The battle for the next high-definition disc format is all but over. Over the past month and a half, HD-DVD has received a series of crushing blows. Actually, its more like HD-DVD was murdered, the corpse was pissed on, buried, dug back up and then forced to perform unnatural acts with a donkey in a Tijuana sex show before being fed to a pack of rabid dingos.
It’s been that kind of month for HD-DVD.
First the studios started leaving en masse. Then retailers started to balk. Netflix announces they were going Blu-ray exclusive. The Pope made renting HD-DVDs a venial sin. etc., etc.
So Blu-ray has won the battle. But was it the best technology? That debate still continues. In an effort to settle the question once and for all, a team of technicians here at the Badmouth Labs have compared Blu-ray to HD-DVD in eight categories:
Cost, Capacity, Picture Quality, Audio Quality, Region Coding, DRM, Interactive Features and Future Proofing
We are purposely excluding sales and studio support. We already know the answer to those questions, and they do not necessarily indicate quality or value. If sales equated to quality, we’d have to admit that McDonald’s is the tastiest restaurant in the world and Wal-Mart has the most fashionable clothes. That’s not going to happen.
So take one last look at how HD-DVD stacked up against the newly-minted champion, Blu-ray.
Cost
HD-DVDs and Blu-ray movies retail for nearly identical prices. But since the inception of the format, Blu-ray players have been notably more expensive than equivalent HD-DVD players. Currently, an entry-level Blu-ray player has an MSRP of $400, while an entry-level HD-DVD player has a suggested retail of $150 . This is somewhat of a misleading comparison, since Toshiba has drastically slashed prices in a last-ditch effort to increase its user base. But it was not long ago that HD-DVD players were $250, and Blu-ray players were $500. Before that HD-DVD players cost $500 and a Blu-ray player was a $1000. At every turn, HD-DVD players have been less expensive than their equivalent Blu-ray counterparts — often by half or more.
Advantage: HD-DVD
Capacity
Blu-ray discs generally can hold more information than HD-DVD. A single-layer Blu-ray disc holds 25GB of data while a single-layer HD-DVD disc holds 15GB of data. Dual-layer versions of both are also available in 30GB/50GB flavors. Prototypes have been made of triple layer HD-DVDs that store 51GB of data and Blu-ray discs that store up to 200GB of data, but those have not made it into production and it is not clear that even if they could be mass produced, that they would be compatible with current players. (Toshiba claims the triple-layer HD-DVD will work on current players, but this is so far unconfirmed.)
In practice, both formats have more than enough storage to store a full 1080p movie plus extras. (A single-layer HD-DVD can store more than three hours of HD content.) Warner Brothers, which released titles in both formats for a time, used the exact same digital encoding for both Blu-ray and HD-DVD. Still, there is an advantage for Blu-ray for longer works, such as television series or placing multiple movies on a single disc.
Advantage: Blu-ray
Picture Quality
As mentioned earlier, in many cases, the studios will use the exact same digital encoding for both players. So their picture qualities would understandably be identical. Because its data is more tightly packed, Blu-ray does have a higher potential bit-rate for video+audio (48.0 Mbit/s v. 30.24 Mbit/s), but it is unclear that this extra bandwidth has any affect on picture quality, although it certainly would have some advantages for computer use. It appears that both formats have all the bandwidth they need to produce a perfect HD picture.
At the moment, picture quality is a tie. But that certainly wasn’t always the case. Due to rushing their product out the door to compete with HD-DVD (more on this later), Blu-ray’s first batch of movies were all encoded as space- and bandwidth-hungry MPEG2 files — the same technology used to encode standard DVDs. With only single-layer technology perfected, there was not enough space on a Blu-ray disc for a high-quality transfer of the movies. So all of the initial Blu-ray movies were of poor quality — many barely better than the standard DVD versions of the same film. At the time Sony insisted that MPEG-2 was the future of movies. But once they were able to implement better compression schemes, they quickly abandoned the codec for greener pastures.
Advantage: Tie
Audio Quality
Both HD-DVD and Blu-ray support a wide array of both lossy and lossless audio formats. HD-DVD provides higher bit-rates for Dolby Digital Plus, while Blu-ray offers higher bit-rates for Dolby Digital and DTS-HD High Resolution. Both formats also support DTS, Linear PCM, Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio. In practice, some have noted that many Blu-ray titles have a small edge in audio because the studios have encoded the soundtrack in standard Dolby Digital, where Blu-ray has an advantage. But HD-DVD titles in Dolby TrueHD have been released, offering perfect, lossless audio fidelity. Since both formats have shown that they are capable of perfect audio fidelity, and the differences in sound quality to date have been hard to detect, even for audiophiles, we’ll call this one as even.
Advantage: Tie
Region Coding
Like DVDs, Blu-ray has a region-encoding scheme that prevents you from purchasing a movie abroad and watching it in your home country. Region coding hurts film enthusiasts who may want rare films from other countries. The only people who benefit from the practice are the movie studios who can then play games by charging different prices for the same material based on what part of the world you live in. HD-DVD does not have any region coding at all. This means that if an HD-DVD movie is unavailable in the U.S., but on the shelf in Europe, you can just buy the European version and it will play perfectly. For instance, The Prestige is a Blu-ray exclusive…in the U.S. A European import of the title will play perfectly well on any American HD-DVD player.
Advantage: HD-DVD
DRM
Digital Rights Management is industry-speak for copy-protection. Generally speaking the more of it a product has, the happier the corporations are and the worse off the consumer becomes. In the modern age it’s pretty much impossible to completely avoid DRM. The best you can do is minimize it. Both Blu-ray and HD-DVD use 128-bit AACS content encryption that tries to prevent you from decrypting the movie you own (except on an “authorized” player) and HDPC protected output that seeks to prevent you from copying the decrypted movie as it leaves the player destined for your TV.
But the Blu-ray team added in two more layers of DRM: “BD+,” an embedded virtual machine that can run specialized anti-copying code, and “BD-ROM mark” yet another layer of DRM protection. If any one of these DRM schemes fail for any reason, your Blu-ray movie becomes as useful as a drink coaster.
Advantage: HD-DVD
Interactive Features
Both Blu-ray and HD-DVD promised to move past the boring, static menus that we are used to from DVDs, ushering in a new era of interactivity. But only one format really delivered on that promise out of the gate. In its initial specification, HD-DVD required that all players have Internet connectivity, a second video decoder, a second audio controller and at least 128MB of persistent storage built in. Blu-ray rushed out the door without any of those features implemented. that translated to more and better special features for HD-DVD.
Take the movie 300 for example. It was released by Warner Bros. on both formats. Here’s a list of the special features for each film:
Blu-ray version
Special Features
- ADDITIONAL SCENES of the Traitorous Hunchback and Never-Before-Seen Giant Warriors [in High Definition]
- FRANK MILLER’s Vision Realized on Film [in High Definition]
- 300 SPARTANS - FACT OR FICTION?: The Shocking Life of a Spartan Revealed [in High Definition]
- WHO WERE THE SPARTANS?: How the Actors Built Their Characters Based on Spartan Customs [in High Definition]
- WEBISODES: Go on Set with the Cast and Crew
- COMMENTARY by Director Zack Snyder - and MORE!
HD-DVD version
Special Features
- ADDITIONAL SCENES of the Traitorous Hunchback and Never-Before-Seen Giant Warriors [in High Definition]
- FRANK MILLER’s Vision Realized on Film [in High Definition]
- 300 SPARTANS - FACT OR FICTION?: The Shocking Life of a Spartan Revealed [in High Definition]
- WHO WERE THE SPARTANS?: How the Actors Built Their Characters Based on Spartan Customs [in High Definition]
- WEBISODES: Go on Set with the Cast and Crew
- COMMENTARY by Director Zack Snyder
- Exclusive to HD DVD Game Vengeance and Valor: Lead More Spartan Warriors into Battle Against Xerxes’ Forces and Test Your Combat-Hardened Knowledge of Tactics and Strategy
- PICK YOUR FAVORITE SCENES: Assemble Your Favorite Clips and Create Your Own Montage
- WEB-ENABLED FEATURES: Cool Mobile Downloads
- BLUESCREEN PICTURE-IN-PICTURE VERSION: Director Zack Snyder Compares the Pre-CGI-Enhanced Version to the Finished Film
Now this comparison only compares the features in HD-DVD to the features found in Blu-ray “Profile 1,” the “Grace Period” profile. On November 27, 2007, Profile 1 was superseded by Profile 1.1, the “Bonus View” profile. New players introduced after that date will have at least 256MB of local storage space as well as mandatory secondary video and audio decoders. But wait, there’s more. Sometime in late 2008, the “Bonus View” profile will be supplanted by Profile 2.0, “BD-Live.” BD-Live will up the ante with a full gigabyte of local storage and full Internet connectivity.
But even as they rolled out Profile 1.1, Sony released four new players in November 2007 — all of which were Profile 1.0. The truth is almost all of the players on the market today are Profile 1.0 — with the exception of the PlayStation 3, which we’ll talk about next.
Advantage: HD-DVD
Future-Proofing
As mentioned a few times in the article, Blu-ray was rushed out the door a little early in order to compete with the already released HD-DVD format. This resulted in some problems with the format. Some are easily fixed. Some are not. Picture quality was abysmal (for HD content) because of a poor codec choice. That was fixed rather easily as Blu-ray transitioned to better codecs that were already supported in the Profile 1.0 standard. But current migration from Profile 1 to Profile 1.1 to Profile 2.0 will show the real repercussions of buying half-baked technology.
Simply put, everyone who bought a Blu-ray player released before November 27, 2007, will never get any of the Bonus View or BD-Live profile features. This is not a simple firmware hack. If your player doesn’t have a secondary video decoder, gigabyte of storage and Ethernet port — no firmware update is going to provide one. Even if you buy a current player that adheres to the newly developed Profile 1.1 standard, it will be obsolete in less than a year when BD-Live becomes the new, “new standard.”
This situation creates multiple problems. Owners of Profile 1.0 players will never be able to get features such as picture-in-picture or interactive applications. Owners of Profile 1.1 players will never be able to take advantage of Web features developed by the studios, or applications that require more than 256MB of storage. And the movie studios will need to decide if they want to invest in making those cool new features available on their Blu-ray releases when they know a large chunk of their audience will not be able to take advantage of them.
The only exception to this rule is Sony’s PlayStation 3, which already had an Ethernet port, massive amounts of storage and impressive video and audio hardware built in. A simple firmware upgrade allowed it to move to Profile 1.1, and it is suspected the same will work to upgrade it to Profile 2.0. Every other current and future Blu-ray owner will be getting a raw deal until consumers are able to buy a Profile 2.0-enabled player later this year.
Advantage: HD-DVD
Conclusion
Blu-ray: 1 HD-DVD: 5
So there you have it. A brief comparison. I know some people will want to give me crap for not giving Blu-ray the edge in audio, since many movies do sound a tad better on Blu-ray due to the studio’s audio codec choice. But since both formats can provide lossless HD-audio, I still call it a tie. And if we started picking at it like that, we could just as easily give picture quality to HD-DVD due to the atrocious first batch of Blu-ray films.
It appears as though, eventually, Blu-ray will be able to do everything that HD-DVD was able to do out of the box — and perhaps more. But this is truly a case of a costlier, buggier, consumer-unfriendly, less-feature rich technology winning. There are many reasons for this. Blu-ray was ability to claim an early lead by Sony bundling a Blu-ray player in with every PlayStation 3. Some studios preferred for Blu-ray’s region coding and DRM so they could carefully control and limit where consumers can buy their movies and what they can do with them.
The HD format wars were really just getting underway. Other than a few early adopters and a small number of PlayStation 3 owners, the market was wide open. With their low-price players and winning features, Toshiba looked as if they were going to make some serious inroads into Blu-ray’s early lead. But when the studios all began to move to Blu-ray exclusively, HD-DVD lost its opportunity to make a case with consumers. It doesn’t matter how good your technology is if none of the studios will release movies in your format.
R.I.P. HD-DVD, you will be missed.
Bonus Point
When talking about movies. It’s always important to get the opinion of noted filmmaker Michael Bay, director of such classics as Bad Boys II, and Playboy Video Centerfold: Kerri Kendall. Bay pitched a very public hissy fit when he found out that his film Transformers would be an HD-DVD exclusive, even claiming he would not direct Transformers 2 because of it. But, Bay soon remembered that directing crappy movies like Transformers 2 is how he affords his hookers and blow, so he backed down and said that HD-DVD rocked!
That lasted until recent announcements made it clear that HD-DVD was dead again. Now Bay is telling everyone that will listen that “Blu-ray’s better, and I told everyone. I was very vocal about it. I knew HD [DVD] was not going to make it.”
Two things are clear from this exchange: 1. Michael Bay really supported Blu-ray the entire time. 2. Michael Bay is a giant douchebag.
Advantage: HD-DVD
February 15th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
Hey, you forgot computing use! HD-DVD virtually dropped out of the market about 6 months ago. The HD-DVD recorders were slower than DVD recorders. Meantime, Blu-ray took computing by storm with multiple burners available. Try this: search google shopping for HD-DVD burner - the only thing you will find is a Blu-ray burner with HD-DVD reading capability.
Hey, wait again, you forgot about use of the format for Gaming. PS3 games are actually Blu-ray disks - providing a boost for manufacturing price reduction.
Hey, you forgot about long term costs. Blu-ray anti-scratch coating was tested by cnet News and found to be a big improvement. Disks will last longer at rental firms cutting their overhead costs.
Hey, you forgot about future disk production cost. The initial new production requirement is needed for Blu-ray but the technology is actually less expensive than DVD or HD-DVD to produce sincethey do not have to laminate two layers together (except with Blu-ray dual layer). The Blu-ray disk actually is a single disk with a data coating layer and then two protective coatings. The lamination process was always a drawback for DVD.
Future-proofing: everything changes and old 1.0 Blu-ray players will still play movies which is the purpose of the format.
February 15th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
1. I didn’t forget about computing use. The article was about home theater use.
2. I didn’t forget about gaming use. See above. And if I was going to comment about gaming, I would mention that Blu-ray has slower access times than a plain old DVD and that its exorbinant cost took Sony from first place to third in the console race.
3. The anti-scratch coating is needed for Blu-ray because the surfaceof the the disk is so thin that it can be easily damaged. HD-DVDs and regular DVDs can take more damage.
4. The studies I’ve seen show HD-DVD with a small edge in manufacturing cost. At any rate, the difference is in the pennies, not a major deal-breaker one way or the other..
5. Everything does change. But usually not twice in the space of a year. Blu-ray was rushed. Profile 2.0 is what the format should have been in the first place.
February 15th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
This article is very biased. I do not have time to write a full response to it, however, here are a few points of disagreement.
In my view, the most important feature in a disc technology are storage and speed. Blu-ray has the edge on both and therefore I believe it is the best technology.
Consumers can look into the future, and they realize that eventually Blu-ray (which was released later and thus lags in price) will reach the same low price levels as HD-DVD, will have the same interactivity as HD-DVD, and in general will catch up to HD-DVD in every area. They also realize that HD-DVD will never have the advantage in storage and access speed. The latter two, however, are the most important aspects of what is essentially a storage disc.
The method you used to compare the two is flawed. You created categories for comparison but did not weigh them in importance. Features are not all created equal, and some are certainly more important than others. For a disc format I would say that storage, access speed, picture quality, audio quality, and price should be the most important, with the other ones mentioned in the article lagging significantly. Using this method, and being aware of changes in the future, you will realize that consumers did choose the right format, and the better technology did win.
Disclaimer–I do not work for Sony or Toshiba and do not own any High def player.
February 15th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
Storage and speed are important, but since both formats have enough space to store an entire 1080p HD movie along with a perfect lossless HD-audio track, it’s a rather moot point. The extra storage available on Blu-Ray discs is seldom used.
Likewise, both have more than enough bandwidth to maintain a perfect picture and perfect audio. Adding more speed might help in a computing environment, but it does nothing here.
Blu-ray may drop in price and may develop all the features that HD-DVD has, but that’s hardly a reason to buy a more expensive, feature-free player today, now is it?
And I vehemently dispute that “consumers” chose much of anything. Sony forced PS3 owners to buy an unneeded Blu-ray player that gave them an artificial early lead, and the major studios selected Blu-ray for their own reasons.
Consumers had very little to do with it.
February 16th, 2008 at 10:17 am
John,
1. Home computing use is important to home AV use. More and more people are using computers for their AV system movie player, movie disk recorder, and “Ti-Vo” type recorder.
2. My comment on gaming use is that the increased disk production is eating away at initial production line changeover very quickly.
3. Again you state that HD-DVD and DVD can take more damage - which is false. Blu-ray with its anti-scratch coating can take more abuse as proven by independent testing. It does not matter that the data layer is closer to the surface because it is protected better.
4. Yes there is CURRENTLY a small edge in manufacturing cost. This small edge in pricing charged by the producers is due to initial equipment investment for Blu-ray production. HD-DVD is able to be produced with minimal line modification. The small HD-DVD edge will dissapear and reverse to be a Blu-ray edge once the initial investment is absorbed. The simple production cost (without considering initial production line conversion from DVD) is lower for Blu-ray media.
5. The Blu-ray spec changes do not matter. Early adopters got what they wanted - a High-def movie player that will continue to play new movies being released. If they wanted to link online with their home AV system they would have waited for 2.0 or purchased HD-DVD.
6. New one: Toshiba stopped production of HD-DVD players and recorders. This is now the most important consideration in what to buy.
link
February 16th, 2008 at 11:55 am
1. If you use a home theater PC to play movies, it is just another player. For data transfer, back-up etc., I think the day of the optical disk is close to at an end. Apple is starting to release models with no optical drive, the same way they started release iMac’s with no floppy disk years ago.
2. I see. Well the price differential in manufacturing is minuscule still. If HD-DVD had won the battle, its costs would drop as well. I don’t see the PS3 as a long-term factor one way or the other.
3. We are basically saying the same thing. You can scratch a HD-DVD easier, yes. But because the surface of media is further from the surface, that scratch can be ignored or even buffed out. if a Blu-ray disc were similarly scratched, it would make it inoperable. So they developed a non-scratch coating to prevent that. I’ve never screwed up one of my DVDs so I can’t play it. I don’t think I’ll have any problem with my HD-DVDs either.
4. Long-term, I don’t believe the manufacturing cost of either format will be a factor. It will be a difference of pennies, not a primary reason to choose one over the other.
5. I couldn’t disagree with you more. When they were selling those Blu-ray players to people at Best Buy, were they telling them, “Hey, this thing won’t play all the cool features we will come out with next year?”
6. Well, we all knew that was coming. The point of the article wasn’t to compare sales, but relative technologies.
February 17th, 2008 at 5:33 pm
Pour one out for my fallen HD DVD homies. I’m getting a combo player as soon as a decent one comes out that meets at least the BD 1.1 spec. In the meantime, I’ll enjoy the heck out of my 30+ HD DVDs and dream about what could have been. And hopefully those Band of Brothers discs from Japan will be here soon…
February 17th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
Blu-Ray won for three reasons:
1. “Features” heavily supported the studios, at the expense of the consumer. Sony (oh, I’m sorry, the “Blu-Ray Alliance”, headed mainly by Sony) knew that if they could obtain the position of a “standard” before HD took off in the market, then it wouldn’t matter how anti-consumer the format was, because it would be the only choice. The media industry, however, is a factor from day one, and of course they love Blu-Ray because it is heavily DRM-laden, much more so than HD-DVD, and has things like region-limitations, as was mentioned in the article.
2. Sony paid the studios. A lot. Much more than Toshiba. MUCH more. In the order of a few billion. When you already have the format that will let the media industry put the hammer down on how the consumer can use your product, why not take a few billion on the side, just for good measure.
3. False statistics. Sony has been throwing around numbers that have no basis in reality. They would claim X amount of Blu-Ray players sold, compared to HD-DVD players, but what they weren’t saying was that the majority of the players sold were PS3’s, and that a good chunk of the people buying the players had no intention of even necessarily using it to play Blu-Ray movies.
Say what you want, cheer if you want, but Sony bought this win, and they’re going to start trying to use it as leverage to make back ground they’ve lost (consoles) and money they spent (buying the industry). Almost every aspect of Blu-Ray is pro-industry, and anti-consumer. I don’t even care that Blu-Ray won, because the reality of the situation is that I don’t think either optical format would have caught on (HD downloads are just a year or two out on the horizon), but it sickens me to see that people are actually cheering for the less consumer-friendly format. You now see why these corporations are able to be so predatory and abusive to their consumers, because when it really matters, when there is still a chance to do something, the consumer is still too ignorant to have any influence.
February 18th, 2008 at 4:49 am
February 19th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
It would seem that Sony has won round 2 of the video wars.
Round 1 saw VHS vs. the Beta format and although the Beta seemed to be the clear tech winner in both size and video quality, it was Philips VHS system which came out ahead in that battle.
The battle seems to have been fought in the same way in the high def. DVD formats with the winner being Sony this time. I have had the opportunity to view both technologies side by side using the same media presentation and other than a slight edge in video quality that I noted with the HD/DVD format (it seemed to be much brighter), both formats seem to be equal in quality. I do not think I could have seen any differences in quality between the two presentations had I not been able to view them together.
However, I despair at the thought of what Sony will do with it’s monopoly. Will it continue to maintain elevated pricing of both it’s players and movies?
I think I will be happy to watch movies on my hi def TV using my $60 dollar DVD player and $10 movies.
February 26th, 2008 at 6:44 am