HD DVD: End of Week 1
bbum’s weblog-o-mat » Blog Archive » HD DVD: End of Week 1:
It has now been nearly a week since we added an HD DVD player to the home entertainment system.
Some impressions.
We watched Serenity this evening. It is visually stunning. I’m sure the audio is pretty amazing, too, but I don’t currently have the 5.1 pre-amp / speakers hooked up.
By “visually stunning”, I mean: It looks better than it did in the theater. As an added bonus, I make better popcorn, have vastly superior beverages for far less money, and can watch a visually stunning movie while sitting in front of a fire.
No wonder the theaters are running scared. Hell — we paid $19 for Serenity on HD DVD which, accounting for the evening’s expense, is about 1/3rd to 1/5th the cost of actually going to a theater (depending on babysitting expenses).
Anyway — HD DVD really delivers in terms of the visuals when paired with a decent TV; 46″ 1080p Sony LCD, in my case.
The Planet Earth really drives it home. I have watched it on DVD, via Satellite, and on HD DVD. At 1080p, The Planet Earth is an awesome — a moving — tour of the awesome breadth of life on this planet.
As well, we watched the remastered HD DVD version of Blazing Saddles. The difference between it and the DVD is quite noticeable, but mostly in that HD DVD so clearly displays the noise and imperfections found in the original production process.
And, of course, if the discs do so, the extras on HD DVD can be considerably richer and more deeply integrated with the primary content than regular DVDs. Speaking of regular DVDs, the player does an awesome job of upscaling legacy content (though, honestly, I have no idea how it compares to the various $30 to $70 upscaling DVD players that are commonplace these days).
And that is pretty much where the happiness ends. Click on through for a bit of a rant on the vasty stupidity that is next generation media….
In this first week, it has also becomes abundantly clear that HD DVD is doomed. Though I have no experience with it, I would bet that a lot of my relatively off-the-cuff observations would apply equally to Blu-Ray.
Great summary and overview of HD-DVD here. Pretty much re-affirms my decision to stand on the sideline and watch — which I think many folks are doing, which is why both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are doomed.
I’ve had two reasons to avoid plunging into the “DVD upgrade” waters: first, I’m unwilling to commit to a format until the industry does — the fight between the two formats simply means I’ll buy neither until they figure it out. It’s not JUST not wanting to invest in the loser, it’s that I refuse to be part of a battle these folks should have solved before tossing it onto the market, and buying into it only encourages them to think they can suck out the consumer’s money for the fight. Thanks, no.
But the second reason is that nobody in the industry is really doing anything to convince me why these things will improve my life. As Bill notes — the HD format is much better, but nobody seems to be marketing that — and the new DRM restrictions and other technical issues annoy me. DVD has DRM, but it really stays out of the way of the consumer; these new formats don’t. I don’t mind iTunes DRM for the same reason — I know it exists, but it doesn’t impact the way I want to use the material; until companies figure out that the market is a compromise between what the consumers want and what the industry wishes they could impose (DVD and iTunes get this; HD-DVD and blu-ray and RIAA idiots clearly don’t), I’m going to not spend any of my money here.
I’m not in the camp of the “I can do anything I want, any way I want, any where I want, and how I want” consumer anti-DRM folks — I understand the owner of content wanting to set some reasonable limits — but what the industry is trying to do in defining “only how we tell you you can, only when we tell you you can” isn’t in any way what I consider reasonable limits. The only way I can influence this is with dollars (or euros, or whatever), so I do so by not putting them into formats or industries that are pushing these unreasonable limits. DRM is not evil. How companies are using and abusing DRM to redefine the consumer’s rights in using content — that’s evil. And so far, consumers keep showing they aren’t as stupid as these industries seem to want to believe, they aren’t buying into it.
So I continue to sit on the sidelines here, and will…
Oh, and I seem to be the only person in the universe unimpressed by Planet Earth. The photography is stunning, but (unlike, say, March of the Penguins, I found the narrative stultifying — in the US, it’s narrated by Susan Sarandon in what can only be described as an NPR drone, and the scripting of the narrative ultimately boiled down to “good lord, do we have some amazingly good video here, or what? And these guys sat in a desert for FOUR YEARS to bring you this 30 second clip of this funky beast!” I found her such a turn-off I more or less gave up on it. It just came across as self-indulgent to the point of being more annoying than stunning…
Related posts:
- here’s weird thought for All Star week Here’s a really weird, radical thought for All Star...
- Another week gone… Chuqui 3.0: Reality sets in…: And on the new...
- With less than a week to the NHL draft, I predict… I predict absolutely nothing. And I will continue to...
- Sharks over the last week… Sorry for the lack of posting, was off involved...
- one week in…. I’m one week in at work, and starting to...
and any purchases you made will be treated as referrals by us.
