DVD5 - Does it have a future?

With over 300 DVD's I've a lot Kicking around!

quote:

Originally posted by jcs_smith:
since DVD is mainly a rental medium

is this true?

I think that there will be no retrofit upgrade to the DVD5.

I also believe that HD-DVD and Blueray disks won't be conquering DVD as DVD has conquered VHS. Nowadays most people are happy with MP3 and Divx. I don't expect people to swith over to the next-gen formats very quickly.

My theory is that in order for new formats to gain acceptance they have to offer a convenience benefit to 'regular' users. CD offered obvious benefits as does DVD. I agree with bwolke that HDDVD might not advance quickly, and I would expect that file downloading of movies replaces DVDs entirely, as music downloads are replacing CDs.

quote:

since DVD is mainly a rental medium

Interesting point–if this is the case, and, with the vastly-increased bit rate of HD DVD or Blu-ray discs, how does one get around the persistent problem of scratched rental discs? How robust will the error-correction be, really–or will this be significantly worse than DVD, as is?

My bet is that the discs will be so expensive, that the uptake on new releases (to replace damaged copies in the rental pool) will be constricted, equally reducing adoption of the new formats.

I wouldn't worry too much about it at the moment.

The takeup of Blueray/HD-DVD is going to be akin to SACD/DVD-Audio - a complete disaster area.

DVD to most people is still a relatively new innovation. People saw the jump from vinyl to CD as a major improvement in "quality", the same applied for VHS to DVD. The value in jumping to a new hi-def format will follow the same as the audio hi-def - probably an initial flurry of interest followed by apathy.

People are not going to like the fact that to watch the new formats is going to mean buying a brand new TV that supports HD with all the resultant anti-copying technology which is likely to have a number of incompatability issues.

The prediction for takeup is 1/3rd of the market by 2010 split evenly between both new formats. The market will not support two different formats with different films on each as most people will not buy into 2 different formats at the same time.

I certainly have no intention of changing for some time, will wait until the dust settles.

Just my 2 pence worth.

Steve.

Rental medium? Are you kidding? DVD sales eclipsed CD sales in the 2nd year DVD was introduced. DVD sales remain very healthy and in Europe they are skyrocketing with increases of between 30 and 40% in the last 3 years alone. Doesn't sound like a rental medium to me.

OK. I'm basing my statement on anecdotal evidence. Everyone I know has a few DVD's knocking around but I don't know anyone who makes a really significant investment. They all do more rentals. The fact that DVD's outsell CD's is not necessarily a big deal - I don't think many people buy CD's anymore. I suspect that computer games are the really big sellers now.
Stuart I take your point when you say that you have 300 DVD's and I could well be wrong but I don't believe that's like having 300 CD's, which isn't that big an investment in music I believe. You can play a particular CD hundreds of times but are you really going to watch a DVD all that many times?
I must admit I feel a bit blase about HD DVD. I don't really see the point and I suspect that it may just be like mini-disc, something that falls by the wayside. The truth is though, that a lot of the hollywood studios have made a significant investment in it. So while the jury is out I would not be willing to spend a lot of money on a dvd player. All of which I would have thought must impact the sales of the DVD5, although I would be surprised if it sold that many units anyway

Your right apart from a few (mostly music) DVDs most of my DVDs I've only viewed a couple of times and a much larger selection of my CDs and LPs get repeat plays.

Dear Friends,

I know that from the music standpoint, I am probably an oddball, but I have about 60 odd DVDs which have been viewed many times. I never tire for example of a film of the quality of the Cruel Sea, or the humour of Those Magnificent Men In Their Tlying Machines, or the serious drama in Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy. [Guiness as his best perhaps].

Currently I have no DVD replay as my PC is a borrowed one, which I have not felt inclined to buy a DVD reader for. That will change once I move this weekend. Clearly I cannot think of a normal repaly set as I will not have a TV in the place, and cannot afford an expensive Home Theatre set...

I have a very ecclectic DVD collection actually, but it is all the sort of stuff that used to be BBC Sunday afternnon viewing. One of my favourites is Kind Hearts and Coronets.

Will any of this ever see HD DVD? I doubt it.

In that way the normal DVD is likely to survive for many I am sure, even if the HD thing does come in any numbers. The only way it will take over is is parity is managed on price, so why would the Hollywood Studios bother? I may well be wrong, but I suspect the both normal CD and normal DVD will survive for quite some time.

Fredrik

jc

Anecdotal indeed. CD sales remain very high indeed and far outstrip any other music sales both in terms of volume and units. I appreciate where you're coming from about DVD being more of a rental market, and people having smaller collections of DVDs than they might have music CDs.

As you say, the games market is becoming ever more improtant and this is why the volume sellers for HD-DVD and BluRay are being launched primarily in that market in the shape of X-Box 360 and Playstation-3. That market has typically accepted format changes quite happily too, so it's very possible that the traction will happen for both formats with enough unit sales to keep the drive manufacturers happy and both formats co-existing quite happily.

What this means for HD movie and music machines is anybody's guess, but I can see quality manufacturers finding themselves in an awful dilemma of providing separate machines that cater for both formats, or simply ignoring it until there is the demand.

just 2ps worth here. Playusa have a special edition of crash for sale as a blu-ray. I can't see either taken off and agree that downloaded movies music seems to be the way ahead.

with over 600 dvds it will take a lot to get me to leave the format altogether.

N

I think this is one of those times, where the market is looking to change again.

There is new technology available now and it is being introduced into the market. Whether it becomes Blu-Ray or HD-DVD will depend upon cost of player and cost/availability of software to view upon it. This will accelerate the price reduction in the hardware. When it comes down to the point where you can buy a DVD player for $100 and a HD player for $150/$200, people will seriously start to move onto the new technology.

However, we all have to remember that there are other plays going on. With broadband becoming ubiquitous, then delivering content over IP to your house will be the next wave. Look at Sky buying EasyNet and then rolling out national broadband. It's perhaps not just to give their customers broadband, but to deliver personalised content to their homes over IP.

Now, when these technologies mature and colide is perhaps the more difficult question to answer.

Roy.

I don't think you'll ever see the DVD5 do Blu/HD. It's a completely different laser mechanism and decoding requirement. Probably the only change to the DVD5 you'll see will be a scaler card for the DVD5, but who knows when that'll be out now. And to be honest the longer it takes to come out, the less the adoption of it there will be, with the growing availability of HD.

It'll become more difficult to justify the investment in a declining technology.

Roy.

Here are 10 good reasons why this is not really gonna be a problem

http://www.audioholics.com/news/editorials/10reasonsHDDVDsfailed.php

Regards

Martyn

I am very confident with Naim's 1080p scaling card because with the problem I have at hte moment with my DVD5 i am oblige to use RGB scart only output and that's crazy how much better the image is compared to my Sony DVD recorder even with discs recorded by the Sony. On a very simple composite connection the DVD5 easily beats the Sony in RGB.
I think Naim will do a great great job with the 1080p scaler as they did with the 576p BNC only output, will push even further the limits and we will be very surprised.

It's an interesting question.

Maybe 2 months ago I would have also thought HDDVD has doomed, but then I got Sky HD.

The difference is absolutely astounding and if you see an end to end HD system in action I think you'll be convinced pretty quickly, as will the rest of the market.

Look at the take up of Sky HD as an indicator of the market. There is a demand and it's big. Granted it won't be as big as the switch from VHS to DVD was, but it will take hold pretty quickly in my opinion.

Cheers,

Andy

But that's the whole point–broadcast HDTV, whether terrestrial or IP-based, will someday provide the bandwidth to really display amazing picture quality without the presence of a spinning disc–much in the same way the FM tuner drove the hi-fi market years ago (before my birth).

My guess is that the distributed formats largely (from a consumer's perspective) fill in the gap until random-access choice is possible within a particular market.

I think the key here is in your sentence:

will "someday" provide the bandwidth

We have video on demand services here in London & they're fine, but they have a relatively small take up and aren't really competing with the DVD take home market.

Commercially the big film houses are set up to distribute to DVD first and then they release the rights for broadcast months later. Sure this will change eventually, but in the interim HDDVD has a real opportunity.

I'm no soothsayer though so it'll be interesting to see what happens!

quote:

Originally posted by jcs_smith:
Is there going to be a retrofit upgrade to the DVD5 so that it will be able to play HD disks once a common standard becomes established? Otherwise, since DVD is mainly a rental medium it could relatively quickly become useless. Vinyl has the advantage that people have vast amounts of it kicking around but I can’t see that the same would be true of DVD. I understand how difficult it would be, considering that it will need changes of laser, etc but I can’t believe this is not being considered.

High resolutions players are already available for a lot less. The technology advances rapidly, low resolution players (including the DVD5) are practically obsolete within the next 2 years.

quote:

Commercially the big film houses are set up to distribute to DVD first and then they release the rights for broadcast months later.

This is not a technical distinction, but a commercial one–broadcast delivery does not require any attention to packaging, menu structure or other DVD-authoring necessities (excluding any additional titling, content editing or aspect-ratio modifications).

In most cases, a Dolby E soundtrack can be printed onto your delivery medium of choice and be ready for courier dispatch within a few hours.

All

I think the scaler card is dead and buried after Sky launched its rather poor HD service. As for 1080p. There are limited screens at this time to even display this format so how do Naim make a scaler card to produce these images with little or nothing to test them on.

So where for the DVD5 the price has dropped big time with the NVi now out there. I do belive that there are very few new products coming to the HC market. This is due to two factors in my humble opinion. The current crop of DVD movies hit the shops and cinema s are poor, average at best. The other is the looming format war and the ever changing 720p 1080i 1080p viewing format.

Until Sky get it right which looks a long way of the scaler card looks even further in the distance.

Neill

quote:

Until Sky get it right which looks a long way of the scaler card looks even further in the distance.

Someone has mentioned '2 months' once or twice, think it was a few months ago now - well no, it was back in Nov. 2005, and several 2 months since.

But then again, two months in Naim speak is a country mile to others.

HD TV is quite amazing, especially those Discovery Channel documentaries...

However, DVD is also amazing provided that the image is not expanded to fill the whole of the 16:9 screen on my 55in Fujitsu plasma and the mastering is done well. Unfortunately, these two conditions are not consistently met so some DVDs look stunning while others are thin in colour and lacking resolution. The mastering can be so bad at times that you can see hair on the playback (like at the movies) and the image bounces around like an old silent movie.

Basically the movie industry is not committed to quality for DVD--a lot of DVDs out there are really shoddy but some are just amazing, especially the more recent releases (close to quality of HD). What this tells you is that the average consumer can't tell the difference or doesn't care about quality--the average consumer buys DVDs for convenience over VHS (just the same as CD vs LP).

The connectivity issues with HDCP and HDMI will be a major annoyance also, impacting the convenience factor over DVD.

That's why HD DVD and Blueray are sure to fail. With the quality of DVD on pretty large displays like 55inch--provided the release is good like the more recent ones--HD DVD is definitetly one to wait on rather than adopt early. I suspect though that if you want to go to larger displays, like home theater projection etc then HD DVD could be just your ticket. Let's face it though, this esoteric corner of the market will not keep HD DVD alive. It's sure to die, like DVD-A (maybe SACD will hold on as a niche like LP)

Chris.