lifebsideben

I’ve been staying out of the HD-DVD / Blu-ray format war for a long time, but Val sucked me in to it. You see, she got me the BBC ‘Planet Earth’ DVD set for X-mas… only it was the HD-DVD set. One of the reasons I hadn’t bought it previously, is because I hadn’t wanted to get it on standard def DVD, since that would be a ‘travesty’ to lose 3/4ths of the detail that it was shot in, for such sweeping and compelling nature content. But, now she had bought it for me, and I didn’t want to return it. I quickly did some research, decided yep, HD-DVD was the format I preferred, and bought a Toshiba A3 from Amazon for $179 (this was January 2nd). Of course, a week later, and obviously because Ben Margolin finally jumped into the fray and cast my dice, Warner Brothers threw all their weight behind Blu-ray, and the couple remaining HD-DVD allied studios look soon to follow. Toshiba was taken by surprise, and canceled their press statements at CES a couple of days later. It looks bad for HD-DVD as a format. You’re welcome! You’re now free to buy Blu-ray now… but here’s why you shouldn’t.

Blu ray and HD DVD offer comparable video quality. Some titles are better on one or the other. Anyone except for superpicky “golden eyes” folks with 120″+ displays won’t be able to tell the difference between a well-mastered disc in either format. None of the Blu-ray players are fully forward-compatible, which sucks, except perhaps the PS3, which is also probably the best deal price-wise on a BD (Blu-ray Disc) player, at around $500 for a nice bundle. Toshiba sells their players, with recent price drops, for $130 for a 1080i model (1080p if you’re willing to go refurb). Again, most people probably can’t tell the difference between 1080i and 1080p anyhow. So in a lot of ways, the formats are pretty comparable — although HD DVD has a few major benefits (easy conversion of pressing equipment from DVD to HD-DVD, ability to press DVD on one side and HD-DVD on the other easily, much less expensive players, etc.) and Blu-ray has some other benefits (well, mostly that it has the support of most of the major studios, and I suppose also it’s a reasonable excuse to get a PS3, which one day might have decent games on it.) And Blu-ray has another big negative: Sony is pushing it, and Sony is arguably more Evil than Microsoft (who has a hand in HD DVD, but seems actually to have not botched it). Sony is clearly not on the side of the consumer; whether it be the endless format lock-in they attempt (Beta; SACD; Minidisc; those god-awful mini-DVDs for the PSP) and certainly doesn’t think consumers have any rights (the rootkit fiasco). I really, really, do not want to give Sony any more of my money if I can help it. I’m even going to get rid of my PSP, now that I really don’t have time for it. Most consumers probably don’t care about these things, but they should. A lot of influencers, I think, DO know and care about these things, and so that’s part of why I still believe that neither side has ‘won’ yet, and I really don’t think the ultimate winner of HD home content will be either optical disk format, but downloads instead.

As I get older, I have this huge media library — about 400 DVDs, and probably close to 1000 CDs (not including Prince bootlegs, which probably number another 300). Most of the CDs are off in storage, with the ones I play most frequently, or really at all, ripped and accessible via iTunes. But what to do with the DVDs? I don’t want huge piles of DVD cases everywhere, although I do have that to some extent — but most of them are in ‘binder’ style storage. Disk storage still isn’t quite cheap enough to copy them all to HD (at 4-8G per) and back them up regularly, and I don’t watch them often enough to justify the time to rip them, either. In fact, except for a bunch of kids’ DVDs (mostly Pixar titles), discs don’t hit my player more than about twice, ever. So why do I even own them? Sure, some are because they are fantastic movies and have great extras like commentaries, and I intend to watch them again, maybe even a lot of times. But it doesn’t typically happen. If I could rent them “instantly” for $3 or $4 a pop, when I want them, I think I’d be OK with that. But I want them in good quality (i.e. at least SD DVD bitrate and resolution and full DD or DTS sound) and with the extras as needed. So far, there’s no way to get this… but we’re getting close.

Let’s look at the contenders. Well, I guess there’s rentals by mail (Netflix/Blockbuster), which isn’t bad, I mean you do get the exact original disc content, but it’s far from “instant”, and means a fixed monthly commitment. That’s not going to suffice for me. I’ve had Netflix and Blockbuster, and I just don’t plan that far ahead. It’s fine for weird foreign films I want to see “sometime”, but by the time they show up I’m often not in the mood and end up with it sitting around until I am. Sometimes that means I only rent 1 or 2 DVDs a month, which is hardly worth the price considering the waiting time, etc. Netflix has an on-demand service as well, apparently, but since it doesn’t work on the Mac, it doesn’t work in my household, otherwise it seems like an option with possibilities. I know they hired the guy who “invented the DVR” and so obviously they’ve got plans for some kind of set-top box (I tried grilling them on this about 8 months ago when I interviewed there but they were keeping quite mum). That might be interesting, especially if it’s basically free to subscribers. I think I’d probably sign up with them again if they did have that.

There’s “on demand” from my cable provider — Comcast. Now, I basically hate Comcast because of their exhorbinant prices. But I am overall relatively happy with the actual product. I have the dual-tuner HD DVR, which most of the time works well. Sure, it’s no Tivo, but it costs $9 a month to rent, instead of $13 for Tivo (and you buy the hardware for Tivo). Plus, if it ever breaks — which happens, I’ve had 3 bad boxes in the past 2 years — they replace it, no questions asked. I’ve had good luck with Tivos as well, and still have a SD Series 2, and I hate to say this, but the Comcast Motorola DVR is “good enough”. Sure, its interface is clunky. Sure, it’s not as responsive to the remote. Sure, it doesn’t have some of the cool searching features. Heck, it’s even got annoying ads interspersed in the guide UI… but it does record HD from 2 tuners, and give me OnDemand. And there’s actually a good amount of on-demand content available, both in SD and HD, for no additional charge. And I can order movies in SD or HD via “pay per view”, which works reasonably well. However, the on-demand stuff definitely is not up to snuff in bitrate, as even I can see blockiness in fast-moving scenes on a 37″ 1080i display occasionally. For my $4 (for SD even), I want no jaggies! And, while there’s a reasonable amount of stuff, there’s nowhere near the breadth of my DVD collection available, and things “come and go” from the availability, in a seemingly random fashion. So not terrible, and there are definitely times I’ve found something interesting and watched it instead of browsing the DVDs.

What I think is definitely the next step, and a great competitor to HD disc players, is Apple TV, with the new software to enable HD streamed content from the iTunes store. The original incarnation of AppleTV left a lot to be desired in my opinion, most specifically, that most of the content needed to by ’sync’ed from your iTunes on a Mac/PC. I don’t want to do this — I want to play stuff as I want, from my home network, or from iTunes, and the new software (coming out soon) looks to support this. I don’t want to store much of anything on the local HD on the AppleTV; just to use it as a local cache. The $179 version should be enough for anyone with a home network with storage and media on it (which is probably anyone with a nice HD setup using HDMI, etc. anyhow). I’m finally going to pick up ones of these, and give it a shot. The HD rentals from iTunes are $5, which does seem still about $1 too high, but they look to be at least 720p, which is probably ‘good enough’ for most movies, especially ones I might only buy the SD versions of anyhow, if I were to buy them.

So aside from items like Pixar movies (which will one day come to HD DVD I hope, but doubt due to Disney’s relationship to Sony and Blu-ray, won’t) and others that I play over and over again for the kids, and really justify purchasing (and even those, will probably just get ripped and converted to an iTunes-friendly format as soon as I get the Apple TV), I don’t plan to buy many more optical discs with movie content on them. Or what I do buy will likely be second-hand, at “throwaway” pricing… which is actually how I view most of the DVD pricing now. If a DVD is $15-$20, it’s still less than two movie tickets, and I can watch it without people talking and with pause-ability, and no babysitter required. And I can always resell it, to boot. But I’d rather not even have another acrylic disc taking up space, requiring cataloging and care. Just let me see what I want to see, in good a/v quality, when I want to see it (really, like right then) and I’ll pay a reasonable price. I’ll even pay again, if I want to see it again, a few months later. I think AppleTV and iTunes is the closest to being able to offer this, in the very short term. And hey, with the current slump in the market, it’s probably time to pick up some more Apple stock, too [well, or would be, if I wouldn't take a bath selling anything else!]

Tags: apple, Apple-TV, DVDs, format-wars, HDDVD, iTunes, movies, Technology