets devoted to their field.
We're talking about the successor to the DVD - Blu-Ray versus HD-DVD, of course.
Technogeek site ArsTechnica has been following this brouhaha diligently. About a month ago, it looked like HD-DVD was on the ropes, and Toshiba even canceled plans to have hardware ready by the holiday season 2005.
However, industry titans Microsoft and Intel zapped everyone (including Blu-Ray consortium members Sony and Disney) by suddenly endorsing HD-DVD, based on what they felt were unsubstantiated claims by the BD group of disc capacity and compatibility. Ken Fisher of ArsTechnica interviewed Microsoft's director of technical strategy for the Windows Digital Media Division, and shed a lot of light on the internal rationales for Microsoft's decision to take (very public) sides.
Today, Blu-Ray fired back, saying that the capacity issues would be resolved by launch and that the compatibility concerns were trivial. Fisher has a great synopsis. Naturally, HD-DVD will have a formal response. Also of interest are these opinion pieces by representative Blu-Ray and HD-DVD partisans.
I won't get into the details - that's in the linkfest above. But I think it's important and affects us in a potentially greater way than did the VHS vs BetaMax standards battle of a few decades ago. Ultimately, content on these next-generation discs will have to tread a fine line between consumers' rights and content producers' need to protect their intellectual property. It is good that the debate is playing out in public, because the transparency will ensure that we consumers have a window into the process. After all, it's our hard-eaned cash that both consortiums plan to suck in the hope that we will replace our DVD collections for our personal home theater libraries. Stay tuned.
The good news is that both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are 5-inch optical discs. That means it'll be possible to make a single player that plays both formats, as well as previous optical discs (CD, DVD). As long as the physical form factor continues to be the same, any transition will be relatively painless. I fully expect to be able to buy a player that will play my current CDs in 2050. Of course, I'll be 82, so I probably won't be able to hear them anymore...
By 2050 you can probably hardwire the sound to your brain so your ears will be superfluous.
The new formats will support HDTV resolutions, To do that they have to be a lot bigger. Two-layer DVDs top out at about 8.5 gigabytes; Blu-ray is something like 30 gig.
As to balancing the rights of consumers and content producers, there's no balance at all. Blu-ray is protected nine ways from Tuesday, and I believe they can even enforce pay-per-vew with it if they want -- at least until someone cracks the encryption, which won't be as easy this time, and is definitely against the law to even try to attempt.
SDB: I have some hope that the open source community will crack the discs as they did DVD, if only for linux compatibility, irrespective of format. Maybe its a fools dream, but I am hoping for a consumer -oriented outcome. I am willing to suffer some inconveniences as long as when I buy a disc, its mine. That wasnt the case with that ill fated DivX thing from Circuit City IIRC...
Just in case you're interested.