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Is Blu-ray Doomed?

Pulkit Chandna — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 16:43:23 -0600

Doubts have been cast on the success of the Blu-ray format ever since it debuted. Initially, the format appeared to be doomed due to a poor adoption rate, thanks mainly to a host of factors, including the PS3’s initial tribulations, popularity of the DVD format, and the steady rise in the popularity of digital downloads.

However, it soon appeared that the tide had turned as PS3’s sales picked up and the rival HD DVD format ran out of steam and met its sorry fate. The latest good news has come in the form of sales data released by research firm Futuresource, which indicates that Blu-ray sales during the ongoing holiday season have been promising.

Futuresource expects 2.5 million Blu-ray players will be sold next year in Europe. But all this good news might just mark the end of the format’s halcyon days. Has the Blu-ray flattered to deceive?

According to Cnet’s Don Reisinger, the Blu-ray will never scale the heights of popularity that the DVD has managed. Like numerous other pundits – bona fide and self-proclaimed – before him, Reisinger is convinced that digital downloads will eventually deliver the Blu-ray to its grave.

Another sinister portent for the Blu-ray format happens to be the grim sales picture of the PS3; strong sales of the console surely could have gone a long way in popularizing the format. I expect Blu-ray to share the same mediocre fortunes as the PS3 during the remainder of its lifetime.

Image Credit: CinemaRetro

Microsoft Gets Windows Ready for Blu-ray

Chris Moody — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 08:46:56 -0500

Like everyone, Microsoft hates to back a loser. There comes a time though when you have to lick your wounds and suck it up. With the demise of Microsoft backed HD DVD, they are now working on incorporating the new storage option into Windows.

Microsoft is developting a “Windows Feature Pack for Storage” for both Windows XP and Vista. On the Microsoft Connect website they highlight three new technologies each in their own installer for the prerelease beta:

Active Storage Platform: This pre-release package enables the Windows platform to restrict access to portable devices (such as a USB Flash Device) via a certificate or password authentication based on the IEEE 1667 standard specification.

Image Mastering: API update for Blu-Ray media: This feature enables the Windows platform to do master style optical burning on Blu-Ray media.

Smart Card Drive:: This release provides support for new form factors, such as ICCD/CCID smart cards.

Maybe official Microsoft and Windows support for Blu-ray will help speed adoption rates for the new storage media.

Toshiba Goes With Upscaling DVD Player, Another Dis For Blu-ray

Chris Moody — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 09:05:40 -0500

Since Blu-ray won out on the high-definition format war over Toshiba’s HD DVD, high definition on disc has just languished. Blu-ray’s victory has been a hollow one with few people rushing out to replace their trusty old DVD players and DVD collections. The initial assumption that it was the format war that kept adoption of the new standard slow. It turned out to be customers being perfectly happy with standard DVD quality.

Toshiba has been considering it’s next move and has decided DVD is good enough and is jumping on the "upconverting" DVD player bandwagon. They are releasing the XD-E500 DVD player that they says does more than previous models to improve the look of DVDs on high-definition TVs. At a MSRP of $149.99 it is twice as much as regular "upconverting" players, but it is less than half the price of a Blu-ray player.

An Associated Press report said that the XDE player produced a noticeable sharpening of the image over a standard, $70 up-scaling model on side-by-side LCD HDTVs. Toshiba didn't demonstrate the XDE against a Blu-ray or HD DVD player, however. Toshiba did stress that it's not meant to compete with Blu-ray.

Toshiba is playing up to Blu-ray’s marketing weakness, they can’t seem to convince users that there is enough of a difference in between regular Blu-ray and Standard DVD to warrant the expense of upgrading. The appearance of “upconverting” DVD players is only going to further hinder Blu-ray adoption. It might be an inevitability that someday we will have to upgrade. The big question is who will hold out the longest, Blu-ray’s high prices or consumers not wanting to pay those high prices and holding on to standard DVD? Who do you think will win out? My money is on the consumers.

Pioneer to Offer Blu-ray Recorders

Pulkit Chandna — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:52:51 -0500

Pioneer has to its credit a $145 Blu-ray player - on sale only in China, perhaps the cheapest BRD player in the world. However, it was a tad watchful during the course of the format war. Now with Blu-ray having emerged victorious, Pioneer is making a deeper commitment to it. It has announced plans to launch Blu-ray recorders by the end of the year in Japan. The recorders will be developed with some help from its minority owner Sharp (14% stake), which is amongst the six Japanese majors currently offering Blu-ray recorders.

Image Credit: Pioneer

Maximum PC's 2008 Geek Quiz

The Maximum PC Staff — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 13:35:27 -0500

Geeks. We can go about our day unnoticed, quietly making sure the systems that allow the workplace to operate efficiently continue to run. Some people might consider us downright dull—and that’s just fine by us. Because when something out of the ordinary happens—when a car appears in someone’s office, a cubicle is transformed into a fish tank, or livestock roams the halls—we manage to fly right under the radar, and thus remain free to commit evermore elaborate shows of ingenuity without reproach.

In addition to testing your tech knowledge, this year’s Geek Quiz celebrates the best geek pranks of all time, which, unlike baser schoolyard antics such as swirlies and wet willies, showcase intelligence, skill, and guile. If you think you’ve topped the ones we’ve listed here, be sure to contact us at input@maximumpc.com.

<a href="http://www.mystudiyo.com/act61895/go/maximum_pc's_geek_quiz">Maximum PC's Geek Quiz</a>

Smooth Sailing for Blu-ray?

Katherine Stevenson — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 19:32:20 -0600

Starting with Warner Bros.’s dramatic defection to Blu-ray on the eve of this year’s CES, it's been a tumultuous couple of months for HD DVD, ending at last on Monday with Toshiba's announcement that it would cease developing, manufacturing, and marketing HD DVD players and media. And frankly, we have to give Toshiba props for accepting its defeat so readily and putting an end to a format war that had already lasted too long.

The question now is what the future holds for Blu-ray. Will its triumph over HD DVD prompt consumers to finally buy high-def disc players and movies en masse? Not according to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who recently made the claim that optical discs are an obsolete content distribution method. And indeed, while the two optical formats have been duking it out, the Hollywood studios have been forging online-distribution partnerships. The most high-profile of these involves the updated Apple TV, which now lets you stream both standard- and high-def material that you buy or rent from iTunes directly to your TV. A set-top box by Vudu (www.vudu.com) offers similar functionality, as does the Xbox 360 via Microsoft’s Live Marketplace (in fact, movie director Michael Bay made waves a while back by accusing Microsoft of supporting HD DVD just to fuel format confusion and drive frustrated consumers to its online store).

It all sounds very juicy, but communications analyst Michael Inouye of market research firm In-Stat isn’t convinced of the online threat: “Until we get much larger data pipes for downloading, HD will be a pipe dream. I would imagine that quite a few consumers will not accept video ‘hiccups’ should they occur as they download the video (in cases where they stream the content). And if the consumer wishes to upgrade to larger data-transfer rates, it will likely come at a price.”

In-Stat analyst Gerry Kaufhold offers up another factor: “Cable TV operators and the TelcoTV services provide you with your subscription TV service and your broadband Internet service, so they will continue to make sure their pay-TV services provide the highest convenience, the best image quality, and the most recent new titles so that they won’t lose too much of their user base to the Internet-delivered services.” That should come as little consolation to the Blu-ray camp, however.

We’ll render our own hands-on assessment of the major movie streaming/downloading services in the May issue of Maximum PC, so stay tuned.

LG Super Multi Blue GGW-H20LI

Katherine Stevenson — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 14:14:04 -0600

It’s no surprise that high-def optical drives are getting less expensive while their specs improve—that’s the trajectory of all emergent technologies—but we are still taken aback by the dramatic strides LG’s GGW-H20LI represents. Just a few months ago, in our September issue, we reviewed this drive’s predecessor, the GGW-H10NI, and not only is its follow-up better in every respect, it’s half the price!

Granted, at $1,200 the earlier model was priced out of the stratosphere—consumers paid a premium for its unique ability to read both HD DVD and Blu-ray media (while writing to just the latter). The GGW-H20LI also offers this convenience. Plus, it offers a welcome speed increase for Blu-ray burns. Rated at 6x for BD-R media, the GGW-H20LI took 21:23 (min:sec) to write 22.5GB to a single-layer disc in our tests. That’s a 6-minute savings over this drive’s 4x predecessor. (Frankly, we were expecting to see more savings, since the 4x drive nearly halved the times of its 2x competitors, but we’ll take what we can get.) We saved just about 6 minutes when writing to rewriteable media as well, with the GGW-H20LI filling a single-layer BD-RE disc in 39:38.

But really, given the high cost of Blu-ray media ($12 to $15 per single-layer disc), not to mention the still-lengthy burn times, this drive’s DVD performance matters as much or more to most users. Rated at 16x, the GGW-H20LI took 5:40 (min:sec) to fill a single-layer DVD+R, while its predecessor took more than 10 minutes. Even dedicated DVD burners aren’t much faster—the Samsung SH-S203B, our pick for “Best of the Best” (see page 46)—took 5 minutes to complete this task.

Its reign might not last long, but for now the GGW-H20LI is the fastest, most versatile high-def optical burner available and made all the more attractive by its handsome façade and SATA interface.

LG GGC-H20L

Katherine Stevenson — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 22:59:24 -0600

So your DVD burner is getting a little long in the tooth and you’re ready for an upgrade, but you’re not all that keen on adopting next-gen tech. And who can blame you? Even the falling price of hardware doesn’t make up for the relatively slow burn times, costly media, and compatibility issues that plague Blu-ray burners (and the same would be true of HD DVD burners if you could even find them!). Trouble is, you’ve got a brand-new 27-inch LCD that’s just begging to display high-def movies. What’s a consumer to do? Well, you could buy a combo drive—one that lets you read next-gen discs and write data to fast, friendly CD and DVD, like the two models we review this month.

For just $20 more than Asus’s drive, LG’s GGC-H20L lets you read both HD DVD and Blu-ray discs—a luxury that’s well worth the extra cost of admission. The GGC-H20L also affords you slightly better DVD burning performance.

Rated at 16x for DVD+/-R writing, LG’s GGC-H20L bested Asus’s drive by filling a single-layer DVD+R in 5:51 (min:sec). And its random and full-access times were much lower when reading the disc (100/178ms versus 167/349ms), as was its CPU usage at 8x speed (24 percent versus 43 percent). But when it came time to write to double-layer and rewriteable DVD media, LG’s drive was just as ho-hum as Asus’s. The GGC-H20L took 27:28 to write 7.96GB to DVD-DL and 15:01 to write 4.38GB to DVD-RW.

Still, we’ll gladly take the HD DVD compatibility and faster DVD+/-R writes for a few extra bucks. Like the Asus drive, the GGC-H20L offers a SATA interface, a CyberLink bundle, and a simple, black face plate, so what’s there to lose?