News from China said that their plan for making CH-DVD, the Chinese version of HD-DVD, will not change despite Toshiba kill the format recently. CH-DVD player will put to market next month as planned. It is said Toshiba has contract with them so they should still get all the tech support they needed.

After seeing all the development lately, I wonder the sudden death of HD-DVD has anything to do with this China factor. I guess Sony, even Toshiba don't really want to see a repeat of DVD boom from China which took the world by storm. How can developer like Toshiba make profit? At least they get licence fee from every DVD player made in China. But in the case of CH-DVD where China wants to remove as much of this money going oversea as possible. What is left for Toshiba? How can Toshiba justify spending big to gain studio support and at the end of the day profit goes elsewhere?

Imagine if the world market flooded with cheap players from China which can play all the HD formats and regions, will people still buy any lock down Bluray or HD-DVD alone player from Japan? In their mind a quick death of HD-DVD is needed before it is all too late.

HD-DVD player clearance, studio goes blu, retailer goes blu, rental goes blu and finally the inevitable all happen in a well executed manner. Toshiba looks like the loser but at least money will stay in Japan and that is what count in the years to come. How can you imagine their share goes up when they kill the format and lost billion?

Without HD-DVD disc in the world market, effect from CH-DVD player from China will be next to insignificant. So even if the format can survive, will be forced to stay in China as is.

Besides CH-DVD, China is also pushing red laser HD format like EVD. It is said they are trying to unify all the existing formats and start release before year end. Their target is consumer with TV 40" or below and plan to keep price of movie down to under $3.

Our war is over but looks like HD-DVD, in the guise of CH-DVD, is about to fight another war, in the near future, not too far away.....

Oh, I guess now I know why Toshiba recall all HD-DVD players from store rather than put them to bargain bin. Rebadge and ready for another fight in this hi-def virgin land. Bansai!

That is an interesting perspective PKK.

I've also wondered whether someone could take a VC1 encode from a Blu-Ray disc, strip out the copy protection, and write it onto a HD DVD/CH-DVD. If that's going to happen, then China is the place

The problem though is where will they get studio support? Without studio support will one person in the Western world buy a Chinese HD DVD player?

well the whisper i got was studio legal titles (we are talking licensed hollywood) where around $8-$12 in China - how true this is i dont know and i can not verify it but i am hardly surprised.

You can buy studio "support" for round about a dollar these days

2 dollars gets the extended "Exclusive 12 month Plan"

This is correct. The studios had to drop their prices to meet the market in China. People there weren't going to pay the ridiculous prices that we pay, when they can get a perfectly good bootleg from their local quick-e-mart for a couple of dollars.

I missed out on buying Paramount on ebay last week, some bastard by the username of sonny sniped me at the last second.

Yeah I saw that

I bought the aircraft carrier.. ..for a steal !!!!!

I haven't heard that the studios wouldn't support CH DVD

I don't know if they would need to. IIRC China has a big local industry and only allows a handful of international films into the country legally, surly the format could survive on it's own. Not to mention it has the backing of the China Government

cheers

Can you believe 95% of DVD market in China are run by piracy? It is sad but true that piracy shape their market and help to push the format to all four corners like never before.

I just visit China and Hong Kong last month. I am more than shock to see Hollywood and local movies are still release on both DVD and VCD formats. Why people still buy VCD these days with low PQ and needs two disc for a movie is beyond me. Official Hollywood DVD is about $2 to $5 each. Even HK only get their digital TV broadcast the last day of 2007. Road of hi-def is still wide open.

HK is lucky to be put into Bluray region A so push of hi-def is easier because customer can see hundreds of titles from USA on shelves from day one. Local production is still rare. China is left with region C and I don't think their price can come down anytime soon to match those of DVD. China is ready to press HDDVD with their DVD factory when the time come. They already made pirate copy of Transformer in HDDVD spec using three DL DVD which can play back on PC with DVD rom. The reason for using normal DVD is that there is no official HDDVD player sold in the country yet so no market for any pirate HDDVD at the moment.

Will a population of one-fourth of the world support their own HD format even without Hollywood? Possible. Future is hard to tell especially after what happen to HDDVD. Don't know how good BD+ can stop piracy. If they fail than table will turn. Everything is still a big question mark today.

No problem with that argument, but how does that help us? I have watched and enjoyed a few Chinese movies as I used to live in Asia, but I don't think I really want to watch them all the time. CH DVD may do extremely well, but it won't help me I don't think.

The reason VCD still exists is many millions of people in Asia own VCD's still and will for some time. In Malysia, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, where I spent a lot of time VCD is king. People there get them cheap, they copy movies easily, and when you earn $5-10 a day it fits in the price structure.

The failure of HD DVD as a Western HD format might actually help CH DVD being accepted by studios. Studios can now support Blu-ray and CH DVD with no hint of conflict of interest. China will not officially adopt Blu-ray due to excessive royalty payments, so unless the BDA can appease the Chinese government by dropping demand for royalties, no movies will be released on the format officially. So studios have the choice between red laser based EVD or the blue laser based CH DVD. Heck, if Sony does not come up with their own China-only format, even they might adopt CH DVD>

If CH DVD is a success, then the availability of dual format players in the West might improve, because dual format Blu-ray/CH DVD players are similar enough to dual format Blu-ray/HD DVD players to be manufactured on the same production line. LG has a lot invested in China, so perhaps their continued support for HD DVD might be due to this.

Won't these have "burnt in" subtitles ?

So long as the Chinese/Hong Kong/Korean/ studios add english subtitles, I'll have access to far more and far better movies than the US studios put out.

"Hd-dvd Is Not Dead....yet, Will it win this time?"



No

Hahaha PKK wasted quite a lot of time putting that post together.Meanwhile in the real world,that is the western world every retailer and movie production house is selling blu ray.What the hell will any consumer in the western world care about what they are doing in China?The only thing thay care about is when Amazon will have the next BOGO deal on blu ray.

You mean that place where almost every consumer electronics device in the world is manufactured?

Looks like the perfect solution in both world. If CHDVD can actually take off then Amazon.cn will be my new best friend.

Um...that may be the reason which also means most care less about PQ or SQ. I guess pressing and packaging of 2 VCD will not save much over 1 DVD these days. Those big boxes of 30+ VCD disc for a TV series is just plain scary.

After seeing how they turn the world upside down with dirt cheap DVD player costing not much more than 1 disc, I wonder what they can do next with HD.

If it was only about cheap players HD DVD would have won.They were better machines on paper and always cheaper in the US.I wouldn't buy one for $50 now though cause my local rental won't be stocking CH DVD's.

Yes perhaps I am missing something here. It's okay, sometimes it takes me awhile. I can understand momaw who likes to buy anime and foreign films, but for most people who want the latest English movies how is cheap players really going to help? They could flood the market now with $10 CH DVD players if they liked but I don't think it will make any difference to studios in the US or Europe at this stage. Maybe if they had done it last year it could have been different, but the reality for most of us is that HD DVD is not got anything left but its dieing breathe. Still great machines and I will have a lot of movies to play on it for years to come. But for new material I will have to buy the SD DVD until I am satisfied enough with Blu-Ray players to jump into that market.

That is exactly the situation today. Sony or BDA won the war by killing HDDVD in a swift blow weeks before China enter the war and I believe that is no coincidence. That makes CH-DVD, even if successful, will remain a China only format as intended since no one else in the world will be able to buy any new HDDVD disc.

But what concerns me is that if piracy can crack and rip Bluray Disc and make them into CH-DVD (remember this is a place with 95% DVD piracy), Bluray will have a hard time surviving in that country. In fact there are many BD rip you can find on internet from 2 to 30GB these days. I personally doubt we will see any CH-DVD in our land and I think licence or anything might stop them from export. Don't get me wrong. I am not saying HDDVD will fight back and win back what they lost. But it is still possible for HDDVD, in the guise of CHDVD, to win the war there.

Do you know you can find legit Hollywood DVD from Amazon China for around $6 include shipping? Wish they can open up with HD disc in the near future and we will have a great time shopping online. I understand most may not care about what happen thousands of miles away but I must say I am a happy man if I can get cheap Hollywood HD movie no matter what format and where they are from.

I'm not so optimistic that Hollywood would be too keen to unleash their films in 1080p quality to a market so rampant with piracy on a format that is so easily cracked. Blu-ray has BD+ to at least slow pirates in these markets, CH-DVD seems to fly in the face of everything Hollywood stands for these days.

Sean

Well, so long as somewhere in the world HD DVD players are being made, anyone with a collection of HD DVD discs is safe.

And of course as has been mentioned there will always be a market for cheap discs (legit or not). With globalisation and internet purchases passing into the mainstream and becoming more commonplace, perhaps people will chose to buy the version with chinese writing on the back of the case (but the film in unblemished HD with English language) for $6 rather than the $40 version available with a full English slick?

Either way it doesn't bother me. But if full HD quality discs are available cheaply and mass produced, perhaps the US studios will have to look closer at their pricing structure and DRM restaraints to legitimate purchasers?


One question to consider though. Was HD DVD pulled to assist the studios? If people don't have players in the home to play these cheap HD movies then the market is no threat to their domestic turf? In the early days, most people outside Asia could not play VCD's without going to the trouble of getting a VCD player, so a lot of piracy was contained within these countries. Along came DVD that everyone had (east and west), was easily copied and duplicated, and could play VCD's to boot and piracy exploded. Now they are looking to contain it again via hardware. Until HTPC's become common in the lounge room, different incompatible format high definition players between the markets would certainly help curtail this piracy.

Just a thought.

The fact that Blu-ray brought about the demise of HD DVD through Studio support doesn't automatically indicate that Blu-ray will be an on-going success in the West.

A lot of money was wasted in the fighting of this format war so expect the adoption of the BR HD movie format to take a very long time to recover those costs, this meaning that high disc and player prices will also prevail for a long time too.

With the added cost of a large HD panel being the major stumbling block to the adoption of HD it is unlikely that Blu-ray will become DVD's replacement.


Apart from the impediment of a large HD panel what would work would be the SSD (Solid State Disc) where consumers could download a HD movie from a retailer's SSD server or that from a video store.

The consumer only needs to purchase a 30 Gig Flash card (or more) which would store the movie until it was erased .
SSD Flash cards are becoming cheaper by the day and once they become a 'universal' data carrier they will be very cheap.

The SSD player will have everything in it that we have in the XE1 and more (without the physical drive of course) and should be able to accommodate future formats like the 2.35:1 format etc.

Using a SSD as the carrier of the movie would remove any need for Studios to press discs, whether DVD, HD DVD or BR, or any other format. The SSD card would be transparent to the movie or the format it was issued in as long as the SSD card was of the required capacity.

The player itself could be of a standard design with just superficial differences between models.

The Chinese would love to go into mass production with such a universal player such as this, formats wouldn't matter nor would piracy.

C.M

Next week i will be able to go down to my local rental and hire Day After Tomorrow, The (Blu-ray),Independence Day (Blu-ray),Master And Commander - The Far Side Of The World (Blu-ray),Ronin (Blu-ray),Chicago (Blu-ray).In a 5 weekly rentals for $12.50 deal.Clocking in at 225gb.How far into the future do you think i have to set the time machine to d/l 225 gb for $12.50?

Good point about the HD panel, Chickenman. I won't be getting a BR player until I get full HD, currently my 1388 * 768 panel looks excellent playing most DVDs but I think all that 1920 * 1080p goodness would be wasted on my current TV. DVD from an upscaling Philips player on a 37 inch LCD is a MASSIVE step up from my previous VHS on a Sony CRT!

Having said that, whilst BR on a 1080 TV will be a noticeable upgrade, for me it's not the Quantum leap that DVD was, and certainly not worth paying 2 or 3 grand or whatever. The trigger, in my case, will be when the LCD dies and by that time, maybe 2 or 3 years down the track, we would be looking at maybe $1500?

Time will tell.

Edit: last year when BR hit the headlines I seem to recall that it was a prerequisite to have a 1920 x 1080 panel and that if the BR player did not detect such a panel it would 'strangle' the output to give just a normal DVD quality signal. Is this actually the case or was it some sort of urban myth put around at the time??

well thats it. i have a 12gig cap, so it would take like 3 months to get a movie? ... online dowloadable content aint goin anywhere just yet.
unless they have some serious restructuring of isp plans.

If it has to happen today I guess it would take the route like what we are getting through Foxtel cable digital where you click any movie and download/stream to your STB's hard drive before watching. Not necessary going through your ISP and speed should be fast too. I guess not long ago my ISP propose something like internet TV where I pay them to watch and those download does not count.

There are a lot of other threads and information on the web about resolution and viewing distance. Suffice to say that you need either a really big screen or to sit really close to notice the difference between 768 and 1080 lines. In other words 768 lines is a high enough definition for most viewers and the difference to 1080 lines is often not noticable.

I also have a 768 line LCD display and it looks fantastic when fed a high definition source 1080i signal. There is 4 - 5 times the amount of information in 1080i vs 576i and the LCD can use this to produce a better image. It is noticably better feeding high definition source material in at 1080i than feeding 576i source material in at native resolution or upscaled to 1080i.

While upscaling with an XE1 (in my case) is very good, it cannot create detail where it doesn't exist in the source. The question is does the player do a better job of upscaling than the display. If the player does not upscale then the screen needs to upscale and deinterlace from 576i to 768p in any case.

Hope this helps, the bottom line is yes your LCD will look better with native HD source material than upscaled material.

ozynigma

Yeah I agree to this - would be great if that happened. But they'd probably have hard subs :-(

Interesting news on CH-DVD seems Toshiba are chairing the committee (maybe a deal? sorry don't want another conspiracy story ).

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/36274/135/

quote...
In a separate decision, Toshiba was confirmed to chair the Steering Committee from February 2008 to February 2010. The vice chairs are held by Sony as representative for the consumer electronics industry, Intel from the IT industry and Warner from the Content industry. Other SC members include Hitachi, IBM, ITRI, LG, Matsushita, Memory-Tech, Microsoft, Mitsubishi, NEC, Paramount, Pioneer, Samsung, Sanyo, Sharp, Thomson and Walt Disney.


It is too early to tell what will happen next but happy to see all the big names there including Sony.

My legs are so sore... I need to site down...

But I can't stop dancing!!!
Ever since I saw the new those few weeks ago, I've been doing the happy dance.

I'd almost stopped when I walked into JB's today and saw the HD-DVD section was totally removed from the shelves and Blue-Ray (which was already twice the size) had taken all that shelf space.

HD-DVD no longer available from JB's.

If I'm about a decade too late with this little rant, please excuse me, but much like in the 80's I'm glad I'm not a Beta loser.
Just a loser.

Long live Blue-Ray and all the High Def pron to come.

Hey, I can still buy an HD-DVD player new and cheap off ebay. Then I will just play normal DVDs through it and upscale them to almost HD. Standard DVDs will be around for a l o n g time to come so I can live with the slight difference in quality (via upscaling) and enjoy really good PQ for a fraction of the cost of blu-ray.

The Future is here already,just not for you

http://www.informationweek.com/story/showA...RSSfeed_IWK_All

Oh man
China want a piece of every thing
Since Toshiba discontinued HD-DVD business
Chinese company might think they don't have to pay license fees now

deleted...double post

I think they have it sort out from the very beginning. That is why they call it CH-DVD long before Toshiba announce defeat.

Well we must be caught in some sort of Time Distortion Field here in Australia, because I distinctly remember getting unlimited 100Mb fibre connection Sweden 1.5 years ago, yet here in Oz ..... uhh ...yeah

Blu-Ray quality downloads in Oz = long long way to go.

With HD DVD discontinued as a format, not that it failed but through the lack of effective marketing, there always remains the possibility that it might be revived as a format if Blu-ray fails in the interim.

The point I want to make here is that these HD formats may well be too far a head of the game.

The mass adoption of the HD formats is highly dependent on consumers actually having a sizable HD display,and when I mean sizable, I mean at least 42" and preferably 50 to 60 " to at least gain the visual benefit of it.

The fact is the large HD panel market might be just too small to provide for on-going support of the Blu-ray format at this time, especially now with the downturn in the economic climate in the USA.

Blu-ray might just fail through being an expensive and unfinished format at this time, a deep recession in the US would just kill it.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, we have the Chinese wanting to punch out their variant of HD DVD in the millions.

No economic downturn over there.....the Olympics are on and they are in the limelight for this one.

This is where the danger lies for Blu-ray, if its adoption is sluggish in the USA due to high prices of hardware and discs plus the hard economic times, the Studios might now turn to the Chinese to produce the cheap HD DVD player and go format neutral or HD DVD exclusive.

It all comes down to the bottom line.....the $, these formats are just delivery systems nothing more than that to the Studios.

C.M

There is a logic to C.M.'s arguments.


Never say never.


Unlikely, sure



but never........

Was just developing another subplot that may usurp Blu-ray.........

C.M

like Peter Griffins evil twin brother.

Do you twirl your mustache as you post

Somehow I think a recession in the West will affect China
Who do you think is buying all their crap

so when are you buying a blu ray player CM?

More like Terry Thomas (the actor).

http://www.moviemarket.co.uk/Photos/P20201...53be941c527eb30

C.M

A What !! ?

C.M