Happy New Year! 2011 was a very interesting year in terms of world events and technology, and even saw a little bit of HD DVD activity. As I walked through stores in the last few weeks, I was reminded of holiday seasons past when we were excited about Walmart featuring a low-cost HD DVD player in their big sale, or an Amazon sale on dozens of HD DVD titles.

Now, of course, the news is all about Blu-ray discs and players. 3D HDTVs have also captured some attention, accompanied by choices over which specific 3D method to use, reinforcing something we all experienced with HD DVD: every next “big thing” usually has some kinds of standards competition to go along with it.

Some of us are veterans of many such competitions, and we’ll undoubtedly be part of many more as we feed our love of gadgets and technology. I’m sure there’s going to be amazing new gadget goodness in 2012, and format wars or not, it’ll all be a lot of fun. Have a great new year!

Matthew M stopped by to ask a few questions that have probably been discussed by many at forums and amongst friends, and even around the water cooler.

Don’t know if you get this – 2 questions:

Thank you for your efforts. I always preferred HD DVD over BluRay, the only thing I did not like was the movies released as Combo and not just HD DVD. Most were released both ways somewhere in the world but a few I wanted weren’t, very sad.

Ask what the “best” of something is, and you’ll usually bring up a lot of opinions, sometimes even backed up with evidence. Please share in the comments about what you think the “best quality” HD DVD player was, and the best of the HD DVD burners.

Our old pal Gary Ugarek is back with another HD DVD to release. As you already know from recent posts at the site, Deadlands 2 not only came out on HD DVD, it also won Indie film awards.

Gary is going back to his vault and bringing out a 500-copy limited production run of the original Deadlands 1 on HD DVD. Here’s the rest of the story directly from Gary: (more…)

A year ago today, on February 19, 2008, Toshiba officially withdrew from the high-def DVD format war. Their announcement was inevitable, and came after many weeks of bad news from various companies like Warner, Netflix, Walmart and Best Buy ending their support for the HD DVD format. Toshiba had spent many, many, hundreds of millions of dollars developing and marketing HD DVD technology, and many partners had put in their share of time and money as well. But in the end, there was just too much negative momentum to fight back.

Toshiba moved on to continue advancing technologies they were already involved with such as flash memory, hard drives, HDTVs, laptops, and their work on the Cell processor. Last year, they came out with a super duper image enhancement technology for standard DVDs, and have more recently demonstrated Cell processor applications for more of that image enhancing for HDTVs and computers. But neither Toshiba or Microsoft have announced any plans for doing anything with Blu-ray.

I’m sure many of you who were deeply involved with format war battles can remember all of those days and weeks very well. (more…)

Did you watch the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics on your HDTV the other night? What an amazing show! It was the kind of event that especially shines in high-definition. Watching a few sporting events over the weekend was somewhat hit-and-miss since not everything has been in HD (at least for me), but having your team win makes up for that a little.

So here’s my advice for the forthcoming Chinese-owned HD DVD format: bundle an Olympics highlights disc, or even a box-set, with each of your players. Based on national pride alone, you’re bound to sell at least a hundred thousand units, and word of mouth will bring in the next batch of customers. Communist governments are typically into heavy self-promotion, and I’m sure the government can even be talked into helping susidize this deal big-time. A box set of these Olympics could very well be your Planet Earth, and maintain the same kinds of high ranking in the most loved HD disc sets of all time. An exclusivity deal for this Chinese box set might help your sales momentum carry you forward for quite a while.

What will you need to do beyond that? If you followed the format war in the western world, it would appear that being influential with the studios is a key requirement. For example, we read in a recent Forbes article that Sony’s participation as a movie studio in all the movie studio politics helped keep Lionsgate on the Blu-ray side. But that’s the west, where consumers theoretically drive the market. It’s not that way in China, where studio politics can be trumped by real politics.

In case readers didn’t know, one of the driving forces behind the Chinese HD DVD format is China’s desire to own as much of the technology as possible. They don’t want to be restricted by, or share profits with, all sorts of foreign-owned patents and licenses. This fact alone means that the CBHD (China Blue High-Definition) team gets some government help, and I’m sure that there are many Chinese citizens who are equally happy to show national pride and root for their hometown team instead of the foreigners.

Some analysts point out that studios haven’t signed on to support CBHD, and that Blu-ray is the inevitable winner even against this format. I think they’re ignoring one major difference between China and the rest of the world: the Chinese make plenty of their own movies and music to not need to care about everything that comes out of Hollywood. In fact, even the Indians make plenty of their own music and movies to not need to care about the movies that come out of Hollywood. Is that the same for you and I in the west? Absolutely not. Our entertainment is totally dependent on what Warner, Disney, Universal, Sony, Paramount, etc. put out. Thus, the outcome of the format war here was deeply affected by these Hollywood studios and their control over our western content.

While studio politics might be a hill of beans in the USA or Europe, it don’t mean a thing in Communist China, where the government gets the first and last word. Movie and music piracy is a fact of life there, and people barely care about purchasing original movies in the first place when cheapo copies are freely available.

Heck, I meet plenty of people in this country who have that same attitude. The difference is that copyrights and other intellectual property laws are observed with a little more reverence in western countries. That means that the governments of those countries might actually get a few police officers to care that Johnny Consumer is making his own copies, buying some cheap ones, or getting them off the internet.

Hollywood makes a tiny amount of money in that nation of over a billion potential customers, and the Chinese government does little to fix that situation. They’re polite and appear to give a crap about studios and copyrights, but the Chinese authorities would just as soon keep more of the profits in their homeland. The government decides who gets to play ball and what those rules are. They choose how much time Blu-ray can spend with the ball and how much time their own team will get.

So, CBHD guys: get your act together and put those players out, and look into that Olympics bundle right away. Only time will tell if your format war has the same dynamics as it did in the west. Your hometown advantage can only work for a little while, and you’re gonna have some competition from locally manufactured Blu-ray players soon. And don’t forget that previous attempts to establish homegrown standards over western ones haven’t necessarily panned out.

HD DVD fans: this is not really anything to do with us because it’s primarily designed for use by Chinese in China. I doubt that we’d even get any firmware upgrades (if that’s all it takes) to make our existing players use CBHD discs, and even then, it’ll be mostly for watching Chinese content.

Here are other recent articles about CBHD in case you want to learn more about it:

• CH DVD Details Revealed, Warner on Board? at FormatWarCentral, works with translation of an article from ZDNet China
• Chinese HD Format: It’s blue, but not “Blu-ray” at Ars
• HD DVD lives on in China as CBHD, but will it have content? at BetaNews

There’s a saying that “it depends on what you are made of whether you take on a polish or get worn down.” Life might send upsetting things in one’s direction, but it’s up to us how we react to these challenges.

Good sportsmanship means that you accept victory and defeat gracefully. In the spirit of showing some good sportsmanship, here are some instances of jokes made at HD DVD’s expense, as well as some that poke fun at Blu-ray.

This list is not comprehensive, and I left out things that I didn’t think were overly funny, or that I felt were insulting — to both formats or owners of those players. Some are funnier than others:

Making fun of HD DVD:

• How to Rationalize at Basic Instructions
• HD DVD Eulogy at Joy Of Tech
• HD DVD Funeral Attack of the Show clip on YouTube
• HD DVD vs. Blu-ray consumer apathy at ExtraLife.com
• A political cartoon, one of many such jokes

Here’s another along those same lines.

This video clip from Der Untergang has been used many times, and its use for HD DVD was right on the mark in many ways (be warned of the strong language):

(click here to view the video at YouTube if it is not visible above)

This clip has also been used to parody (more strong language):

• Hitler’s Xbox banned (over 2 million views)
• Hitler’s car stolen

There are a few other variations, and the best of the clips demonstrate an excellent working knowledge of the subject being made fun of.

Here are a couple of older Blu-ray jokes:

• Exclusive Interview Blu-Ray Speaks at Aeropause.com (from August 2006)
• Why We Are Switching to Blu-ray at The Onion

And just for you Blu-ray fans who come around here in the spirit of bad sportsmanship, here’s one about the greatness of Blu-ray (over 7 million views). (sorry, couldn’t resist)

Add some of your own in the comments, but forget about it if they’ve got a derogatory tone or are unfunny. I’ve seen some where the joke’s punchline is simply to show a player thrown in the trash or to call the owner an idiot. Besides these people’s family members, I’m not sure who else would think those videos were funny.

Regarding advice about your HD future, it’s one thing when someone is speaking from their own experience, and a whole other matter when people are just pulling ideas out of their butts. It’s quite common for the advice from this latter group to completely disregard your actual investment in an HD DVD player and movies. Since it’s not their money, they’ll offer advice such as “Sell it all on eBay.”

You should do what you’re most comfortable with, but I want to present an explanation why selling it all off may not be your best option. I’m not saying it makes absolutely zero sense, but just that you should consider a few things about this course of action. (more…)

The big news at all the usual places that talk about HD DVD is an article in The Hollywood Reporter suggesting that Toshiba may be closing in on making a decision over their part of the combat in the high-def format war.

The authors of the article are guys who routinely write for a few magazines and sites that cover the home video scene like Home Media Magazine, and obviously Hollywood Reporter. According to their industry sources, financial losses and recent negative news are taking their toll on Toshiba. One of the sources feels that the possible end is coming in just “a matter of weeks.”

That’s what I was able to extract from the article in terms of information directly related to a decision from Toshiba and the HD DVD camp. The rest of the article summarizes news that you’ve already read about here and elsewhere in the past several weeks.

There’s a little bit of conjecture where they’re reading into a quote by Toshiba’s Jodi Sally who said, “Given the market developments in the past month, Toshiba will continue to study the market impact and the value proposition for consumers, particularly in light of our recent price reductions on all HD DVD players.” Their take on this quote is that “something’s in the air.”

There’s also something implied when the authors mention that they weren’t able to get calls returned by Kevin Collins, the HD DVD evangelist at Microsoft, or Ken Graffeo, the VP for Universal Studios Home Entertainment and co-president of the HD DVD North American Promotional Group.

As a whole, it’s really easy to come away from the article and believe that Toshiba is about to call it quits in a few days. But nobody at Toshiba or the HD DVD group actually said so in the article, this is really just talk from some industry sources. Since they don’t name the sources, it’s fair to guess that those sources are Blu-ray aligned people trying to create some bad publicity for HD DVD (although they did say one of them is “close” to the HD DVD camp). This wouldn’t be unheard of, since it’s been people from the Blu-ray camp who have leaked bits and pieces to news outlets in the past and been able to make sure that bad news was definitely getting well distributed.

Let’s step back for a moment and take a deep breath. (more…)

Some HD DVD owners decide to completely stop doing business with companies that announce plans to withdraw their support. A good example is Netflix who announced that they would stop stocking new titles and would allow their inventory to phase out from natural attrition. Warner is another.

I can understand why people might get upset, but I’m not sure that boycotting these companies actually solves the problem. In fact, I think it only helps those companies come up with real numbers later that solidify and demonstrate their initial statements about a weak HD DVD market (whether those statements were well-founded or not). I also wonder if the sacrifice is the right one to make, especially if it feeds into the company’s self-fulfilling prophecy.

Stopping all business with these companies only gives their bean counters some smaller numbers on the HD DVD side to count up. Many months later, they’ll come out and note that demand has fallen off and their decision is now sealed, and they might even consider accelerating their exit.

On the other hand, continuing to get your HD DVD titles from these companies demonstrates that there’s demand for the format. In fact, if there’s enough of a reliable source of income from the format, it’s a little harder for those companies to ignore the money that they’d throw away.

If you don’t believe me, then read this posting at DVDTown.com where a Warner executive said, “If there is product available in HD DVD and there is a request from a retailer, we will provide.” Ronee Sass, VP of Publicity and Promotion also went on to say, “There may be isolated instances that an HD DVD title will be created, but as a general rule our titles will be out in SD and BD only.”

The extremely optimistic might get carried away and interpret that statement as saying that Warner is coming back. No, that’s not what Sass said. What she said is that if there’s a good reason to make a disc, then they will. She didn’t say they’d make brand new movies come out. But she did say that Warner is basically not going to ignore consumer demand for a product.

Lastly, there’s the sacrifice that you have to make when you elect to stop doing business with a certain company. Most boycotts are designed to hurt the company’s financial prospects. If a company has already decided to boycott you, then boycotting them ends up being a one-way loss — yours. Your loss is that you have closed off one additional way to enjoy HD DVDs.

• Warner will restock if needed at DVDTown.com