BluRay-HDDVD coming soon!???

Information is that BluRay is in the latest Sony Playstation and will hit Japan this year. Early 2006 they are coming to the US. What does that mean for us?

Apple was showing an HD DVD player at NAB but the content was undocumented. Surely there are better codecs than MPEG-2 out there to really allow for brilliant pictures from the HighDef discs. H-264?

What is happening in the audio and video world to meet the needs for this new technology?

H-264, MPEG-2 and WMV are all part of the HD-DVD/Blu-ray specifications.
Oddly, DVD SP 4 incorporated a sort of "preliminary" support for HD-DVD, but Apple as a company is a member of the Blu-Ray alliance. Go figure...

Since the specs for HD-DVD is not complete, the way DVD SP 4 supports it is: You can use H-264 or MPEG-2 encoded HD streams, but the interactity and navigation features are the ones in standard DVD. Since 480i is also part of the specs, you could use not just HD, but also throw an unbelievable amount of amazing quality H.264 SD content on one of those disks.

Apple DVD Player is so far one of the only players that supports HD playback, but I believe Interactual just announced an HD capable version of their player for Windows. There are no "real" (hardware) players on the market AFAIK. Several Blu-Ray players are coming out in early 2006. Samsung announced they working on a "combo" player, compatible with both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.



Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires - Argentina
www.adolforozenfeld.com

[Oddly, DVD SP 4 incorporated a sort of "preliminary" support for HD-DVD, but Apple as a company is a member of the Blu-Ray alliance. Go figure...]

Not challenging; the very name HD-DVD says everything, it's going to be a far more effective brand than "Blu-Ray." Quality, dunno. But I bet it wins out, just like VHS over betamax.

- Loren
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Which will the Porn industry support? The reason VHS won out was that Sony didn't want to let the porn industry in, so they (Porn Industry) put their stuff on VHS tapes.
Actually Apple is on both the Blu-Ray board and the HD-DVD board.
The new players were supposed to be coming to market just before Christmas. I've been kind of not wanting to buy anymore DVD's until the new HD ones come out. We were just talking this weekend about how much these new players would cost. Probably $500.00 to $1,000.00