Warner goes with Blu-Ray. That was dumb.
So, you’ve probably heard that Warner has picked a side in the hi-def format wars, and they’ve gone with Blu-Ray. Here’s why that’s bad.
Blu-Ray is technologically more advanced. It’s about 200% more efficient to store video in h.264 than in MPEG-2 (which is used by HD-DVD). So what? You can still store a 2-hour MPEG-2 movie on a single HD-DVD (or Blu-Ray) disc. h.264 is also orders of magnitude less efficient to decode and display, and I think this is a lot more important than storage efficiency. So you can store 4 hours of video on a Blu-Ray disc. These discs cost pennies to manufacture, and if you’re watching 4 hours of video you probably welcome the intermission when the time comes to swap discs.
The hardware to decode MPEG-2 is simple. Brainlessly simple. It’s been used in standard DVD players for over a decade. It’s been refined to the point where the ASICs used to decode MPEG-2 are practically hit and run blackjackjeux flash casinoonline black jackjack black moviesslots onlinecasino jeux toulousewww casino gratuites combonus de casino en ligneregles de la rouletteenquete casino on netwww jeux casino comjeux de casino gratuisjeux de cartes casinobonus sans depot pour casinoroulette anglaise,gagner à la roulette anglaise en ligne,la roulette anglaisevideo poker en lignewww casino dowww geant casino frle casino machine à sous gratuitescertificat bonus casinosuper slots casinomeilleurs jeux de casinojeu roulette gratuitesjeux keno en lignecasino bonus partycomment gagner a la roulettejeu au casinojeu casino machinecasino jeux de tabletableau black jackwww produits casino frjeu poker casinocasino jeux en francebaccarat room en lignejeux online poker tourpoker en ligne sans argenttelecharger poker superstarsjeu carte pokerstreap poker gratuitesjeu de cartes pokertelecharger party pokerdes règles du poker texas holdempoker tour en lignejouer au poker sur macpoker gratuites sur macpoker en ligne 3djeu de poker pour pclogiciel de poker gratuitesjouer au poker en francaisjeu de poker gratuites cheaper than dirt. In fact, every new TV has a hi-def MPEG-2 decoder built right in, because that’s the format used for HDTV (at least in the U.S.). Anyone who has ever tried to play h.264 video on an only moderately new PC, on the other hand, can tell you that it takes some serious horsepower to do it.
Therefore, I argue that both Blu-Ray AND HD-DVD are retarded, because of their requirement for players to support these “efficient” codecs. This will make players more expensive and less power efficient, which means hotter and noisier as well. Blu-Ray even includes freakin’ Java in its standards, so studios can execute freakin’ programs on my player! Thanks, but no thanks.
Ditch both of these pieces of crap, and make a blue laser disc standard that only uses MPEG-2. Like a DVD, only with high-def video. That way, you could even have uber-cheap players that just read a the raw MPEG-2 stream off the disc and send it to the TV to decode with its built-in decoder. Or TVs with a built-in disc slot, which would cost only marginally more than a regular TV and take only marginally more space (if any). Didn’t anyone think of that? Sheesh. Yeah, let’s have a bunch of redundant hardware and complicated software instead, just so we can cram more video onto a single disc rather than spend another 33 cents making a second one.
Of course, now that at least two major movie studios have gone Blu-Ray exclusively (Sony and Warner), the rest will soon follow and HD-DVD will die (hope you didn’t buy an HD-DVD player!). We’ll all be stuck buying expensive, wasteful players because nobody in that industry seems to have any common sense. Bummer.