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Media Businesses PlayStation (Games) Movies

Blu-ray, HD DVD Target of EU Antitrust Probe 173

rfunches writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that EU antitrust regulators are turning up the heat on the Blu-ray and HD-DVD format consortiums. The European Commission has demanded evidence of Hollywood studios' communications and agreements on the new generation of DVD formats. From the article: 'The European Commission, the European Union's executive body, appears to be particularly interested in the activities of the Blu-ray group because of its dominance in Hollywood, according to people familiar with the situation. The commission is investigating whether improper tactics were used to suppress competition and persuade the studios to back their format.' The article points out that all of the major Hollywood studios except Universal are backing Blu-ray; Universal is backing HD-DVD. It also notes that while one industry watcher believes the first format to have an installed base of two million homes will come out on top, there were millions of Betamax units already sold when VHS won out in the format wars of the 80's."
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Blu-ray, HD DVD Target of EU Antitrust Probe

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  • Spurred on by whom? Why by the HD DVD camp...

    The HD DVD camp has been lobbying the commission to draw attention to Blu-ray's tactics in the movie capital in a bid to force more studios to put their product on HD DVD, according to people familiar with the situation. One issue the Commission has raised with some studios is statements made at the Consumer Electronics Show in January in Las Vegas about the exclusivity of studios to Blu-ray, according to people familiar with the situation.

    The European Commissio

  • by Bullfish ( 858648 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2007 @11:24AM (#19731129)
    HDTV penetration has to be much higher in all markets. VHS and Beta both worked on all TV's made at the time. These only work on HDTVs (to get any benefit from the formats). The majority of TVs out there are still SD. Likely by the time HDTV penetration is high enough, another format will emerge, or hybrid players will be very common.
    • Actually... http://www.cornbread.org/FOTRCompare/index.html [cornbread.org]

      That page shows images from "The Lord Of The Rings: Fellowship of the ring" from the DVD version and from the HD-DVD version downscaled to the same resolution as the DVD version (480p Widescreen).

      You should be surprised that even after downscaling to DVD resolution the HD-DVD images are still obviously better.
      • You should be surprised that even after downscaling to DVD resolution the HD-DVD images are still obviously better.

        DVD compression (MPEG2) uses 16-pixel blocks. So, I would expect HD-DVD's to be about 4 or 16 times higher resolution.

      • it's kind of a bad comparison because they guy used two completely different methods to capture the data then he "upscaled" the DVD version to 1080p before downscaling both back down to 480p... no only that but he did is "scaling" with Photoshop. There's no good reason he couldn't have captured the DVD the same way he captured the HD DVD... and there's no reason he couldn't have simply captured both through the same mechanism and had the player downscale the HD-DVD before it even reached the capture device.
        • The DVD capture used a better capture method (raw digital output from the player), yet still looks worse. Though I kind of agree that maybe he should have used a hardware player to downscale the HD-DVD.

          He didn't upscale the DVD to HD and then downscale it back to DVD, he kept just kept the original DVD capture. Nowhere does he say anything about downscaling the DVD. Scaling it up and then back down to the original would have been stupid, though with any good scaling algorithm (and he does say he used bicubi
      • I'm not sure that is a good comparison.
        • He's not using identical frames.
        • He's using a slow kind of resampling that a hardware player wouldn't use.
        • He's using jpeg and not some kind of lossless method.
        • He's actually scaling DVD up to 1080p, not 1080p down to DVD, so this comparison isn't actually useful for what you describe
        • The images on the front page are downscaled to DVD, click on them to get the upscaled to HD-DVD versions.

          This page features the HD image sampled down to the DVD's resolution of 852x480. [...] You can see the full-size comparisons by clicking on the images on this page.
      • SDTVs can only do 480i.
        • Yes, but you generally can't get an image of a single field.

          Looking at the images, I see no interlacing problems, so either dvds are stored in progressive, they use the common conversion of 24/25fps film to 50/60fps interlaced that a decoder can detect and restitch, or his decoder has a immensely good deinterlace algorithm.

          The quality of an interlaced picture is very near that of a progressive picture (especially for film whose source was half the framerate), so it's close enough to get a progressive still
    • by linumax ( 910946 )

      HDTV penetration has to be much higher in all markets.

      Apparently three in 10 US households [dealerscope.com] now have an HDTV set, and the HDTV market will exceed 50 million units [nikkeibp.co.jp] by 2008.

      Likely by the time HDTV penetration is high enough, another format will emerge, or hybrid players will be very common.

      Video on Demand? and Hybrids are already here! so I think it's gonna be an interesting competition, hopefully the end result would be best for us consumers.

      • That's a drop in the bucket. World wide figures: 1,416,338,245 televisions.

        http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/med_tel-media-te levisions [nationmaster.com]
      • by Paulrothrock ( 685079 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2007 @01:17PM (#19732747) Homepage Journal

        Count me as one of those people who won't own an HD set until he's forced to. I just spent $400 on a 32" CRT TV, and I'm not about to go out and spend $700+ on a similarly sized HDTV. I don't watch sports or movies all that often, so what will this get me? My wife will be able to see every pore on the face of some reality TV tramp? I'll be able to make out the birthmark on Katie Sackhoff's shoulder? It doesn't add to the plot or production quality, and can often get in the way of it.

        Let me put it this way: Until HDTV gives me something other than sub-microscopic picture quality, there's nothing I can't get from it that I can get from my video iPod.

        • by jgoemat ( 565882 )

          Let me put it this way: Until HDTV gives me something other than sub-microscopic picture quality, there's nothing I can't get from it that I can get from my video iPod.
          He types as he watches on his 15" monitor running at 640x480 resolution...
          • That's a different story altogether. More monitor space increases productivity. I use a computer professionally. I can't think of anyone who watches TV professionally.

        • "Count me as one of those people who won't own an HD set until he's forced to. I just spent $400 on a 32" CRT TV, and I'm not about to go out and spend $700+ on a similarly sized HDTV. I don't watch sports or movies all that often, so what will this get me? My wife will be able to see every pore on the face of some reality TV tramp? I'll be able to make out the birthmark on Katie Sackhoff's shoulder? It doesn't add to the plot or production quality, and can often get in the way of it."

          So you're complete
          • Well, what exactly would you want from an audio/video technology other than better quality?

            One of the first articles I read about digital broadcast said that they could have ten times as many channels broadcast over the air. It would be like getting standard cable (the kind without the box) without paying for it. Why, for example, can't I get Discovery or Sci Fi over the air if there's so much more room for them? When it can save me money by letting me get the content I want over the air rather than having

            • "One of the first articles I read about digital broadcast said that they could have ten times as many channels broadcast over the air. It would be like getting standard cable (the kind without the box) without paying for it. Why, for example, can't I get Discovery or Sci Fi over the air if there's so much more room for them? When it can save me money by letting me get the content I want over the air rather than having to pay for cable, I'll buy an HDTV."

              Good point, then. Sadly, it'll never happen. I don
        • I just spent $400 on a 32" CRT TV, and I'm not about to go out and spend $700+ on a similarly sized HDTV

          Tiger Direct has a $400 special on a 32 inch wide screen LCD. ATSC tuner. 720p. HDMI, component video, etc. Weight 57 pounds.Niko SV3206 32" LCD HDTV Television [tigerdirect.com]

          Your hernia-in-a-box CRT will need a converter for broadcast reception in two years. You paid $400 for 4:3 video and analog audio and you call this a bargain?

          It doesn't add to the plot or production quality, and can often get in the way of it

          • Tiger Direct has a $400 special on a 32 inch wide screen LCD. ATSC tuner. 720p. HDMI, component video, etc. Weight 57 pounds.Niko SV3206 32" LCD HDTV Television

            And I'm sure that's just as high quality as my Sharp CRT.

            Your hernia-in-a-box CRT will need a converter for broadcast reception in two years. You paid $400 for 4:3 video and analog audio and you call this a bargain?

            Thankfully we have options other than broadcast television. And, thankfully, I don't have super hearing that causes me to shriek at any

        • by chrish ( 4714 )
          I'm not willing to "invest" in HD until I'm positive they've got this crap sorted out. How many times now have the early adopters been burned because Hollywood (or whoever) changed the DRM they wanted to foist on HD, or the format changed, etc.?

          As I understand it, Japan has a much, much higher per-capita HD installed base. Why do American companies hate the rest of us so much? ;-)
    • by ect5150 ( 700619 )
      I predict Blu-Ray and HD-DVD will go the way of DVD+R and DVD-R
    • Even then, I don't think HDTV penetration will matter as much. I have an extremely nice 42" Pioneer plasma and DVD's look very good on it. Maybe I'm alone on this, but I don't feel the need to replace my dvd player and 150+ dvds for a whole new format, dvd is good enough for me.
  • by asphaltjesus ( 978804 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2007 @11:24AM (#19731135)
    shocked!

    We all benefit from Free Markets because we get to choose between super-hd-blue or blue-super-hd. Why do we need regulators?
  • Beta was much clearer but was more expensive and had 5.5 hour tapes.
    VHS ruled because 6 hour miniseries and price outweighed quality.
    • Well, you're right in the broad strokes, but wrong in the details.

      Even at the end of its life cycle, Beta tapes were 5 hours at slowest recording speed (Beta III). This is almost certainly less important to the eventual death of the format than the original tape length which was one hour, when RCA provided a four hour VHS tape. X2 recording got Beta up to two hours, but four hours vs. two hours is the difference between recording an American baseball/football game and not, or between recording a long movie
      • I do not remember the shorter beta times you mention being a problem when I owned a beta machine however I probably bought a couple years after introduction as prices dropped into the $400 to $500 range.

        However, I clearly remember Beta tapes going 5.5 hours.

        Wiki supports that memory here:
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCR [wikipedia.org]
        Sony made thinner tape and still slower speed to allow *over* five hours,

        And I remember at the time that the 6 hour VHS tape was critical because people wanted to record 3 nights of 2 hours o
        • Interesting. Wikipedia also my assertion [wikipedia.org].

          I suspect Wikipedia may not be the definitive source in this instance. ;)

          In any event, you may well be right about 5.5 hour tapes (though I don't recall them), but I still think Sony never recovered from the initial difference in (temporal) tape lengths. By the time you get to five hours or six, it's a fairly small set of television that will be supported by one but not the other.
          • Yes.

            I suspect the sports issue affected a lot of people but I was not aware of it because I entered the market a couple years later when longer tapes were standard and I was not a sports fan.

            I will say one other thing on the 5.5 hour issue. It was a problem since most network movies (with commercials) ran 2.0 hours back then (8pm to 10pm cst). You could fit 2 movies and then you were screwed. So you had to watch it and pause it during commercial breaks. It was likewise a problem on HBO because movies te
  • Where blu-ray becomes red-ray...

    and HD-DVD's become HHDDVVDBVD's.

    Sarge is my HERO. RVB Forever!! http://roosterteeth.com/ [roosterteeth.com]
  • by badboy_tw2002 ( 524611 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2007 @12:14PM (#19731881)
    No one gives a crap about which format does what better. Honestly, in the context of playing movies and whatnot it really doesn't matter. I'm a pretty techy guy and I couldn't tell someone the difference between the two other than Blu-ray has more capacity, which doesn't affect movies that much (maybe a two disc HD-DVD set is one disc on Blu-Ray?) The winner here will be hybrid makers, as it won't matter who puts what out on which disc, it will play them all.
  • Umm (Score:3, Insightful)

    by thanksforthecrabs ( 1037698 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2007 @01:03PM (#19732555)
    Why is this posted here when 99% of the people claim they will never own "DRM-infected" media?
  • There were several high profile media stories about the protection that HD-DVD uses exclusively is cracked quickly and repeatedly ahead of key updates. The Blu-Ray camp has been touting BD+* for a while now, and naturally studios and distributors will be backing any chance they have of getting more money. Is it really more complicated than that?

    * (a DRM scheme exclusive to Blu-Ray which relies on executable code that modifies the video stream to make it viewable. This is as opposed to the scheme HD-DV
  • on standard DVD media...
    • by swb ( 14022 )
      And exactly zero studios did too, so you're stuck warezing movies, I guess.
  • Given the news on slashdot yesterday that Universal was threatening to cancel its contract with Apple for iTunes, added to the fact that Universal is the ONLY big corrupt studio that support HD-DVD, plus a final dash of Microsoft who have lots of money invested in HD-DVD in the XBox 360 and in their piece of shit Zune, it looks like another blow has been struck against a true free market by the people who think bribery is a technicality.

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