HD-DVD has Won, BD has lost (according to p0rn industry)

[Eric_C]

http://www.tgdaily.com/2007/01/11/ces2007_hddvd_blu_ray/

(Title adendum added by owner of forum, to avoid post title looking like some REALLY news worthy announcement that impacts everyone as the statement WAS incomplete as it was.)

[Nick M]

This is a very real piece of information and significant blow to Blu-Ray, considering that the Porn industry is bigger than all of Hollywood combined.

[Kevin P]

I always had a feeling about HD-DVD vs. BD, where HD-DVD is VHS and BD is Betamax.

Even though BD is technically superior, it's more expensive and more bloated. Plus, the average Joe is going to flock to something that seems familiar to them. "HD-DVD" has "DVD" in it, and sounds familiar. "Blu-Ray Disc" is something completely new to them, and they are like, what the heck is that?

Plus Sony hasn't exactly had the best track record in marketing its innovative technologies... Betamax, MD, SACD...

The sooner one format wins out, the sooner I can jump on it! :B

[peterS]

well if blu ray even looked good id care :roll:
probably means audio will suffer if hd dvd is the norm

[Lex]

Well, since I don't buy p0rn, I don't think I will base my main decision about the BD vs HD-DVD on this. Beauty is more than skin deep anyway, ha ha. Frankly, a lot of the type people that do these things, we may wish to see in less resolution, not more. lol.

But I digress, quick and dirty, and I do mean quick and dirty production quality or reproduction means nothing to me, nor does their "industry", and I use that word loosely. So, excuse me while I say it is not game, set, match yet, not on the basis of this reveling fact.

The jury is swayed little by this fact, regardless of how "big" the p0rn industry is or isn't. The jury is still out.

Peter, I've got quite a few of each disc, and so far, I'd say quality can vary from format to format by film, and sometimes, even by scene, so your global statement is seen only as your personal opinion by me. I buy both discs. Also, there's a lot of variables along with the disc. There's player type, cable type, display type, environment watched in, studio releases, quality of masters, etc that can all come into play.

[ThomasW]

This is an interesting 'about face', almost a year ago BluRay was Digital Playground's choice.
http://www.gamespot.com/news/6142519.html

[Nick M]

And so the battle continues... :B

[Jack Gilvey]

probably means audio will suffer if hd dvd is the norm

Really? HD DVD is capable of carrying Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master, both lossless compression techniques resulting in a bit-for-bit identical copy of the source.

[PewterTA]

Wooo Hooo pr0n!!!!!!!!!

Ha ha.

I for one don't buy any of that...but I do realize how big of a decision that is.

There needs to be a standard out there, the industry killed themselves by not picking a standard format. I think HD content would be a lot bigger if people didn't have to pick between two formats and be afraid one will fail and then they are stuck (like betamax).

[Lex]

While you make some valid points Dan, actually, how I see it, you'd not be stuck like Betamax for a long time since both current generation gaming systems are capable of supporting the formats, those will be available for a long time I expect. Yes, it is possible you could own discs for a format that goes away, but not being able to get equipment to play them would not happen for a very long time I think.

[aud19]

Really? HD DVD is capable of carrying Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master, both lossless compression techniques resulting in a bit-for-bit identical copy of the source.

Yeah I don't get that either...:scratchhead: You want to explain Peter?

[joetama]

I don't really want to see porn in HD.....

It goes along the same reasons you turn off the lights in real life....

[aud19]

It goes along the same reasons you turn off the lights in real life....

YOU might.... :W

:rofl:

[AndrewM]

This is a very real piece of information and significant blow to Blu-Ray, considering that the Porn industry is bigger than all of Hollywood combined.

Porn isn't anywhere near the size of "Hollywood". Forbes (google porn & forbes) did an article on it about 5-6yrs ago and put the "home video" market size at around $1-2B total, with the internet pulling in another $1B (with the rest being PPV and magazines).

Even AVN (the industries news rag) puts total numbers around $4B and they may be embellishing a little bit.

"Hollywood" is somewhere in the $40'ish billion range these days.

But even besides all of that, the adult industry is really pushing the internet and is even working on IPTV type setups as the distribution costs save them a fortune. Except for maybe the big players (like a digital playground) the number of copies a title gets on a format is fairly low (even a big adult player may only press an equal amount as a mediocre theaterical release), contrast that with a big hollywood film which may get 50-100-500k copies pressed for store shelves in just an initial run.

That's the same direction regular hollywood home video will go as well eventually.

[Nick M]

Just read that Forbes article. Interesting stuff! Not sure who exactly to believe. Either way, it's a definite slice of the pie towards HD-DVD. Personally, I think I'd like Blu-Ray to win, but I don't have my hopes up...

[AndrewM]

Oh no doubt that it's a bullet point against BD, $1-4B is still $1-4B.

Porn is credited towards helping VHS win that format war, but the situations are quite a bit different. Before VCR's the only way to bring a home movie is to have an old projector setup, other than that you went to a theater. All the sudden people could easily bring the stuff home, there was a bit of a symbiotic relationship there as the VCR let the adult industry grow and that the adult industry let the VCR market grow.

[mattburk]

hd & blue ray-They will both be short lived if a flash player come out-as they should. who needs spinning disks, when flash is getting pretty inexpensive.

[aud19]

They will both be short lived if the flash player come out-as they should. who needs spinning disks, when flash is getting pretty inexpensive.

Ssshhhhhh...apparently nobody here wants to accept that optical media is on the way out....Don't mention things like flash-media etc or things like VOD, FIOS etc :B : :lol:

[Jack Gilvey]

They will both be short lived if the flash player come out-as they should. who needs spinning disks, when flash is getting pretty inexpensive.

I don't think there's any doubt about that, but this media is here now. You either enjoy what's here now, or wait a few years for what might come along.

[AndrewM]

Accepting that it is happening and acknowledging that it isn't going to happen soon are two different things.

Flash memory - 16GB USB sticks costs $240-250 today. Blu-Ray writable disc (25GB) costs $17 with prices similiar for HD-DVD writable (these are consumer prices).

We'll need to wait a couple more years before memory capacity catches up to optical, then wait 5-6'ish years for the prices to come down to the same point. Today 32-64MB flash memory devices are cheap enough to basically give them away (bought in quantity you can bring the price way down). 32MB on a flash memory has been around since the mid/late 90's at a consumer level.

Same with fiber into the home, you have less than 1% of homes with fiber in them that are capable of using it. It's certainly the future, but how long until they hit 50% how about 75-80% and then on top of that how long until people start using it? Going by history it's not going to happen in the next 6-8 years, in 1999 'broadband' was available in about 15-20% of people's homes, today that number is up around 70'ish%.

HD optical formats are here for at least this generation.

[Ovation]

And as far as "broadband" is concerned--it is available, but I doubt 70% of US homes actively use the internet, nevermind broadband internet.

When a non-optical disc format has the same PQ and SQ as current hi-def disc options AND either enough people decide to hook up their PC to their HT OR stand-alone "non-disc" players are widely available, then we can talk about the "end of the disc". I've been awaiting the end of the internal combustion engine for decades.

Besides, people like to "own stuff". Discs aren't going to disappear for quite some time.

[AndrewM]

And as far as "broadband" is concerned--it is available, but I doubt 70% of US homes actively use the internet, nevermind broadband internet.

Subscription rates are still around the 50% range IIRC, the avalability in homes may be a little higher. But there are also large chunks of the country that are still remote enough that cable/teleco can't push a 'broadband' solution to the people.

[aud19]

You guys might find this thread interesting

http://www.htguide.com/forum/showthread.php4?p=314814#post314814

[AndrewM]

Nobody hear has said that the industry wouldn't go that way. But you noticed this part;

Internet connectivity with a minimum of one megabit per second of bandwidth is required. Faster connections are needed for better quality playback of the programming, with DVD quality possible with a three-megabit-per-second connection, according to the company.

3Mb/s is a LONG way off from the 32Mb/s bit rate I was getting off a blu ray disc the other night. Granted with some codec work those numbers come down (hence the 6-8Mbit of DVD can turn into 3Mbit), but even if/when they come down to 15-20Mbit we are still many years away from that being available in even 50% of households.

[aud19]

My point is that it's coming and fast with FIOS and similar services or steppingstone services like this Netflix. The MP3 generation is going to be in charge of your media soon folks :lol: Also, FWIW the poorer and lowest population density areas will hardly make or break a tech. And also FWIW I firmly believe that J6P doesn't care about BD/HD-DVD's ~32MB/S bit rate any more than they cared about DVD-A/SACD or even CD's superior bit rates over 128MB/S MP3 files, PARTICULARLY the poorer, lower population areas.

[Hdale85]

But there are still enough that care about quality that these company's will have to put out a good quality signal for the customers that do care or they will lose a lot of business ...And as far as FIOS I've been waiting for it to get to my neighborhood since the beginning of last year...its available in Pittsburgh...just can't seem to figure out where :B But as soon as they get it in my area I will be upgradeing to the 30Mbit connection.

[AndrewM]

My point is that it's coming and fast with FIOS and similar services or steppingstone services like this Netflix.

Define "fast", even Verizon themselves see this as a 10yr plan to compete with cable co's. Their TV service is serving 4 small cities right now (less than 300,000 total population). Fiber isn't even on the radar for many markets right now as the local teleco has no reason to upgrade. Verizon is spending the bucks to push TV, but down here Bellsouth has a multi-year deal pimping DirecTV, so they aren't going to spend the HUGE amounts of money running fiber to homes with limited payback (DSL speeds run up to 6 or 8Mbit now which is fine for 80+% of their customer base).

The other monkey wrench in the whole deal is what is on the backend. You may get 50Mbit from your endpoint into the Verizon network, but what happens when you go out to the rest of the internet, even big time providers don't have the resources to handle high-number high bandwidth requests. Last week just a little over 17 Million people watched CSI. So imagine you get your codec's all nice and perfect and you can drop a bit rate down to say 12Mbit/sec (1.5MB/sec - CBS is good about pushing out 20'ish Mbit right now), what is CBS going to do when 17M people try and download a 5.5GB file? That's 93,500,000 GB (93.5 PetaBytes if my zero's are correct) of file transfer in an hour

And also FWIW I firmly believe that J6P doesn't care about BD/HD-DVD's ~32MB/S bit rate any more than they cared about DVD-A/SACD or even CD's superior bit rates over 128MB/S MP3 files, PARTICULARLY the poorer, lower population areas.

They don't care about the details such as bit rates and codecs, but they certainly care about getting HD quality, hence the explosion of HD capable display sales. Comparisons to music doesn't work, people are moving the complete opposite direction, people want portable music, not high resolution.

Also, FWIW the poorer and lowest population density areas will hardly make or break a tech.

Never said it would. Although there are certain rules that a company has to follow for doing rolling out certain types of services. Cable companies didn't spend big bucks rolling out cable service to the poorest neighborhoods (where subscription levels are low, theft is high, etc) of this country out of the goodness of their hearts, ditto the telephone companies.

DVD was released in 1997, VHS was pretty much dead in 02/03, the next generation of optical came out in 2006. Is there any indication that IPTV or ultra-high speed ISP's are going to have majority market penetration in less than 8-9 years? Even if you started today it would take nearly that long to run fiber into a majority of homes (assuming every company was 100% behind doing it).

[aud19]

I don't entirely disagree with you. It's not going to be perfect FIOS-like service to EVERYONE overnight. But with services like Netflix dowload service (among others) starting and the fact that the public has already proven they want their media on demand and downloadable not to mention the farce that is the HD optical disc roll out and "war" that the general public doesn't even care about.....I don't see either HD format having a mjor or long term impact. They'll be relatively small and short lived stepping stones IMO.

[AndrewM]

not to mention the farce that is the HD optical disc roll out and "war" that the general public doesn't even care about.....I don't see either HD format having a mjor or long term impact.

HD on optical is doing better than DVD did when comparing the same time frames (ie just months after launch). They've sold more hardware and discs so far.

[Lex]

I have not proven I want my media on demand or downloadable, sorry Jason and I am part of the public. I Feel as George does, I'm a collector, and while DVD is the most viable hard media, it's what I want my movies stored in. I don't want to involve a computer when I am watching movies. Nor do I want to use my hard drive space to store movie video. I further like to own my movies, not borrow them for a fee based system. They tried that on the consumer, it was called DIVX, and it FAILED miserably.

I just don't get it, what, because a bunch of kids want to steal music to rip for their IPODs, suddenly everyone wants to download music and movies? Only people that can't afford home theaters want their media downloadable, or people like students that don't have room for a TV at school, so they download so they can watch on their computers. That I can understand, but that does not mean I fit their mold of media needs. I don't, nor do they fit mine.

Further Jason, I was at Best Buy video section 2 times this week and both times, others were looking at and buying HD titles in both BD and HD-DVD formats. Though I will admit, BD seemed to be the casual winner in terms of numbers I saw.

I am going to agree with Andrew fully, that the move from tape to DVD was like getting someone to shift from a straight razor to a blade 50 years ago. It was a real paradigm shift. They came sort of kicking and screaming until the prices dropped into Joe Sixpack's range. (Speaking of old Joe, not heard him mentioned much lately, where's he been, drinking wine?)

But the move from DVD to HD disc, is just like a lateral move from PC to MAC, or maybe from Folgers to Maxwell house, it's still coffee, it just has a little different, and better taste, we hope-

[JonMarsh]

I don't entirely disagree with you. It's not going to be perfect FIOS-like service to EVERYONE overnight. But with services like Netflix dowload service (among others) starting and the fact that the public has already proven they want their media on demand and downloadable not to mention the farce that is the HD optical disc roll out and "war" that the general public doesn't even care about.....I don't see either HD format having a mjor or long term impact. They'll be relatively small and short lived stepping stones IMO.

If we had the broadband infrastructure that parts of asia and northern Europe do, I'd be inclined to agree with you.

But I can barely tolerate iTunes TV show downloads where I live, a Bay Area town in Norhtern CA; and they're only 450 MB on average; a 20GB HD download would be an all night and day affair. And while I do have terabytes of storage online at home, I don't think I'm a very typical PC/Mac user. Putting my HD-DVD's on hard drives would require about 900 GB at present, and I'm just getting started. Now, I love my Mercury Elite Pro outboard storage units, and I think that 1TB in a striped RAID array for under $500 is a good deal, especially considering that comes with four different interfaces, including Firewire 800, but that's NOT a consumer solution by any means.

When I heard about the Xbox360 HD movie download service, I just about died laughing- how many HD movies, even in VC1 with extra compression and reduced HF detail, are you going to store on a Premium Xbox 360 HD? (a 20GB drive). Two, if you're lucky? Now, I have an Xbox 360 premium system, but until they open the system and allow you to put a LARGE HD on it, that dawg don't hunt.

Even if HD-DVD doesn't go any further than SACD does, it is HD, and it's available now- if you have a good 1080p capable display, IMO, it's a lot of fun. Once more interesting BR content is out, I'll probably add that, too- as plentiful as PS3's have become in the last couple of weeks, I might even go that route, though for now I'm happy to wait and see what the next CE BR players look like.

I'm actually more likely to add another HD-DVD player, because the new Toshiba XA2 with the HQV scaler chip is pretty close to state of the art for upscaling DVD's, including video sourced material.

[aud19]

Even if HD-DVD doesn't go any further than SACD does, it is HD, and it's available now- if you have a good 1080p capable display, IMO, it's a lot of fun. Once more interesting BR content is out, I'll probably add that, too- as plentiful as PS3's have become in the last couple of weeks, I might even go that route, though for now I'm happy to wait and see what the next CE BR players look like.

I'm actually more likely to add another HD-DVD player, because the new Toshiba XA2 with the HQV scaler chip is pretty close to state of the art for upscaling DVD's, including video sourced material.

Very true and very good points Jon I have less play money that a lot of folks do... so me, myself and I am holding out for a good while yet :B But if you've got the $$ by all means enjoy the HD discs that are available now.

HONESTLY I really hope I'm entirely wrong about all of this but I just don't have a lot of faith in the HD-disc formats being as prevalent as some of you folks seem to think they will be and the MP3 generation is only going to have more and more influence on our media.

[gianni]

I'll raise my shield after the last word of this post to fend off the rock throwing-

1) May HD-DVD and Blu-Ray forever disappear into a black hole for this asinine format war they are making us endure and the shoddy implementaion of these formats and players and their d_mn_d disasterous HDCP. May SD DVD win the format war.

2) I hold a university degree from a school of engineering, am reasonably computer and consumer electronics literate and have a broadband connection. However, I will never desire to download compressed movies from the internet nor have a traditional computer involved in my A/V or music system. In fact, I think I would rather go back to reading paperbacks. And yes, I have an ipod.

Give me my own shiny silver disk which I can collect or rent as I desire. Thank You Lex!

[AndrewM]

1) May HD-DVD and Blu-Ray forever disappear into a black hole for this asinine format war they are making us endure and the shoddy implementaion of these formats and players and their d_mn_d disasterous HDCP. May SD DVD win the format war.

For me that is cutting off my nose to spite my face. I want HD movies, in the end the difference is big between them.

From a non-enthusiast point of view, after a week onslaught of watching HD material my fiance and I sat down to watch something in SD and I kept getting the question "why is it so fuzzy".

As for VOD and other services, I also look forward to those days as well, but once it's out and matured and works. I had it with Comcast (we were in an early roll-out area), and while it was great having literally hundreds of movies and hundreds of other programming features available, it outright sucked in terms of usability.

Let me pay $30-40-50 a month (hell more if the quality is there) for a mega-catalog of titles to play/stream? Think of how Rhapsody/Napster are pitching their service now, $10-15 a month and you can access as many songs as you want.

When I heard about the Xbox360 HD movie download service, I just about died laughing- how many HD movies, even in VC1 with extra compression and reduced HF detail, are you going to store on a Premium Xbox 360 HD?

12GB free on the HDD after all the internal stuff, each HD movie is about 8GB IIRC (only 720p)...so one movie!

I had the same reaction as you did when I heard about it. I laughed even harder when one of the MS execs talked about the problem and simply said "Oh but you can delete it and download it anytime you want".

[Shawn Parr]

Personally as far as VOD and owning discs go, I would prefer a hybrid system. I myself would buy it all on DVD and/or whatever future format becomes the most standard, if it does...

Then have a system like the AppleTV, where I can rip the DVD's I own and put them onto the small sexy box that can live with my A/V gear and I can VOD what I own. If I have a drive failure or the box freaks out, I still have my discs I can watch. Since I rip them myself there is no DRM to worry about, besides what was on the disc in the first place which obviously is not an issue with DVD and HD-DVD right now.

Then the infrastructure is in place so that if I go on a trip I can move a copy to my laptop, or if it pans out an iPhone, and I'm good to go.

That is my little nirvana. I now return you to your regularly scheduled HD disc argument...

[AndrewM]

Then have a system like the AppleTV, where I can rip the DVD's I own and put them onto the small sexy box that can live with my A/V gear and I can VOD what I own. If I have a drive failure or the box freaks out, I still have my discs I can watch. Since I rip them myself there is no DRM to worry about, besides what was on the disc in the first place which obviously is not an issue with DVD and HD-DVD right now.

HD and BD both have something like that in their spec, although you're not going to escape DRM...and who knows how it would work in the real world on various devices.

The idea is that you could centrally store movies and play them through some type of STB to other TV's. But I'd have to go look but I think the idea of putting them on portables is missing out of it.

[Shawn Parr]

although you're not going to escape DRM...

The DRM that supposedly makes it so you can't rip an HD-DVD was broken this week. There are now HD-DVD movies available via less than legal venues.

[AndrewM]

It wasn't "broken", at least not in the same manner CSS was broken. People managed to find the keys to a handful of titles (and it happen about a month or so ago).

It remains to be seen what will be done about it, but the way it's supposed to work is that all HD-DVD's should be disabled in the player that exposed the keys (as the key for that version of the player should be revoked), even those made after this point of the same title (ie Serenity was on the list of 'cracked' titles, but a Serenity disc that was made after say today should not be able to be cracked using the same methods).

When CSS was cracked all DVD's past, present and future were cracked and there was nothing the studios could do about it (well realistically do about it).

[Shawn Parr]

Actually there are two sets of keys for HD-DVD, title keys, and volume keys. The title keys are the ones in a movie itself, and the title keys are associated with a player (from what I understand with a bit of google research).

What has been discovered at this time is how to find the title keys, which it turns out that PC software players store in plain view in memory. A scan of memory from someone who knows what they are doing and you can see the keys, then use the AACS specification to write a decoder.

Current implementations seem to require you to find the keys yourself and input them into the ripper. Many people are working on finding and utilizing volume keys so that you will not have to do that work in the future.

As of right now it doesn't look like there is an easy way to combat this without changing the AACS specification. As even if they release a new version of the film with different keys, you could analyze the memory it is stored in to get the new keys, and there is not a volume key that can be tied back to a specific player. Even if they could, it would be a software player and they would likely have to come out with an update which may or may not solve the issue of the keys being stored unencrypted in RAM.

This is a losing battle no matter how you look at it. Industry people creating the DRM see this as a job. I'm talking about the actual engineers and coders. The people working to defeat it are a bit different, they see it as a personal challenge and a way to seek greatness. They have more fuel behind them to 'solve the problem.' There likely are more people interested in breaking these things then in creating them.

[AndrewM]

As of right now it doesn't look like there is an easy way to combat this without changing the AACS specification. As even if they release a new version of the film with different keys, you could analyze the memory it is stored in to get the new keys, and there is not a volume key that can be tied back to a specific player. Even if they could, it would be a software player and they would likely have to come out with an update which may or may not solve the issue of the keys being stored unencrypted in RAM.

Wikipedia has a decent rundown;

The approach of AACS provisions each individual player with a unique set of decryption keys which are used in a broadcast encryption scheme. This approach allows licensors to "revoke" individual players, or more specifically, the decryption keys associated with the player. Thus, if a given player's keys are compromised and published by an attacker, the AACS licensing authority can simply revoke those keys in future content, making the keys/player useless for decrypting new titles. However, if attacker doesn't publish the compromised player key, the AACS licensing authority doesn't know which key is compromised, and it can not revoke it. An attacker can use his/her player key to get title keys of several movies, and publish the title keys or the decrypted movies, without risk of revocation of his/her player key.

Once that key is gone (ie in new titles) you can no longer use the player that allowed you to view the key in memory.

Of course as the above said, there are ways around it.

This is a losing battle no matter how you look at it. Industry people creating the DRM see this as a job. I'm talking about the actual engineers and coders. The people working to defeat it are a bit different, they see it as a personal challenge and a way to seek greatness. They have more fuel behind them to 'solve the problem.' There likely are more people interested in breaking these things then in creating them.

Of course..well for anything at this level it's mostly trivial for those guys.

It wouldn't be that hard to encrypt the contents of the disc, but it would lose any sense of being consumer friendly.