The Format War Is Over, but I'm Still Bitter

No one seems to be asking the relevant question - who needs or even wants HD movies? Even with a high-definition widescreen TV, I'm struggling (admittedly with 55-year old eyes) to see MUCH of an improvement in quality. Is this marginal improvement in quality worth paying heaps for in terms of extra cost of new player (even with the format wars over), extra cost of replacing existing DVD discs, etc? Excuse me, but I don't think so.

I hate the DVD format. It is terrible. It is unstable, and it doesn't quite hold enough information to be truly useful. Data corrupts so easily on it. I can't trust anything to it. And trying to do the simplest things with DVD, like transferring home movies from VHS to DVD, is near impossible to do with acceptable ease and quality. Not good quality, just acceptable is nearly impossible. DVDs are too large physically. They, nor their players fit in your pockets easily as cassettes used to. Overall, I think the optical drive situation is unacceptable. I am much happier with flash-ram, and as of right now, it does the job with a little DIVX compression and is cheaper too.
HD Video is MUCH better than DVD. DVD was a waste. Go Blu!
DVD was never a good format, and MPEG2 is the wost, least efficient means of compression ever.
I miss the days of putting a VHS into my VCR and being able to just watch my movie, instead of hoping the disk is without corruption and without scratches.

VHS may have been convenient, but it surely wasn't any more stable than DVDs, I certainly experience my fair share of tape glitches and other VHS anomalies over the years.

I agree though, DVDs are far too fragile and unreliable.

A flash RAM solution would be much more practical, for cripes sake, we're almost a decade into the new millennium and still using mechanical data storage methods, how long are we going to be forced to relay on such inefficient and unreliable technology ? HD-DVD and Blu-ray are both colossal wastes of time, resources and money.

Here's to hope that technology like Sandisk's SSD and backlash against the Hi-Def DVD Debacle are the final nails in the coffin for mechanical storage methods and media.

Go ahead - hate optical disc formats. Hitachi just announced a 1Tb HDD - and apple is comming out with iTV (hopefully) next week - or at least in the first half of this year. Save all your movies in mp4 format using handbrake onto your 1Tb drive and stream them wirelessly to your TV using iTV. That's what I'm gonna do! No more scratched discs, or fumbling through my DVD collection looking for something to watch - just point and click! :)

Oh yeah - unless I'm mistaken Handbrake only works on Mac or Linux - I use a Mac, but if you can get ahold of Linux, try it. The quality is excellent if you choose the 2 pass method. I've tried many other compressing programs and up to this point Handbranke has worked best (except for the occassional glitch of ommiting the sound - which is admitedly annoying).

I'm still waiting for the 3CCD flash drive video camera. Anybody here know where I can get one?
Signed,
Another person who is done withTape & DVD/CD formats

The multi-drive does seem like a solution, but what if the diffraction applied to allow multi-format read makes one format look better than the other???

Not even that, but when you put your dual-format disc into a dual-format player...uh oh. Ka-boom.

Cheers to the first poster! Blu-Ray and HD DVD were not made for us, the movie lovers; they were made for them... big companies trying to create a new market and scam us into buying all our movies over again with beefed up copy protection. How many times do I have to buy "The Abyss"? Let's see, VHS, Laser Disc, DVD, and now Blu-Ray? Anyone adopting these formats are foolish (IMO).
Personally, I've ripped all my DVD's to hard disk and stream them using XBOX Media Center... I can't tell you how nice it is to browse through you whole video collection with an absolutely beautiful interface. I use DVD Shrink to ripped full quality video and sound.

Is HD a significant improvement over DVD? Well, that really depends on personal preference. I remember back when compact discs were first becoming popular, in the early 90s. A lot of folks didn't want to switch from cassettes, which in their opinion sounded just fine. For a long while I was one of those people. Why buy CDs for $10-$12 a pop when I could dub a cassette for free? It took literally years before I made the switch in earnest. HD video I imagine will be much the same. Even if some folks don't notice an improvement at first, they may do so in a couple years, when their eyes become used to looking at the sharper picture quality.

As for PC drives, flash technology is superior in some ways, but keep in mind that they're still darned expensive and very small. Large hard disks are a bit more feasible from a price standpoint, but even they aren't as portable or universally compatible as Blu-ray and HD-DVD are going to be. They both have their place, and I'm glad for it.

antb, panasonic's hvx-200 records to flash cards. it costs a bundle but it's worth it.

I agree, DVD format is a lot to be desired. I can't count how many times I have rented DVD movies and they didn't work because they were scratched, esp. at the very end of the movie! And my sony DVD camcorder.... that's another story. After recording our entire cmas, i find out the DVD was corrupt and i lost everything. Plus, even if it does work, it's a royal pain to pull my data off the disk to edit and reburn. Sorry, Blue/HD look good, but not something I am excited about. All i see are more headaches and hassles. The format needs to change!

I'm so sick of hearing people whine about DVDs. Don't blame the format for the failure of people to properly handle the disc to prevent damage, or studios for putting out poorly authored products that are overcompressed among other problems.

The DVD is practically indestructable if properly handled, and provides more entertainment per dollar than any format in history. I have a large collection, am continuing to add to it, and have no plans whatsoever to jump on the HiDef bandwagon. I won't buy a player for that until they can guarantee that my thousands of investment in the current format will still play.

I bought an HDTV, a 51" DLP. I enjoy the HD programming but I am not about to make the jump to HD/Blue format. I recently saw a DVD played through and upconvert DVD player which provided a very nice HD movie experience on an HDTV. This sort of interim technology (and isn't all technology basically interim technology?) makes a lot more sense to me, both technologically and financially.

Suppose I buy a dual format player. What happens when one format finally wins? Dual players will no longer be made, players will now only be made for the format that won. When my dual player finally breaks down (and we know it will), I'll be stuck with a bunch of discs I can no longer play! Time Warner has the better idea. Dual discs.

Rattlinig on about format and technology misses the crucial issue, namely, the crap that is encoded on the disks. There is almost NO movie or telecast worth watching in the US. No indies whatsoever, not even Al Gore's film. No art films from France or
Italy; no comedies from the Czech Republic; none of the increasingly good production from formerly developing countries.
Only reruns of reruns of junk that was redundant to begin with. Anyone remember "My Charming Little Village"? What about "Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000". Seen any film by Jacques Tati? No? That is the problem. Hollywood is sick and the telecast industry is sicker. Go ahead and sink $500 or $1000 into a machine that feeds you only the increasing violence, foul language and sophmoric "humor" that warps the brain. As for me, I'm taking a walk. In France, or maybe Italy, or the Czech Republic, or possibly Thailand. A very long walk. Cheers.

With all these changes no one even mentioned the other DVD format wich is DVD-RAM. DVD-RAM seems to have the most strengths of any current DVD format. I'm glad this topic is recorded. Where is the governmental agency or private industry watchdog which should be monitoring all this stuff? Letting the public battle it out through their purchases is fine but everyone in this topic is making a lot of sense for the need for some responsible leadership, direction and clarification.
Frank C.