HD DVD dead?

[TechBill]

Here the news for today,

http://www.cnn.com/2008/BUSINESS/02/...hdd/index.html

HD-DVD is officially dead.


Bill

[Jesse]

I have eight. Two I bought myself, one was a gift and five came free with the player.

Jesse

[lovingHDTV]

OK I thought this was kinda funny:

http://gizmodo.com/358219/a-consumer...u+rays-victory

Anyone want to buy a HD-DVD for cheap

[SHS]

MAN THIS ALL TO FUNNY Lack of competition sends Blu-ray player prices upward
http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/12/l...prices-upward/

[flavius]

This will most definitely help the cause!

[lobosrul]

Originally Posted by SHS

MAN THIS ALL TO FUNNY Lack of competition sends Blu-ray player prices upward
http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/12/l...prices-upward/

It could also be supply forces affecting the price. Suddenly, EVERYONE who wants to buy an HDTV optical player is buying Blu-ray, instead of just a portion of the market.

Or it could just be Sony trying to make up for Mini-Disc, UMD, and BetaMax. Hey they're one for four!

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by lobosrul

It could also be supply forces affecting the price. Suddenly, EVERYONE who wants to buy an HDTV optical player is buying Blu-ray, instead of just a portion of the market.

Yup, 3% instead of just 1.6%

Or it could just be Sony trying to make up for Mini-Disc, UMD, and BetaMax. Hey they're one for four!

It's rather well known that the CE industry got behind BD because it promised higher player prices. Pioneer's BD product manager has complained that BD player prices are too low. This is all made especially obvious by the BDA's refusal to license BD to Chinese (read cheap) mfgs. Pioneers new player, that's only Profile 1.1 is $999 MSRP.

[mistergq]

if the blu-ray players are being built or using parts from outside the US, the price increase could be caused by the weaking dollar.

[stanger89]

Well, I finally broke down and ordered parts for my BD player. Ordered a Gigabyte 780G motherboard, Athlon X2 BD-2400 (45W), 2GB Corsair XMS, and a Lite-On BD reader. Basically $400 for a BD player (course I'm reusing my HDD, PSU, and Case)

I had been waiting for the new standalones with audio decoding to come out, but looks like they'll be a few months still, and even then, they'll be $100-200 more than it cost me to rebuild my HTPC. I really thought about waiting for the GeForce 8300 for the HDMI audio, but realistically, it will be a good long while before I update my AVM-20 to HDMI so I'm not really out anything with the 780G and early reports are, it works much better now, than the 8300 does, so by the time I upgrade my SSP, there should be a robust HDMI audio solution out.

We'll see how it goes.

[Jesse]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Well, I finally broke down and ordered parts for my BD player. Ordered a Gigabyte 780G motherboard, Athlon X2 BD-2400 (45W), 2GB Corsair XMS, and a Lite-On BD reader. Basically $400 for a BD player (course I'm reusing my HDD, PSU, and Case)

I had been waiting for the new standalones with audio decoding to come out, but looks like they'll be a few months still, and even then, they'll be $100-200 more than it cost me to rebuild my HTPC. I really thought about waiting for the GeForce 8300 for the HDMI audio, but realistically, it will be a good long while before I update my AVM-20 to HDMI so I'm not really out anything with the 780G and early reports are, it works much better now, than the 8300 does, so by the time I upgrade my SSP, there should be a robust HDMI audio solution out.

We'll see how it goes.

I have been looking at that same hardware for our aging bedroom client. I have been a little concerned about the need for a phenom to do advanced post processing.

I, for one, would be very interested to here how well it all works. How about a review when you get her up and running?

TIA

EDIT: XP or Vista?

Jesse

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by Jesse

I have been looking at that same hardware for our aging bedroom client. I have been a little concerned about the need for a phenom to do advanced post processing.

Well, since this is primarily for BD and a bit of HD DVD playback I'm not too worried post processing.

I, for one, would be very interested to here how well it all works. How about a review when you get her up and running?

Figured I would

[bialio]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Well, since this is primarily for BD and a bit of HD DVD playback I'm not too worried post processing.



Figured I would

What do you intend to use for playback? PowerDVD? I haven't kept up with the Arcsoft thread on AVS, so maybe it's a viable alternative. But good luck with it all - I've had great success with my rig for both BD and HD-DVD.

btl.

[stanger89]

Not entirely sure yet, I'll probably try the OEM PDVD that the drive comes with first. I may look at Arcsoft but I think they don't support ATI under XP.

[bialio]

If the HD audio codecs are important to you, you might not have very good luck with the OEM version. Back when I took the purple plunge, people with the OEM version of PowerDVD sometimes reported 2 track audio alot.

I bought the full version of PowerDVD (on ebay) and haven't had any issues with the number of channels it outputs. YMMV.

btl.

[stanger89]

Yeah, I'll probably end up going with that. I'm planning on using my M-Audio Revolution 7.1 to feed analog to my SSP. But I'm not jumping on buying anything (either PDVD or Arcsoft) until I make sure the whole setup works.

It will also be interesting to compare this to my extender.

[bialio]

The only other gotcha is the whole downsampling fiasco.

btl.

[stanger89]

I've gone into almost a dissertation a couple times on why I think that's "Much Ado About Nothing". The one line answer is: Find me a soundtrack on a movie that's actually affected by that (99.999% of movies are 48kHz and I have doubts about whether converting 20bit/24bit audio to 16bit is harmful).

[bialio]

You are most likely right - but without a side by side comparison of PDVD downsampling and PDVD NOT downsampling on a HBR audio track, I don't think there's any way to conclusively settle this. Even then you'll get as many opinions about the differences as you have people listen to it.

The problem I have with the downsampling is that it introduces doubt - I know that my video is getting through nearly unscathed from how it was mastered. But I know the audio is getting changed. It sounds fantastic - but I wonder "could it sound better and doesn't because of stupid AACS protected path BS?????"

btl.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by Jesse

I, for one, would be very interested to here how well it all works. How about a review when you get her up and running?

Well so far so good, to recap:

Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-MA78GM-S2H
Processor: Athlon X2 BD-2400 (2.3GHz dual-core 45W)
Memory: CORSAIR TWIN2X2048-6400
BD ROM: LITE-ON DH-4O1S-08

So I get home and the parts package is waiting for me. So I pulled the old hardware (Athlon 64 3400+/2.4GHz single core, Geforce 6800) dropped in the new hardware. Reinstalled Windows (don't enable AHCI SATA BTW, the windows installer doesn't like that ), installed the drivers off the CD, installed PowerDVD 7.3 BD off the included CD.

Haven't had a lot of time to play with it, but I got Hitman on BD from Netflix and from what I've seen so far, it works well, playback is smooth, discs start quick. I need to do a little tweaking to get a remote controlling it well, and I'll probably upgrade to 8 Ultra to get all the audio decoding.

[Jesse]

Sounds nice.

I just went for the LG BD/HDDVD drive myself and so far it has worked well with the few discs I have tried. I have not, however, tried any of the newer spec BD discs.

I am a little bent that the new version of PDVD wont play HDDVD. I only have a few discs, but I would like to be able to play them. If you do upgrade to PDVD8 ultra please let us know how well it works with the latest spec BD discs.

Will you be doing any playback of sage recordings with this thing? If so, how does 1080i look?

Thanks.

Jesse