WTB: HD DVDs

I've been on quite a movie kick as of late and would like to expand my collection of HD DVD's.

Sorry, I don't do Sony formats so NO Blu-Ray discs please.

I prefer MINT and COMPLETE discs since HD-DVD players can be picky when it comes to scratched discs.
Shoot me some titles and prices and lets do a deal.

I can also trade some common Xbox and Xbox 360 games if needed.

 

If I ever get the rebate HD-DVD's, I'll be glad to trade them... :lol:

 

Heh. I'm still waiting on my 5 free discs to arrive. It's been about 4 weeks, though I hear that some have waited more than 10 weeks.

 

My first attempt failed because they decided to close the PO Box for an earlier rebate batch (the one with TMNT) instead of just substituting the defunct movies. Luckily, I got the entire package (form + UPC) back when it was returned so I could send it out again.

 

I want to point out that my local fry's has HD DVD's for 14.99 I don't if any such store is in your area. Just a heads up. I believe the price drop was made to keep HD DVD'S alive.

 

Or increase HD format penetration into the market, current sales for BD and HDDVD are quite marginal compared to DVD, I wouldn't call these prices reduction however dramatic an attempt to keep HD DVD alive as Sony would like you to believe. I think it's about time we stop paying a premium for HD stuff and at the moment only Toshiba can afford a loss on the format war, Sony is already too deep down into debts and behind in terms of stability of the format to go down that road.

Toshiba and the HDDVD group are currently setting a trend by marketing HDDVD as cheap and great value for money and that's quite important for the mainstream consumer. To my view BD is perceive more as elitist and cluncky due to lack of a definitive standard yet.

But I guess it's only a matter of time for Sony to counter attack with cheaper prices, but on the price format war I think HD DVD has the edge... Come on come back Warner you still got time to make the right choice.

 

Actually, most retailers are dropping the prices of HD DVDs and players because they don't sell well anymore, and they are trying to move them out to make way for more Blu-Ray.

Best Buy, Frys and Circuit City are all dropping the format by June. Circuit City has already stopped stocking the players, once their inventory is gone, they are gone (which is why they are selling the players for $99- to get rid of them). The company that made the only useable piece of software for creating HD DVDs has stopped selling the software to focus solely on BluRay...

Warner is still releasing HD until May or so...

I suspect Paramount will be releasing BluRay again by April...

But if you want cheap HD DVDs, keep watching for sales, I see certain titles for $9.99 every now and then.

 

*sigh* - I suppose roll on 360 Blu-Ray drive.

It's a shame really - I knew in the back of my mind that HD-DVD was going to fail from the start. I think before they came out I was backing BluRay as my fave format, but HD-DVD was going to be the winner (this was pre-2005).

But then when they came, BluRay sucked so badly initially in the support and encoding standards that I jumped ship. It didn't help that BluRay was more expensive to produce than HD-DVD. It didn't help either that Sony were trying to force it down our throats - I felt glum that the format war was purely going to be won by people being shafted into paying extra for it.

The choice of Java over HDi was stupid - BD-J is a slower and more cumbersome system and lacks the speed and expandability that I want.

The stupid cock-waving war by BluRay Consortium 4 years ago where they shafted interoperability between standards just to fill their wallets was a farce, a real farce.

The advertising for BluRay I kept seeing in Wired was brash and annoying, and it turned me away. HD-DVD's adverts had class and felt that a quality product rather than a thing for 'Hollywood'.

It pisses me off even more that Sony bought the favours of companies rather than the companies making a sound consumer choice. It pisses me off that our hands are being forced as consumers - we now have no real option. It even pisses me off that when I see BluRay players in store they look like a bag of nails.

I want to say 'Screw you, BluRay!' but I know that, at the end of the day, we love physical media for our content (although there may be an uprising if the security keys get changed and updates are forced) and I think we're stuck with those cock-waving, arrogant gits.

</rant>

 

Totally agree mooseblaster.

Plus when HD-DVD is totally dead, expect blu-ray disc prices to stay high and increase year on year. $ony will have a total monopoly on disc duplication charges.

My advice, buy your movies online or buy shares in Sony!

 

Yep all that is going to happen is that we will all pay a huge premium for Blu-Ray as Sony wanted us to pay premium for the PS3. Total control of royalties by Sony means that they will have control of the prices to the consumer.

And yes Sony didn't get Bluray's lead by merit but by buying its way in, they lied about the graphic quality of the PS3 and availabilty, lied about BluRay being a standard, and superior we can certainly expect worse things in the future... Once they are established there is no turning back...

 

I agree on both as well

DVD`s are still priced high even though the manafacturing costs are reduced, but they blag the extras and special editions and all that crap

With an intergrated B-R player this will help the sales of the console as if they are almost the same cost as the stand alone players, most "joe public" will probably say, "lets get a PS3 as is WI-FI and can play games

Not in reverse like the NUON was

So Sony`s console will go to the masses, but not on games at the moment (imho ;-) )

 

I think you are right Sony was particularly clever to put a DVD player into the PS2 which contributed hugely to its success and they are replicated that with the PS3. But a lot of "joe public" who are not gamers won't probably reason the same way, I can't imagine my parents for instance buying a PS3 to watch movies, it's not in their culture eventhough they are getting quite tech oriented these days.

At the time the PS2 DVD was average compared to standalone ones but this time it seems to be the best especially in terms of upgrades...

But yeah on your other point it looks less and less likely that the PS3 will be the dominant game platform this generation. I was really surprised to see today that DMC 4 sold more on the 360 than on the PS3 in the UK. I thought DMC was a PS fan boy thing oh well I guess Capcom is right in going multi platform.

 

Well I've yet to see an HD-DVD's in a bargain bin or for $9 at any of the stores in my area. So no one here wants to sell any?

 

same here, I only saw couple of titles for $14.99 - that was the cheapest(and not very good selection at that), that said I might have some hd dvd's for sale within a week or two so will definitely let you know by then.

 

Any examples of this? I know some movies look bad because the film wasn't restored, but I hadn't heard of any looking bad (or worse than HD DVD) because of the compression. The only real way to test this would be to look at a movie done in both formats, and most of those use the same video stream on both discs, so they look identical.

BluRay has a higher bit-rate ceiling than HD DVD, and thus can look a LOT better than HD if it's encoded properly...

It's winning over the studios for the exact opposite reason. You can do FAR more with BD-J than with HDi. Sure, it requires a more powerful machine (and really, the PS3 is the only way to go if you want to watch BD movies), but any new game, etc for PC always seems to require newer/better hardware to get the best out of it...

And the one thing people keep forgetting is that no one buys HD movies (either format) to play with the interactive features. I could give a damn about anything but the movie, if that plays, I'm happy...

And HD DVD didn't do this? Ever heard of Warner Brothers? (Who had the guts to change their mind and do BD because they realized it was better) Ever hard of Paramount? They dropped BD support _SOLELY_ because Microsoft paid them to do it.

Sony isn't forcing your hand to do anything. No one is making you buy an HD player of any kind... Just like no one forced you to buy a DVD player...

I, personally, don't care which format wins, as long as one does so I can get all the movie I want on one format... Like I said before, I'm in it to see movies in HD. I have no desire to locate every single little car in the Cars movie with my remote. Games on DVD/HD discs are the stupidest thing the studios waste money on. They only do it to get industry rewards, not a single customer on the planet gives a crap about them...

If thye released a move-only version of every title, and a full-featured version for only $2 more, I'd by the movie-only version every time...

The annoying thing aobut BD from a business side is the rediculous fees they are already charged for the AACS copy protection. You _HAVE_ to have AACS on the disc to replicate, and it costs $10,000 for the first title you do (and $3000 for each additional title). Small studios and indie-film makers will never be able to pay that...

 

Well, early films used MPEG-2 for encoding, and as such couldn't get as good a compression (and thus, quality). People complained that early discs suffered from blockiness and pixellation in comparison to the HD-DVD versions. One example, Home Theater Blog, states:

"My own observations (Which I freely admit weren’t with a system I was intimately familiar with) found the exact opposite to be true. So far I’ve viewed, ‘House of Flying Daggers’, ‘Hitch’ and ‘Ultraviolet’ and the Blu-ray demo disc on a 61†1080p Samsung rear-pro display. Flying Daggers had severe macro-blocking in scenes with single fields of highly saturated colors.
"The same thing presented itself in ‘Ultraviolet’ during a close-up of Mila Jovovich's midriff; I again noticed distinct pixilation as if the subtle changes in skin-tone simply weren’t being rendered. It was as if this section of video just got a wash of color as opposed to the subtle shading I’m used to seeing from HD-DVD.

"Hitch on the other hand was just plain bad; I noticed more macro-blocking and shading problems, and less sharpness than the other two titles to boot. It was better than DVD but not better enough to justify the expense."

...and that was the problem. Initially BluRay films WERE encoded badly. So much so that BluRay was forced to drop things like TrueHD and special features just to fit it on the disk (yes BluRay, with it's greater amount of space).

There are also reviews of the side-by-side comparisons here stating the same thing: http://www.highdefdigest.com/feature_blurayvshddvd_firstcomparison.html

And there's the flaw. People don't like being forced to upgrade just to continue doing what they've always done - DVD would never have taken off if people were forced to replace their machines every 2 years else they'd not play the latest discs - and pay $200 a pop.

Also, I must point out to whoever said it - the PS2 is a lousy DVD player. It regularly gets rated 1 star in DVD review mags because the electronics within the early PS2s interfere with the picture (picture noise in the black bits, sometimes sound noise on quiet bits of movies, etc. etc.)

Then why aren't you buying them as downloads, if it's just the movie that counts? Surely this war is worthless, then? Combine with the fact that both formats are trying to sell on the benefit of extra features (which, I must point out, is why DVDs with added features are highly popular) because content is now available on demand.

Also, in quite a few cases the BluRay discs HAVEN'T played. Chronos doesn't on the PS3, and various titles with BD+ won't play on some standalone players due to to DRM issues - combined with the fact that no firmware updates were available at the time to fix it (case in point: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/pos...h-bd-drm-failing-to-play-on-some-devices.html)

----

Actually, something's dawned on me. You remember that when people say 'Microsoft doesn't care who wins' and people shrug it off because of Microsoft's backing of HD-DVD. Well, it completely didn't dawn on me that the encoding format both formats used are made and licensed from Microsoft. Go figure.

 

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/multim...War_Not_Over_Yet_Says_HD_DVD_Promo_Group.html

This is quite interesting, format war is not as simple as it looks, it is a lot about perception and manipulated figures from each camp, I quite like his view though.

 

The problem with early films on BD was that Sony couldn't realiably make 50GB discs back then. If you look at ALL of the launch titles, they were only 25GB discs. The first 50 was Click I think... That's when they started to look good. The discs that are Mpeg2, and at least 29 or more mbits look the best.

BTW- Mpeg2 will always look better than any of the Mpeg4 codecs if you have a high enough bitrate (which BD can provide). That's why Sony releases a lot of their movies in Mpeg2 still.

I think we have a couple of the titles mentioned in your previous post as being blocky, etc... I'm off to check them out! :110:

Remember, initially all BluRay discs were 25GB. Not enough space to good Mpeg2. And, initially, DVD looked horrible. Everyone I talked to at the start of DVD said the format would fail because it looked so bad... The only reason the format succeeded was because they were able to dramatically improve picture quality quickly. The same is true with the HD formats (both of them).

You don't have to replace your machine at all... All BluRay players currently on the market will play every BluRay disc that's released (and that will be released). Even profile 2.0 discs. They just won't be able to do some of the more advanced things (like go online, etc) because they don't have those capabilities. This was known from day one to anyone that read up on the formats. You can hardly expect a player with no network card to be able to download content... But you saved money getting one with less hardware...

I don't know how good a DVD player the PS2 is, but the PS3 is the best BD player on the market. That's simply because of the insanely powerful processors it has in it (obviously for gaming, but the BD part of it takes full advantage of them). People that whine about price shouldn't be getting into HD at all. It's expensive, period. Sure, you can get a player for $99 (HD DVD), but if you aren't paying a few thousand for a decent TV, what's the point? People that go to Wal-Mart for their HD equipment aren't going to be very satisfied...

It's not 'just the movie' that counts, it's the movie LOOKING GOOD that counts. There's no such thing as downloadable HD or any kind of broadcast HD that looks good. Most of it's not even 1080p. And I like having physical media. I don't have a network connection in my video room, and have no intention of putting one there. What I hate is when picture quality of the feature suffers so the studio can put 15 minutes of animated menus on the disc... That's NOT why I buy DVDs/HD discs...

No, like I said, I still want my movies on a disc, I just want it to look good... The success of any of these formats being based solely on extra features is subjective at best. Look at Cars for example (the Pixar film). Disney spent god-only-know how much money developing an interactive game that you can play while watching the movie. Let's say they sold 100,000 discs. Would they have sold one single less disc if the game never existed on the disc? I seriously doubt it. In fact, I'd bet they would have sold the same amount of discs if it was just the movie and nothing else. I mean, think about it, how many DVDs do you have? And of those, how many have you actually gone through all the 'extra' content? Sure, some people love it, and go through it in detail (these are the people that complain when it's not there). And even I like some of it, but I NEVER base a decision to buy a disc on what non-feature content is on it. That's not why I buy movies, I buy them so I can watch the movie. Anything else is nice, but not mandatory.

I know some will disagree with this, but most don't. In the industry, it's all about bragging rights. Disney will get all kinds of recognition and awards for the Cars game because it is pretty clever and a well designed (even if it isn't the greatest when it comes to game play). That's why the do that kind of thing...

But when they opt to lower the bitrate of the feature, or remove an uncompressed audio in favor of a compressed one just so they can fit some stupid game or random interview on the disc, I get kind of annoyed.

But none of that has to do with the hardware. Even the Samsung player that can't seem play half the discs out there can't do it because of software problems, not hardware. They will get firmware updates out that will correct this problem. Yeah, it sucks to get a disc that won't work because of programming issues and have to wait for a fix, but they will fix it eventually.

Chronos won't play on the PS3 because of a 'defect' in the creation of the disc (although I suspect there's more to it than that). The disc has been fixed, and you can get a replacement disc from the publisher if you need one.

Well, ONE of the encoding formats... (Although probably the most popular.) But the rumors of Microsoft 'not caring who wins' was because people think Microsoft wants to be king of HD downloading, and that's what they want to be successful. That would most likely still use VC-1 in some form. That's why they still develop the encoding codec/system.

(I'm not sure I believe any of that, but that's what has been rumored...)

(Something tells me we are veering off-topic here... )

 

Good lord people...all I wanted out of this post was a few HD DVD to buy. Turns out I've started a format war thread instead. Lol!