More thoughts on the format wars: Image quality

I had a lot of fun writing the "The Big Dog Gets Off the Porch" article for the newsletter. (Check out my blog post on the topic too.) It took a TON of research, though, and I found a lot of things I just didn't have room to use. It also made me think about some things -- new stuff as well as stuff that's been kicking around forever. So here we go...

This was never about image quality. Sort of.
There were many comparitive issues that factored into the victory, and they never had anything to do with which format looked better. As Joe Kane pointed out in the article, there was a time when Blu-ray was easily demonstrable as having much poorer quality, due largely to seriously nasty MPEG compression.

(Please note: the article I wrote for the main library had a TON of links, and took an acre of work, so I'm not going to repeat any of them here.)

I think it also pissed him off that Sony et al. simply refused to look at new, better compression technologies.  There was much horror from EVERYONE (including me, not that it matters) about this, long before the format even launched. The 2005 reply from Sony absolutely did NOT help:

"Advanced (formats) don't necessarily improve picture quality," said Don Eklund, Sony Pictures' senior vice president of advanced technology. "Our goal is to present the best picture quality for Blu-ray. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, that's with MPEG-2."

As the article mentions, the image quality was SO much poorer that the videophile community in particular felt that Blu-ray was DOA.

So what changed? I think Joe K is right: it was hammer and tongs competition. Blu-ray looks fantastic of course, and compeition from HD DVD chased it far faster than mere consumers ever would have.

Image quality: Microsoft fails to deliver the killing blow
Anybody remember that head to head demonstration of VC-1 and H.264 at NAB? (Both of these are SMPTE names for Windows Media and QuickTime. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. There were some other formats too, but it was lights out: None of us had seen anything like VC-1. Even the hardest core Mac fanboys were blown away.

A bigwig in the Hollywood post community (ground zero for Mac fanboys, believe me) said, It's over. Microsoft won. Yeah, it's cross platform and everything, but QT is out of it.

Don't believe the hype about Avid, btw. It's the OTHER ground zero for Mac fanboys. It was started as a Mac-only company, and won 6 technical Emmys and an OSCAR for its products between 1989 and 1998, all with Mac-only products, long before Apple bought the Windows-originated Final Cut from Macromedia.

(The PC hype about Avid is another story. The short version is that the guy who said what he said, everyone he worked for, and everyone who worked for him, was fired in the next year. What he was said was never, ever true. End of story.)

So it was with no pleasure whatsoever that we went on the road with VC-1. We projected it on the top of the line Barco projectors. There were only 3 of them in the world, and we had two. (Barco themselves were stuck with only one.) 

We projected VC-1 playing our 30 minute trailer reel and our 5 minute high-impact demo at 4 megaBITS per second playing off a hardrive on FORTY FOOT diagonal screens. A high quality projector showing a huge image exposed every single flaw...

...and there were none. We invited people to put their noses against the screen (rear-projected) and invited them to look for flaws. LA, NY, Chicago, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Munich -- nobody found any. One guy (ONE!) claimed to see some compression artifacts, but when it was pointed out that that was the texture of the screen fabric, he relented.

And that was pretty much the end of VC-1. I have no idea what happened. My guess is that Msoft both lost their will to fight in Hollywood (our contacts at MSFT disappeared), and they focused their efforts on Xbox and HD DVD.

The effect in all places was the same: they forced QT, Playstation, and Blu-ray to get much much prettier.

The OTHER result was largely the same: H.264 still has a much bigger footprint, Playstation still lacks basic features that Xbox has, as does Blu-ray re: HD DVD....but they all look fantastic.

This is why Joe Kane thinks the format war on DVD ended too soon, and why the industry as a whole is disappointed as Apple has fewer and fewer competitors -- the pace of innovation is one the verge of winding down to a crawl. Competition is GOOD.

May the best format LOSE
Now, this all played out much, much differently for the TAPE format wars. People lament that Beta was the better format: ridiculously better quality, smaller form factor, more durable tape and shell, and on and on.

These are all exactly the reasons why VHS won. Betamax was too good for the studios to let it live. 

In fact, they demanded that VHS image quality be reduced even further. VHS lived to see the light of day because the picture degraded so thoroughly when copied. No one of good intent would put up with it.

Which is why the Video Home Standard won. It's more complicated than that, of course, but it's why the studios backed it before the market did, even though Betamax came out earlier, and initial sales were much higher.

WHY this happened, and why it also happened in the DVD format wars in exactly the same way, is a conversation for another day. But it's interesting to note that Blu-ray won for many of the exact reasons that VHS won. Certainly following the same pattern. You think Sony might have been taking notes?

We know that Betamax's professional derivative became the professional standard, and the professional derivative of VHS, MKII, died without a trace...for many of the same reasons that VHS won in the home.

Here's a final word about competition: with Betamax, Sony was the first to introduce really high-quality audio on tape. (The professional derivative of "Beta Hi-Fii" was PCM.) VHS had nothing similar...until the year AFTER "Beta Hi-Fi."

Remember kids, competition, even in format wars -- ESPECIALLY in format wars -- is a good, good thing. The tape format wars went on just about the right amount of time. I agree with Joe Kane that the DVD format war probably ended a year early.

So here we are? What next? Walter points to one answer that really, really needs to be found right quick.  There are others....