I don’t think so. Given the storage capabilities alone, it will never go that route. Heck, LaserDisc is still popular. I have a complete collection of my favs that I have enjoyed collecting and watching. Even if Blu-Ray did go that route, it still would be nostalgia, thus be collectible.
I do, however agree that movies will somehow become available on micro SD type media. Or something more portable. We are a teeny-tiny people. We love small and compact. Hell, look for movie pills you can pop and dream your movie. Science is always looking for a reason to spend more useless government dollars.
I read an article (wish I had the link but sadly I don’t) that felt that BlueRay would only last five years before being replaced by something better.
As someone who routinely uses a media center for playing all my videos, I would much rather have a blue-ray quality service that streamed video I would watch than have to store all those discs.
That said, i don’t think bandwidth will be plentiful enough to make that a reality for several years so in the mean time, jumping on the BlueRay bandwagon for a few years wouldn’t be a bad idea.
Yeah I don’t know about all this. If I’m more than 2 feet away, I can’t really tell the difference. I wonder if that’s my eyes or just the way it is for everybody.
Why would anyone want blueray when we got 10Mb/s or more in the wall?
Optic media is dead and if you still like having 12cm plastic discs laying around all over your house our good old DVDs can actually fit a hd-movie.
I’ve downloaded some 720p movies on around 2.5Gb each(2 HD movies on one DVD!) and if you check the filesize on the 1080 versions they arrive at 8Gb, just enough for a double sized DVD.
And no…this is not obtained with crappy codecs, x264 is realy realy good. Trust me, im sensitive to visual quality.
Why isn’t the movie companies using all this potential? Or does DRM take up the remaining 80% of the discs?
And what’s wrong with DVI for outputing the movie? 1920 1200 @ 60Hz would be enough for anyone atm. At least for movies that can’t even be obained with higher quality now. I would love higher resolution and refreshrate on my pc-monitor though.
Blueray BRINGS NOTHING NEW like the dvd did. It will take very very long before it will reach out to the masses.
On philosophical grounds, I simply do not buy any product that has DRM. That means no iTunes, no region-coded DVDs, and certainly not BluRay.
I would add that I do not feel deprived by not having the content either. I’ve come to the conclusion that live music is it. CDs from the major labels of over-priced based on what actually ends up in the artists pocket and over-processed to the point of being disappointing when compared to live performances and my old LPs. I enjoy live performances and I may buy CDs from the performers directly and only if they are not enslaved by some major music label.
The harassment by the recorded entertainment industry has gone too far and it has to stop some where. Let it begin with me. I just will not buy it.
I would have thought people would shy away from blu-ray considering the minor economic meltdown the US is experiencing right now; at least in reference to the stand alone players.
The transition from CD/DVD was fast enough I think, when DVD players started selling cheap. In Developing countries, still the Blu-ray is very costly, when comparing to their wage level. I believe that, space does matters when it comes to hi-definition things. Only players like Google can withstand the costs. That is how the DivX Video http://www.stage6.com/ service died very earlier. In recent time only youtube started streaming some more high quality videos. I agree with you about 2018 if no magic happened in the costs for space and service come to a lower side.
If you have a 1080P screen then yes
If you have a decent speaker system then yes
If you are watching on a Normal TV/Screen with standard stereo then you will not notice the difference …
Sony tend to pick the winner more than you think?
VHS vs BetaMax - Sony was involved in both sides …and VHS used mostly BetaMax technology by the end …
The various Sony only formats were all hamstrung by being Sony only and by having copy protection built in …
HDDVD vs BluRay - Sony was on both sides …
I will no tolerate attack on good people. I will retaliate. I will give a reply.
@stebe : Ad hominem!
You must go from the internet (yes!) and the online media (yes!)
Go recluse yourself into a dirty dark corner. (yes!)
How does that sound, dear?
Arguments should be precise and must first consider responsibilities that the individual has, or has not. Am i wrong? May not be, because finally the Grand Jury always talks Law in the end, and as we all know,
The Law Is An Ass™. :s grrr…
On the average size display, depending on the source the difference between 720p and 1080p can be debatable.
I thought so as well, but I just did some window shopping today and was quite surprised by what I saw.
A side-by-side comparison of 32 screens with a good Blu-Ray source revealed a great deal of difference between 720p and 1080p capable sets. Oddly, the 1080p picture was a actually a little hard on the eyes because of all the extra detail, especially when that detail was moving (leaves, water).
Another point I should have mentioned earlier, along with colour/contrast is moire patterns. One obvious improvement of HD over SD regardless of screen size is that pinstripe suits and brickwork, etc, have far less tendency to break up into shimmering rainbow patterns. That is quite a significant step forward in picture quality.
I hope that the era of noisy mass media with rotating parts
is finally over.
A SDHC card can store a whole TV season of your favourite serie(s)
in DVD (or better) quality using a good compressing algorithm.
Open questions are the life time of SDHC cards and the number
of inserts the card reader and media survive.
And another good thing: you can reuse your old stamp-album as
a movie-album with SDHC cards.
DVD boxes occupy too much space! I already considered buying one
of these DJ cases where you can tightly store 600 DVDs so I can
finally part with my bulky DVD boxes.
Just glancing over the comments it’s interesting to see that the physical limitations of the human body are mentioned.
I had a similar discussion the other day with my brother. We were discussing how due to bandwidth, compression and storage space the DVD has now been made obsolete. The large amount of data required for 720p or 1080p video makes it impractical from a cost perspective to store or transfer large libraries of videos at that resolution. Though I’m sure that will eventually change, the question is, where do we go from there.
On the average size display, depending on the source the difference between 720p and 1080p can be debatable. Obviously as you scale up in size the difference becomes more noticeable, however I do not for see a future where everyone has 50+ inch televisions. It’s simply impractical for many spaces.
So what will drive the next format? Optical discs are fairly easy to use and store. I don’t see a reason why you would increase capacity just to store multiple titles on a single disc. The only thing that I can think of that would drive a new format would be the possibility of 3D, especially if some level of it can be attained without some sort of glasses.
Blu-ray offers a negligible improvement in audio features / quality over a standard DVD / DD|DTS setup, so I’m not quite sure why this keeps getting brought up, aside from perhaps people just discovering home theater and thinking this is all new. It isn’t, and audio is indeed a very important part of the experience. There are marginal codec differences and uncompressed support, but on the grand scale of things that improve the experience, it falls in the realm of completely unnoticeable even if you tried your hardest to differentiate.
Video wise, the resolution on the 35mm film they shoot movies with is generally not so great (higher ISO and thus lower resolution), which is why real life movies seldom see much improvement. Instead the biggest improvements tend to come in animated/CGI features, yet that also happens to be where video upscaling on better DVD players can achieve very comparable results.
Most people don’t care about the video quality, and for those watching on a monster screen at a close distance, focused on individual pixels, realize that you are highly atypical, and you’re probably so caught up analyzing the technical details and patting yourself on the back for your consumer purchases, you aren’t even immersing in the movie at all, focusing on entirely the wrong thing.
I have a blu-ray player because the rental service offers it as a format, and why not? But for more viewers this is such a non-issue that will have no impact on their lives or enjoyment of movies that it’s just something they’ll upgrade to when forced to (which is in the plans, by the way. Expect to start seeing new movies on blu-ray in advance of DVD, if DVD releases happen at all). I won’t actually buy any Blu-ray movies, at least not for a few years, given that they won’t play in the other PCs, in the car, in the portable player, etc.
On philosophical grounds, I simply do not buy any product that has DRM. That means no iTunes, no region-coded DVDs, and certainly not BluRay.
That also includes any video game consoles, ALL DVDs (they’re encoded, you know), anything that uses HDMI, cable boxes and satellite receivers, and tons of other stuff.
Most everything has DRM. Just because the particular DRM used doesn’t bother you doesn’t mean that it’s not there.
i wonder if blu-ray will be the last physical media format for movies? it seems pretty clear that CD’s are the last ubiquitous physical media format for music.
eventually i don’t expect we’ll own any kind of copy of media at all, we’ll just own rights to stream it… not sure that’s the world we want but i think it’s what we’ll get. so instead of having to buy star wars trilogy or the white album every ten/fifteen years on a new format, we’ll just always have to pay to watch/hear it, or be inundated with ads, or some such thing.
on that note, i don’t really plan on upgrading to blu-ray any time in the foreseeable future, if ever…
Jeff, I recommend getting the Blu_Ray version of the latest Hulk movie from Netflix. So far this has had the most impressive picture quality on my 58 1080p plasma.
What about HDCP? Doesn’t your TV and video card/mobo need to support it to get this whole shebang to work? I too built a similar system to Jeff’s after his most recent HTPC post, but I didn’t get this blu-ray drive (though I considered it strongly) because of my concerns over getting it to work with my Sharp Aquos, which doesn’t support HDCP.
if no magic happened in the costs for space and service come to a lower side.