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German retailer offers HD DVD for Blu-ray exchange

We can only hope to see promotions like this Stateside. German retailer Saturn is currently offering a promotion giving €150 off a Sony Blu-ray Disc player if you bring in an HD DVD player. This brings the price from €499 down to €349.



I’m sure a lot of people in the States would definitely take this offer. If Toshiba was really looking for the consumer’s best interest they would seriously just drop the whole charade and put out a BD player and offer a similar exchange program, I’m sure the BDA would help them with costs. Since they’re all gung-ho about C-HD DVD, they can recycle the returned players into the Chinese market.

You can read the original source in German at hifi-forum.de.

50% Warner HD DVD’s and Blu-ray Discs

Another high definition disc sale has popped up at Amazon.com. This time, they are offering up to 53% off select Warner high definition titles. Blu-ray and HD DVD formats are both included in the sale, so pick your poison.

Up to 53% off Warner HD DVD’s
Up to 53% off Warner Blu-ray Discs

This promotion will only run for a limited amount of time.

Netflix hopes for Mac delivery

I consider this good news as I use a MacBook for the majority of my personal computing and I use Netflix. Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, said they’re planning on bringing “Watch-Instantly” to the Mac platform. Previously it has only been available to PC users through Internet Explorer.

Netflix has been using Microsoft Windows Media digital-rights-managed codecs to protect the content, but Apple uses their own FairPlay DRM which they have not licensed. It’s ridiculous that Apple uses tactics Microsoft has been sued for and nobody bothers (probably because the Mac lifestyle gives Apple a free pass on quite a bit just because it’s “hip”), but I’m not sure why Netflix can’t simply use Open Source Software DRM for cross-platform, cross-browser support.

Regardless, Hastings believes the future of online distribution will grow substantially. He views the Watch-Instantly feature as just the first foray into online distribution.

As a side point, Hastings mentioned that Warner’s support of Blu-ray exclusively should help grow the BD rental business.

Blu-ray dominating sales charts

Coming as no surprise to anyone, Warner’s sudden endorsement of Blu-ray on 4th January has certainly been felt at retailers nationwide. NPD numbers are in for the first two weeks on January for standalone set-top players and Blu-ray Disc has squashed the competition with a 92.5/7.5 split the week ending 12th January. To show how immediate this change occurred, the previous week (ending 5th January) was 51/49 in Blu’s favor. This does not include the Playstation 3 or the Xbox360 add-on. (Numbers provided by The Digital Bits.)

On the software side of things, it’s an equally massive victory for the Blu camp. Home Media Magazine has posted the Neilson VideoScan numbers for the week ending 13th January and it shows an impressive 85/15 split in favor of Blu-ray, with a year-to-date (YTD) showing 74/26.



If this doesn’t compel the hold-out studios to join/rejoin Blu-ray, I don’t know what will. Perhaps when this trend sticks for over a month it will be clear as day.

Don’t waste your time with petitions

For some reason some other news websites are reporting on certain online petitions urging Warner to continue support for HD DVD. Don’t waste your time. There is no way to ensure that every signature is unique so it means nothing. And if you read the signatures you have a few from “Michael Bay,” “Michael Jackson,” and a myriad of other obvious joke names. Hell, I could start an online petition urging Warner to drop HD DVD immediately and have tens of thousands of names on it in minutes. If I printed out the list it might be as think as my local phone book.

The fact that these news sources even report on something so obviously manipulatable really brings their integrity into question. Why not just report on anonymous online polls conducted on random blogs? Some of them show HD DVD more popular than Blu-ray even - but that proves nothing.

War on digital downloads: Day three

In the continuing saga of the Digital Download Crisis, I’ve stumbled across a relevant point made by Tycho of Penny Arcade about the new AppleTV downloads.

Apple’s new digital rental service forces you to watch the download in a 24 hour period. As a strange coincidence, Divx forced the user to watch the film in a 48 hour period. Somehow the format everyone loved to hate 10 years ago is resurrected in digital downloads and praised as the future of home video.

HD downloads aren’t high-def

This is a companion piece to yesterday’s post. I thought this topic was important enough to continue the discussion.

While I more frequently disagree with George Ou of the ZDNet blog, last year he posted on “Why HD movie downloads are a big lie.” I suggest you read the blog as it explains in detail why a 720p video downloaded off Xbox360 or iTunes is no better quality than 480i DVDs.

The main reason this is true is because the 1280×720 picture is compressed to under 1.5GB and has an average bit rate of 1.3 mbps. In comparison, DVDs are 640×480 interlaced compressed to about 6GB with a bit rate closer to 8 mbps. If you believe in science, you can see that DVD video has more detail.

And somehow this is the alternative to Blu-ray? We’re going to go back to VHS quality simply because it’s 50% more convenient? No thank you, sir. Why would you spend so much on the best quality TV you can afford and feed it garbage? It’s like saying 2.5″ low-res screens are the future because they’re on every iPod now. No longer do we have 4:3 screens with 480i resolution, we have 16:9 screens with 320×270 resolution. Yay!

Please don’t give up on high-quality optical media.