dvd

Steve knows how much a Blu-ray drive costs to license, so I'll take his word for it. I won't bust Phil too badly as an individual, because lordy knows he's not the only one to think that Blu-ray's launch will be impeded, if not altogether scrubbed, by digital downloads. I just think that downloads aren't the big story for HD delivery right now. I think the same thing that will prevent Blu-ray's speedy adoption is the same thing standing in the way of HD downloads catching on as quickly as they might.

Yes, I said "thing," not "things." There are plenty of market and technology forces standing in the way for the world at large worth talking about later, but for me, for now, there's only one obstacle standing in the way of me caring about Blu-ray or broadband delivery: my HD DVR.

Before the DVR, I was an early adopter of a whole lot of things. My first CD player cost $500 – a top loader! -- and that was one of the CHEAP ones. Like Blu-ray, the first sales were to "philes," in this case audiophiles. You could mostly only buy them in the kind of stores that sold receivers and amplifiers as separate components. Mine came from a store in Harvard Square, across from Needle in a Haystack, an entire store devoted to nothing buy phonograph needles. It wasn't a huge store, but I'm not kidding – NOTHING but needles. It was kind of eerie.

And back in 1983, $500 was real money.

I was also an early adopter of Laser Disk, which introduced a number of critical technologies to wide-ish scale (only 1% of the VHS market, but still) home use: widescreen aspect ratios, random access chapters, frame-by-frame viewing, surround-sound encoding including Dolby and THX, digital audio tracks that allowed things like commentaries and separate language tracks, director's cuts, significant bonus features, significant picture remastering, and of course, Disney picture disks.

(Without getting all dewy eyed about how much better a laserdisk in a good player looks and sounds than most DVDs, I'll simply observe that no DVD will ever be as neato as a Disney picture disk.)

There were related things I adopted early, including hand-made custom subwoofer cables, front-projection TV (had one of them big 3 CRT gun jobbies), and yep, DVR. That deserves a couple of blog entries by itself, and I'll get to 'em....but the bottom line very quickly became that there wasn't much point to watching TV without a DVR, and there was no way on green earth that we were even going to THINK about adopting HD until there was an HD DVD.

Fortunately, DirecTV came to the rescue with DirecTiVo, a co-branded box that did exactly what it sounds like it did: for $1000, plus $10/month for HD programming. Eek. A little painful, but hey, it was HD, the way we wanted, so we took a deep breath, did without heat that winter, and got what we wanted.

(I say "we" - my wife is every step along the way with all this. We loves us some HD.)

This means two things. One is that the absolutely very, very last thing that would keep my from adopting Blu-ray. I have the rest of my HD rig loaded for bear. I'm not holding my breath for players to drop below the "magical" $200 barrier.

More important for Blu-ray in our lives is that we've been watching HD movies since 2004. I'm getting more every week for the exact same price as SD cable, and using the DVR to watch when I want.

(Not at all a big deal, but something that I notice when I watch DVDs – I prefer the features and responsiveness of my DVR. I don't need chapter marks as much as I do to hop back a few seconds to hear something I missed. One button on the DVR, a pain on the DVD.)

I know there's going to be a lot more Blu-ray disks very quickly, but right now on my DVR, waiting for me to watch a couple more times before I move along are two of my favorites: Office Space and Lawrence of Arabia, neither of which is on Blu-ray. (If I was a better person, I might have put Lawrence of Arabia BEFORE Office Space. So I probably shouldn't mention South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut – should I?) I have no doubt they'll come to Blu-ray, but not before I'll have watched them a dozen times or more in HD.

The big Blu-ray news this month is James Bond. Well, I've seen all the ones I like – including my favorite, Casino Royale with Daniel Craig -- in HD plenty of times. (Daniel Craig is the best Bond by a longer distance than we have yet found a way to measure.) It's the highest-selling Blu-ray disk to date, although The Dark Knight debuts Tuesday and could easily surpass Casino Royale in its first week. I'll see it plenty of times, on my time, when it comes to my HD DVR for free in a few more months.

I've got precisely zero use for the Lord of the Rings books. I haven't gotten past the first dozen pages – sorry, I've tried, but I just can't. I laughed – hard – at anyone in my high school who read them. This put me off seeing the movies longer than I should have waited. My bad. As much as I came to love the movies in the theater (barring the multiple endings of the third), I place the deluxe editions of the DVDs – once you've included 3 commentaries and the two disks of documentaries) among the great achievements in the history of human artistic endeavor. I'm glad to be alive at the time they were released. (Yeah, really.) Not coming to Blu-ray before 2010 says Mr. Jackson. I'll have been seeing them in HD for maybe 5 years at that point. Will the extras that make the deluxe editions such a wonder all be remade as HD? Highly unlikely I think, and I watch those as often as I watch the movies.

Of course Peter will probably find enough extra goodies laying around to make the Blu-ray edition worth my while...but I'm having a hard time coming up with any reason to buy a Blu-ray player before then. Not that I'll necessarily do it then. But I'm waiting something to push me over the edge. Any suggestions? Because until you persuade me otherwise, I'm keeping Blu-ray in my big bag of ho-hum.

(Howdy to everyone who came here from any links after April 2007. Rather than edit this to reflect how things have gone since then, I created a new blog entry that you can find here. 

Other than this note, I've left the original entry unchanged when I wrote it. Interesting to see what I was right about, and what I was wrong about. One thing we were ALL wrong about, that the war would go on for another couple of years. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I've not seen one single prediction before January 2008 that Blu-ray, which has looked like the winner for a while, would win as quickly as it did.

With that, take a gander.)

I've heard people say that porn is going to decide who wins the DVD format wars, just like they did with videotape. Maybe it'll be PS3 or Xbox. Okay, worth talking about. But there's somebody out there who has a bigger influence on retail buying behavior than all of them combined, and they've got $100 million that says HD DVD is going to win. Anybody here want to argue merchandising with Wal-Mart? 

Even if you do, Wal-Mart is the world's largest DVD retailer, so they get to win the argument.

The story being widely reported is that Wal-Mart is ordering up TWO MILLION HD DVD players from Taiwanese manufacturer Fuh Yuan for $50 apiece.

The source of all of these stories appears to be a post in the AV Science forum. And as we at The COW believe, forums are often the very, very best source for the straight dope. You'll find both the link to the original Chinese story, and a persuasive translation of it. (My Chinese isn't quite strong enough to evaluate it conclusively.) There's also a very lively discussion of what price Wal-Mart will sell them for. As the speculation rages, the price has gone from $299 down to $99. Whatever. We'll know when we know.

I'm thinking lower rather than higher. Wal-Mart has been using the weekly cycle of DVD releases as loss leaders to drive customers into their stores. They're especially fond of this strategy, because DVD buyers spend more per visit than non-DVD buyers. 

If you start poking around, you'll find a heap o' articles (or, as our UK readers would say, "AN heap o' articles") about all this, but I say this is by far the best of them. (Trust me, I'm right.) (This time.) Here's the money quote:

Wal-Mart sees the new high definition formats as a way to bring in store traffic again but they realized that won't happen unless the players are affordable and there is only one standard. They recognized their own power in being king maker previously and are now using that power to drive the format that works best for them. They could care less about the technology as this is all about making money and they (like every other retailer in this space) know that two formats won't allow the market to move outside of the fringes and the dual-mode players are simply way too expensive.

So they need one standard and a lot of players in market before their DVD customers wander off to download land and stops coming to Wal-Mart for movies.

He's got a lot of other interesting arguments, but, more important, a whole lot of what appears to be actual facts. Imagine that!

Oh, and one interesting bit of speculation: that the real source of the whole $100 million story is...wait for it....Wal-Mart.

Quick closing notes for now: 

• I don't think porn had a darn thing to do with the success of VHS. Apparently didn't hurt it any, though..but porn's a non-factor this time for sure.
• As much as the data folks like us think Blu-ray is a no-brainer, many in the home theater world hate it. Folks as old as me hold Joe Kane in the highest esteem. A former chair of SMPTE and a pioneer in video calibration, man oh man, he has nothing good to say about Blu-ray. Admittedly, some of this is ancient history (having been written in the practically medieval Summer of '06), but Joe's disdain endures the sands of time.
• Using a conversation with Joe a few months later as a jumping off point, Ultimate AV concurs.
• While not as virulent, Projector Central was unequivocal in declaring HD DVD the winner in an article called, "Blu-ray: Can it Survive?" Again, some of the information is dated , but still an example of how differently the world of HD disks looks from upstream (creation) and downstream (consumption).
• More recently, Joe's putting his money where his mouth is. One of the reasons we geezers love him so is because of his Video Essentials. I used it daily as a systems installer (including home theater), and it's the cheapest way to make your home theater look beyond its best. It's out on a hybrid disk alright: HD DVD and standard DVD. No Blu-ray.
• Even if you think he's nuts on Blu-ray, you really need to check out his disk.
• I think both DVD formats are irrelevant. It's already all about the HD movie downloads. But that's for another blog entry.

Discuss.