Forget the war [correction, since the war is over]for a sec--just pretend that it doesn't exist.

Amazon just lowered the price of the Toshiba HD DVD player to $109 shipped free. [And it still comes with 5 free movies via mail] The means, the player is essentially free.

Just think of this as an awesome upscaling DVD player.

And think of it the great HD you can put on a cheapo DVD-R[with the proper authoring tools].

I just ordered one to give my folks/sister to share some of the HDV footage that I've shot of the kids.

If you can get over the fact, that's it not Blu-Ray.... it's a sweet deal.

Just an FYI Greg, but many of us have been doing that for 1 1/2 years on HD DVD, no need for expensive media and burners for up to 44 minutes of 25 mbps HDV on DVD/9 media, fully working menus as well.

I have a PS3, but I still think HD DVDs had much better movies, and the xbox360 has better games. It doesn't even look like blu-ray will start releasing good movies or games anytime soon. So I'm all set for the quality,
but they're draggin their feet.

Blu-ray authoring is easy using Adobe CS3 and blank discs are down to a few bucks each, so for small run projects Blu-ray is already quite usable. If you need an inexpensive way to play personal videos in HD just put them on a flash drive and attach that to a Sony PS3, or connect a laptop to your HDTV. Now that HD-DVD is officially dead there won't be much point in making any further discs in this format, since the players will be hard to find a few years from now.

But what price BR authoring? (with apologies to Chicken Little)
 

Interesting stuff from the Digital Production Buzz podcast.

http://www.digitalproductionbuzz.com...ate=2008-02-14

The interview with Bruce Nazarian (DVD Association - dvda.org) at 20:32 picks up on some concerning numbers:

An 'industrial' or 'non-broadcast' BR-DVD title incurs fees for authoring and for replication - $2500. Mandatory copy protection $3000 per title.

So if you're wanting to make a Sell-thru title or release an Indie film as a self funded project, you're toast. It would dent (!) the budgets of the vast majority of corporate DVD projects.

Okay, so there are fees associated with DVD production and in fact anything that involves MPEG, but they tend to kick in at far higher numbers.

Are there going to be different strata of BR projects? Will most corporate/wedding BR titles exist either as 'possibly dodgy if not actually illegal and therefore blockable' titles or confined to a feature limited set with strict limits on numbers of units?

I don't want to sound like Chicken Little but there appeared to be concerns over the many restrictions and DRM within BluRay that would i) stop people ripping movies and selling them, and ii) stop people making legal BR disks of their own content and selling them.

I have real concerns about this.

It seems to me that the major studios and networks, many of whom are owned by the same people who make Blu-Ray disks, have a strong financial interest in NOT making it easy or cheap for independent producers to do what they do... sell high-definition disks at a reasonable price to a mass audience.

It took a long time after DVDs were introduced before average schmoes like me could not only afford the equipment and software to produce our own disks, but (perhaps more importantly) have some confidence that the people to whom we were sending the disks could reliably view them at home. I sincerely hope we don't see stand-alone Blu-Ray players routinely manufactured to NOT read home-brewed, region and DRM-free, Blu-Ray disks.

For the work I do, if I have to pay license fees of $5500 or more for each title I release, that will just about kill that medium for my output. Exorbitant licensing fees like this could end up shooting the Blu-Ray association in the foot, however, as it will increase the pressure to come up with an affordable (perhaps Open Source) alternative, or to completely bypass the whole disk thing with HD video streaming.

How have you been burning them? Inever found a HD DVD burner that I could buy.

You can use a standard DVD burner. HD-DVD format content can be burned onto DVD-R and played in an HD-DVD player.

Huh. Maybe we could buy the rights to the discarded HD-DVD technology for a dollar, and promote it as the "peoples' HD alternative." Monopoly sucks. We're already seeing its effects, with these insanely greedy pronouncements from the Blu-Ray Bandits.

But when I do that on my computor, a DVD will only hold 20 minutes of video and it doesn't look as good as when I record it to Blu-Ray. And BTW, my partner has put more than 44 minutes of content on a Blu-Ray disc and he can create a Blu-Ray disc with fully working menus, as well. While I admit that we haven't created anything for wide distribution, no one has attempted to levy any $5500 in fees for any of the programs we have created. Since Blu-Ray burners are relatively cheap and very easy to get, we do not have to go to some master disc manufacturer and don't have any issues with that. BTW several years ago, when I was looking for prices for mass distribution of a plain old DVD, I was quoted similar prices.

G4 is one of those stations that I occasionally watch
http://www.g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/pos...D_Funeral.html

>Blu-ray authoring is easy using Adobe CS3 and blank discs are down to a few bucks each, so for small run projects Blu-ray is already quite usable.

Kevin, are you serious? CS3 for the Mac or PC? I would buy a burner if I knew I could set up my system for under $1,000 and put at least 40 minutes on DVDs costing me less that $15. I haven't heard that's possible yet.

I will sorely miss HD DVD.

Well Dana, you can get Blu-Ray discs for less than $12.00 each. And my partner has 1 disc that has a 7 1/2 minute program, a 9 1/2 minute program and a 48+ minute program on one disc and it wasn't full. And I think the Blu-Ray recorder is easily less than $1000.00 for the latest recorder.

I bought a 4X Blu-ray burner with CS3 upgrade version and five blank BD-R discs for about $900 from Videoguys. If you don't have an old version of Adobe software lying around it's a few hundred more, and if you're working on a Mac you may need Roxio Toast for actually burning the discs because CS3 for Mac tends to make coasters.

Individual BD-R discs are under $8 now if you shop around and dropping quickly.

There might be a little bit of F.U.D. going there re: the licencing fees.

As for the BD burners they're down to below $500 and dropping.

I'd love to find $8 media but I haven't yet.

Mind you $11 is pretty good and it'll just drop further.

Looking forward to going HD in the next year or so.



ian