Toshiba officially scraps HD-DVD Comments by Robert Purchese

I also got Ratatouille on BD for £17 whereas Play.com are selling the 2-disc DVD version for £15

Comparing the prices to new dvd's isn't exactly a great benchmark.

£17 for Ratatouille? You're having a laugh...

I thank HD DVD for making BluRay mature a lot faster than it otherwise might have.

@kanga: surely he meant that the HD DVD boxes are red, not that Microsoft are a bunch of commies

At last.

@drumbaby - "This is huge for Sony. PS3 will sell like crazy from now on."

Yes but how many of the current 10.5 million PS3 owners actually buy BD movies to watch on their consoles? Clearly the PS3 has been instrumental in making BD a success, or at least convincing the movie studios and shops to back the format, despite what the NPD survey suggested (i.e. that most Americans didn't even know their PS3 could plays BD movies!!!) but it'll be difficult to say how many PS3 users are actually using the console to watch HD movies on. One thing is certain though... Sony took a huge, huge risk in adopting BD for the PS3 and it seems to have paid off for them with the added bonus that it will be used for games now and in the future (I'd imagine the PS4 and Xbox Next will include it as standard).

@Darren

A developer looks at installed base to determine which platforms to support. We don't give much of a damn how that installed base was created. Remember that each 360 and PS3 that is in a home, is a potential customer. I would rather have 50 million potential customers who brought a product for movies and then realised they could play games on it too, than 10 million dedicated games players. Even in worst case scenario mode I could sell to enough of the 50 million to break even!

For the record most games have a 5 to 10% takeup so if there are 10 million of a console out there we can expect to sell to about 500,000 to 1,000,000 of those console owners. The exception being mega hyped games and franchises like gears and halo. However, if I keep costs down to a few million to develope the game, then I'm looking at a return of installed base * 0.05 or installed base * 0.10

For the math challenged thats either 5 or 10 million on an average - good game and potentially 20 - 50 million on a AAA hyped to death game. I'm talking pounds so for the wow factor, that's upto 100 million US dollars! The console company would expect to make a further 150 - 200 million dollars by selling to retail and retail will make at least that by selling on to the end user. .

EDIT: To reel things in a bit, I should point out that companies spend upwards of 30 million Dollars on advertising and development of a AAA title and after the tax man cometh, the final figure is a lot less impressive (though still enough for any average joe to retire to the good life).

@L0cky - "I also got Ratatouille on BD for £17 whereas Play.com are selling the 2-disc DVD version for £15.."

Comparing the prices to new dvd's isn't exactly a great benchmark.

£17 for Ratatouille? You're having a laugh...

And why exactly? The movie is great and given the amazing 1080p picture quality over the DVD version, I don't feel I've been robbed because just three months ago I paid £16 for the 2-disc Transformers on DV0 from Play.com! LOL

Yes, you can buy many DVDs for a fiver only months after they've been released but it hasn't always been like that. However, you can now pick up older BDs for under a tenner now, e.g. the region-free Terminator 2 from Movietyme is £9.99. Dunno about anyone else but I have no objections to paying £15-£18 for my movies on a disc.

Can anyone actually tell the difference between an upscaled DVD and a BD... to the extent that it's worth spending the extra money on BD? I can't... I really don't see the point in BD when people already have existing movies collections that can be upscaled and look great.

@penhalion

Cheers for the info :)

@Darren

That is soooo bought by me. Cheers v.much for the lead.

Just to be double sure, I want to buy this one...

http://www.movietyme.com/catalog/product...

not this one...

http://www.movietyme.com/catalog/product...

Right?

Thank god I waited! These format wars are never good for the consumer, I remember buying a laser disk player and a lage collection of disks. Lesson learnt!

@Arwin

"surely he meant that the HD DVD boxes are red, not that Microsoft are a bunch of commies"

Ahhhhhhhhh. That would explain a thing or two :D

"A developer looks at installed base to determine which platforms to support. We don't give much of a damn how that installed base was created"

Truth.

@Needmoresocks81

Do you have a 1080p screen of at least 37 - 40 inches? If not then you really wouldn't notice the difference. If you do, then watching a blu-ray or HD-DVD at 1080p is definitely a noticable difference. the detail is just so much sharper. Of course the actors suddenly look a little too real (meaning bad skin etc. etc.).

@Kangarootoo - The 5-disc version is exclusive to the US so I'd assume both versions in those links are the same as the UK only got the 2-disc Final Cut. I'm not sure what 'UK 1-2' means though... perhaps it refers to the fact that it is shipped from their UK warehouse rather than direct from Philedelphia in the States? Does anyone else know?

P.S. For your information I bought the £21.99 version as the 'UK 1-2' version wasn't there when I ordered the movie but the discs are all region-free, including the two DVDs, so they play perfectly on UK PS3s.

The "Battle of console" is over now, gold to wii silver to ps3 and wooden spoon to MS.

I can now go and pick up my ps3 just before GTA4 is released.

@NeedMoreSocks81

It really depends on the bluray film in question. Some just seem to be of better quality than others. I would expect that to be a result of some films being upscaled for bluray from a non-HD source, and therefore a problem that will die out as new films are made.

Example. Casino Royale looks amazing on bluray. The opening snakefight scene is sharp as a pin and so colour rich, it really makes you go "wow". No doubt its ability to show off bluray was a key factor in its production, given that it was the film Sony chose to give away free to early PS3 adopters.

Mission Impossible 3 on the other hand looked just like an upscaled DVD to my eyes. Nice enough looking, and better than normal DVD playback, but no better than any decent quality DVD upscaled in a PS3 (the DVD upscaling in the PS3 is top knotch, as you probably know).

I believe there are a few other Bluray films that really show the quality of the format, but a great many won't do that yet. I guess anything entirely CG can "easily" be re-rendered from source at HD resolutions, but any other older films may not look so good. Like I said, give it a few years and many films will be recorded in HD res source and the quality will become more consistent.

"Do you have a 1080p screen of at least 37 - 40 inches? If not then you really wouldn't notice the difference"

My screen is only 32" AND only does 720p or 1080i, but a decent bluray film is still noticeably better.

My living room is small though, so I'm only sat about 4-5 feet from the screen ;)

@Darren

Cheers dude. I'll go for the £21.99 version that has no mention of the UK, as it sounds like that is the same as the version you got, which sounds like the better bundle.

Yay \o/

Aye Kangerootoo there seems to be a disparity in HD quality. 300 and Sunshine look fucking awesome in high def but Ghost Rider looked flat out upscaled to my eyes. Perhaps it was because the film itself was so god damn terrible my eyeballs were crawling to the back of my skull for mercy however.

@Kangarootoo

Your right of course it depends entirely on how close you are to the screen (within reason obviously). I'm going by my own living room, where I recently got a 40inch LE40M87 to replace my 32 inch screen. The painful bit is that I got the new screen from amazon for 740 quid while my old set cost me 1200 a few years back.

Damned you progress, thy name is mugger!

only annoyance for me is the fact that Blu ray can now kick in Region coding properly. HDDVD had none , and because of that most blu ray didn't. No competition=region encoding. :(

aaitch dee dee vee dee was a bad name, blu-ray sounds way better

@Kangarootoo - I agree that not all BD movies look amazing, just as not all DVDs do (I've seen plenty of poor quality examples of the latter over the years). The worst BD movies in terms of picture quality tend to be the older ones but not in every case as Blade Runner, 2001 and Halloween look stunning for 25+ year old movies. I have Die Hard and its sequel on BD and although the picture quality is better than DVD, it's still not as good as, say, Die Hard 4.0 as it looks "soft". The most disappointing BD movie I own picture quality wise is 28 Weeks Later which sometimes look great but often looks little better than an upscaled DVD but that's purely down to the way it was filmed. Most of the ones I own though look terrific, particularly those from Disney, e.g. the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, Cars and Ratatouille: I'd say they're benchmark quality myself.

This is great news.

Have been on the fence with regard to purchasing a PS3 for a while now. Not enough games that I like to make it a worthwhile purchase and with the uncertainty about blu-ray as a future standard for home cinema, I just couldn't decide whether it was worth buying a PS3.

This announcement has made the PS3 a dead cert purchase for me. More of the games I want to play are coming out on it, I can convince the S.O. that it will be great for playing movies as it is now the de facto standard for HD films and the price is coming down to what I consider reasonable.

We should also expect the price of the films to come down as companies do not need to purchase HDDVD stock as well as BD and can therefore buy more stock of BD, hopefully at a cheaper price which, maybe, will be passed onto the consumer.

I always thought that HD-DVD would win just because of the name. Everyone knows DVD. A lot of people understand HD. Bish-bosh.

I'd be surprised if the name wasn't a significant factor in its failure, actually. When even the abbreviation of something is a massively clunky five syllables, marketing it is a nightmare.

Enjoying all the fantasists who reckon this will cause an explosive growth in PS3s, though. Despite the advantage of having a BD player built in it's only just barely been keeping pace with the 360 (and that only thanks to the 360 being totally dead in Japan), and even if its sales suddenly doubled it'd take two years or more just to catch up, never mind overtake it.

@JohnnyWashnGo - The PS3 does a stunning job of upscaling your DVDs to 1080p too, in my opinion it's much better than the Xbox 360 (certainly quieter), particularly as it has more video options to play around with and has a far nicer BD remote. Oh noes I am teh biased!!! LOL

@Rev. Stuart Campbell - Hmmm, I wouldn't be too sure... the Xbox 360 is only currently selling well in the US and the UK whereas the PS3 will continue to sell well in the US, Europe and Japan so it's only a matter of time before it outsells the Xbox 360. The PS3 is the still most expensive console and is still somewhat lacking on the killer app front so the fact that it's selling well now makes you wonder how it'll fare once GTA IV, Final Fantasy XIII, Gran Turismo 5 and Metal Solid 4 are out really. Maybe it'll see an upsurge in sales as PS2 owners move across to it? I've said it before but I honestly believe that 2008 will be a big year for the PS3, just as 2007 was for the 360. Microsoft need to cut the price of the 360 really, it's been out over two years now and the machine hasn't really dropped in price much... the Premium 360 really ought to under £200 by now IMO.

"as content grows and dvd space becomes not just a limiting factor but, a deciding one"

Ah, that old argument again. Never played all those fantastic multi disc games eh? And what about compression and pgc? There is no space limit with disc based games.

"PS3 sales will now go through the roof.... F.U 360 fanboys"

I hope you realise the irony of your comment.

TBH it can only be bad news for consumers with blue-ray players and discs remaining at a relitively high price... For me though a DVD player with upscalling is fine. Don't need to buy into HD movie playback.

A real shame that may (I say may) come back to bite us, remember all future proof BR owners own a PS3. Unless the BDA reduce the price of stand alone BR (which is unlikely as they didn't do it with competition in the market so why bother now) that important mass market will remain DVDs.

This was a very dirty war. Not only did over a million HD DVD owners get burned but also over 500,000 stand alone BR owners because the BDA rushed BR out their players won't work properly with future releases. The only people untouched was PS3 owners, turns out the console was good for something after all!

I got HD DVD but I'm not bitter I knew it was a gamble. Fantastic tech well worth the price and I was smart enough to choose the cheapest way in (£100 360 add-on) I'll buy the remaining HD DVDs I want and when BR is finalized and comes down in price (probably about a year away) I'll pick up a player. Win some loose some.

Hell the PS3 might actually become a games console before then and I'll pick on of those up! ;)

Guys, one important thing to remember if you are going blu without the PS3. DO YOUR RESEARCH FIRST!!!! Players can be as cheap as £250 at this time but they are those old players that are not future proof - be careful!

Maybe now to make up from the lost income from these pointless stories and the fanboy comments that follow you could report on how much different electricity companies charge, after all we all have to plug our consoles in. Could have Eon fanboys square of against npower fanboys on who gets the best deal and why their provider is the best

I'm a little non plused about this as i've been fairly even splitting my money between BD and HDDVD as to minimise loses for early adoption.

Still if I can have a swap for my HD-DVD add-on and disks that would be really swell, though I dout it will happen

@SlackMaster

its better for the consumer now , just 1 format and not having to decide which film companys you perfer.

DVD upscalling is good but no 24hz option and no way near crystal picture and sound quailty isnt as good , i watched transformers on dvd upscalling and it only had 10 mbps while the latest harry potter on blu-ray ( btw thats the correct spelling not blue in the colour) was running at 40-50 mbps.

the discs arnt expensive at all in most cases only 2 pound more when i got happy potter dvd was 15.99 from play while the Blu-ray one was 17.99.

Also do you know what this means STAR WARS in HD , lucas said he will do it once a clear winner has been found FUCK YEAH its gonna be a great year for me.

I love this site sometimes ;)

"Respected Devs announce innovative new game!" - 9 comments

"Some bollocks about dvds!" - 83 comments (within an hour and a half)

@bad09 - Re: the rushed BD players comment... while it's true that many older players won't support Profile 1.1 and 2.0 which adds picture-in-picture and online functionality to BD movies, it certainly doesn't mean that those owners cannot watch the movie itself or most of the extras for many years to come. All it means it's that a few features will be unaccessible to them, that's all but not everyone will be bothered by that. ;)

Now we'll go into the same cycle again...
...until recording technology catches up and copying becomes massive, we'll have to put up with astronomical BluRay prices

@Rev. Stuart Campbell

I don't see why this news won't help increase PS3 sales dramatically. Anybody who has been following the HD-DVD/BD debacle will have done enough research to know that most BD players on the market are not nearly as usable or upgradable as the PS3. They will also know that most BD players are as expensive, if not more so, as a PS3.

When you factor into the equation that fact that some of the industries most antipated games are coming out on PS3, including MGS and FFXIII, you have to admit that the Sony console is a far more enticing proposition at this moment in time than it has ever been. If Sony managed to get their act together they could really capitalise on this development and sell PS3s to many more people.

Also, from a personal point of view with a Japanese SO, getting a Japanese PS3 would mean that we can watch Japanese and Englsh language films as well as play games from both our home countries.

@ Darren

Of course mate, you can still watch the movie, but why waste all that money if you can't have the next gen movie experience. Which HD DVD had from the start by the way......

thank fuck. Hopefully disc prices can come down a bit now so it's actually worth buying a BR player (or ps3).

You know what, for all the flak they got for saying it to begin with, the 360 and Wii might be in the same chronological generation but AREN'T in the same technological generation as the PS3.

The Wii is a fucking embarassment to the gaming industry and complete fucking sellout to the masses and the 360 is nothing but a bunch of old, unreliable hardware cobbled with redundant and overpriced peripherals that HAD a couple of decent games on it before it ran out of steam.

Amen to forward thinking Japanese technologists.

Tosh to wanabee American contendors and cheapskates.

OK how long til a Blu-Ray add on for the 360? I reckon an announcement by the end of the week (possibly even today) in shops by summer (or even before) and built in to their next console (unless holographic discs really take off).

@bad09 - Yes, HD-DVD at least included everything from the off - kudos for that - but surely the main reason to buy a movie on an HD format in the first place is to watch it in glorious, superior quality 1080p-o-vision and (to a lesser extent) with HD sound, not particularly for the extras as they're just a bonus that not everyone watches? Admittedly I do watch the extras and listen to the commentaries because I find them fascinating but just because, say, 300 lacked the picture-in-picture stuff on BD, didn't make it any less of a next-generation experience for me since I bought the disc for the movie itself.

Anyway, BD can now do picture-in-pictrue stuff and soon will be able to access online content so it will offer everything that HD-DVD does except with more space per layer. It's still a long way off being a mass-market product so if it does goes on to achieve that then most people won't even be aware it was crippled in the first place. The risk of a format not taking off or the feature set being incomplete/buggy are just some of the things early adopters have to and are prepared to take.

Well I will probably get a PS3 now, just for the blu-ray and odd game.

Like everyone says it's a cheap in to a BRay player.

@penhalion

1080p/24 is a bigger deal for the US that in PAL regions as our 50Hz electrical system is closer to the natural speed of film than in the US.

In PAL regions each frame can be displayed twice = 48 frames and with a subtle speed up fits nicely into the 50Hz TV requirement.
We take film that was shot @ 24fps and display it @ 25fps. Obviously this speed up makes car chases better ;-) but also subtly alters the sound.

In NTSC 60Hz regions a method called 3:2 pull down is employed, whereby every 4th frame is displayed 3 times to get 24 frames to fit into 30 frames. This works nicely most of the time, but if you ever look at a region 1 DVD @ 60Hz you'll notice weird effects when the camera pans horizontally. The extra frames being injected make the panning appear to slow down and speed up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24p

@ Darren "...and has a far nicer BD remote..."

Are you serious?!?! Its god damn ugly!

PS3 Remote: http://tinyurl.com/2lra8n
Xbox 360 Remote: http://tinyurl.com/2q4z9w

@ Darren

I do understand where you are coming from. Yes the main pull is the picture and sound but if that is all you want upscaling does come VERY close to HD and is MUCH cheaper (remember not everyone will take advantage HD sound). As a film buff I love all extras but I do understand it's not for everyone. But watching Transformers, Matrix and Batman Begins on HD DVD has shown me the future of extras in home entertainment and I think everyone will start to take more interest in extras when done in such a great way (I just hope BR keeps up the standard set by HD DVD!).

True by the time it reaches mass market (if it even does) people might have forgotten the profile fiasco but with Samsung being sued and surely the rest to follow they won't forget any time soon.

@Darren: I don't feel I've been robbed because just three months ago I paid £16 for the 2-disc Transformers on DV0 from Play.com!

Again with the comparison :P

If I tried to sell you a sandwich with extra tomato for £22, then told you the lesser version without the extra tomato was £21.99 would that stop you feeling robbed?

My point is £15 - £25 for a movie is too much, regardless of the format.

Though it's really a matter of opinion and personal budget so there's not much point arguing about it.

@symbiote

A couple of good games before it ran out of steam? - not sure where you get that from, because it appears to me that we 360 owners have a whole slew of great games coming up this year....maybe the PS3 hasn't run out of steam, but then; you don't have those couple of great games yet

Obviously, this is going to sell PS3's - but, they were going to have a good year anyway (GT5, MGS4 - these titles were going to sell consoles), but it doesn't excuse the fact that we've been playing great games for 2 years while PS3 owners have had very little thrown their way. Seriously, competition is a good thing - I welcome Sony actually raising the game, it can only be good for all involved.

For me, all this means absolutely nothing. I bought my 360 Elite to play games and it's never let me down with some of the great titles we've had....this news is not going to get me to buy a Blu-Ray player or PS3.....it doesn't make me think that I made the wrong purchase and it doesn't make me worried for Microsoft - it's all pretty trivial really, still, I kinda expected the PS3 fanboys to start nursing semi's when they read the news

:-)

"you wait.. BluRay movies will creep up in price now. They cost fek loads more to make than HD DVD did and were subsidised heavily.. and now there is no other HD disc looking for market share Sony can do what the fuck they want with the price of the discs and the players."

I really doubt sony have been subsidising the movies of competing film studios.

"I always thought that HD-DVD would win just because of the name. Everyone knows DVD. A lot of people understand HD. Bish-bosh."

Apparently that was the problem: HD-DVD didn't seem different enough from DVD and therefore less 'advanced' than Blu-Ray.

This war should never have started, shame Toshiba and Sony couldn't work it out in the past, so it's a good thing it's over.

@ L0cky

Whilst I do agree the prices are too high (and always have been), the price of BR/HD DVD is comparable (sometimes cheaper) to DVD when it launched.

@ callum9999

Actually Sony has indeed been subsidising BR manufacture for the studios for a while. It was a way to keep them happy and not jump to HD DVD. Although the PS3 price cut help move players so I don't know if they still are.