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

And it also may be similar to the situation with putting a 'DVD Video' logo on your packaging. In order to do so, there are physical and financial hoops to jump through. Many smaller corporate producers ignore this detail and just whack a logo on there, and I guess quite a lot of Sell-thru video productions might do the same when they're not on the shelves of K-Mart.

But if caught, you're caught.

I'd prefer it if Sony would do what the MPEG folks do, just state that for titles of less than 10,000 units, or produced on BR recordables, licensing and DRM does not apply. Then we know where we stand.

Almost Very Cheap
 

Toshiba HD DVD Player is now $79.99 at Costco. Free HDMI cable and two HD DVD movies are included in the box.

P.

Its not a problem for someone burning discs at home. But it has been confirmed by independent studios that they must cough up the $2,500 AACS base fee plus the per disc fees when volume publishing their releases. I think R&B Studio's "Chronos" and "Nature's Journey" comes to mind, where the HD DVDs were printed without AACS to save money but AACS was included on the BDs due to being mandatory.

I suspect it just got a bit more difficult to compete with Hollywood as a small independent publisher. I also suspect the Hollywood folks are perfectly happy with that ;)

Maybe my conspiracy theory isn't too far off. I just wonder what the climate will be like in 20 years.

*looks into silicon ball

It'll be the same -chaotic, still unpredictable, and look a lot like decades past

Will you transition from DVD to BD sooner or later?
 

Looking back, I stuck with VHS too long. Too many of my movies are on tape. The money I saved by buying a player late is now long forgotten, but my collection lives on.

I now plan to buy a BD player sooner, rather than later. Sure, DVDs aren't as bulky and noisy as VHS tape, but as screen sizes grow, BD quality will become more and more apparent. My only misgiving is that BDs are currently overpriced vs. DVDs.

So, did you already transition to BD? Will you transition soon? Will you wait? Do you not plan to get a BD player at all?

First bride request pushes me over.

It really depends upon the type of work you do.

Some clients are happy you show up at all!

Others have the means to afford whatever you suggest.

I am stumped right now and might start with the 20 min HD on DVD-5 for now for some of my work, when I upgrade a camera.

I don't think anyone would accept HD DVD anymore.

Can you burn BD on a DVD-5 and it play for 20 minutes?

I know where you're coming from, but can I kind of spin this a bit:

VHS won over Betamax, but the Betamax format returned as Betacam.

Blu-ray won over HD-DVD, but perhaps HD-DVD returns as the industry standard for corporate/industrial HD, which then becomes as ingrained as Beta SP/DigiBeta for the next decade.

Frankly, I don't think that will happen as Hard Disk/H.264 networked solutions will win over BR disks.

But I don't see BR as a Corporate Video medium either.

No... you can burn at least 27 minutes of h.264 @ 17Mbps BD onto DVD-5. I did manage to get 30 minutes on one the other day.

http://dvinfo.net/conf/showpost.php?...2&postcount=11

Best Buy Pulls Remaining HD DVD Stock Off Shelves

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=11279

The last remnants are washing out to sea folks....

currently you can buy a 8 gig USB key for less than $50.
small, light, fast , reusable....
few DVD player have the usb socket, but the day they all have, this will be the end of the disc (red or blue)

I'm still trolling craigslist looking for deals.

Last night I picked up 8 HD DVD movies for $70. Half of which I had not seen. Today things are different. Just because a format dies doesn't mean you are going to see all use for the hardware/software cease.

Frankly I had my doubts that either format was going to see anything more than a fraction of the popularity of DVD. Consumers are tired of optical discs that their kids scratch up or discs that get flaky in some players.

Digital downloads will be the next big thing for many. Me ..I don't care as long as my price/performance ideals are met.

Giroud and Harrison I think you are both right! There will always be those people that will need to have a physical thing to hold that is precious to them and there will always be those people that don't care about that. So I predict that both flash memory and Internet downloads will be the next wave. Bandwidth is the issue with these - but that will be solved sooner than later.

As far as standards though, BD has won this round. HD-DVD will not come back Toshiba has clearly stated that. They are not doing any development or production on any HD-DVD equipment or discs. The industry will not pick it up if no leader runs with it.

Toshiba should open up the HD-DVD spec to the open source community. THAT would be very interesting, indeed!

But what would they get for opening up the spec? They had spent alot of resources to develop HD-DVD, business wise it's better to keep that stuff secret.

and you do not need opened specs, you need plants to build burners,players, and discs....