Well, hello.
It's good to see you again.
I guess that inaccurate.
It's good to have you seeing me again.
Better?
Speaking of eyesight, let's talk about the limits of it. Your eyes are neat little machines. They're fun, they're exciting, and they're full of a thick, syrupy goo. They also have a maximum resolution (looking at a TV screen) of 324 megapixels.
Exciting.
The most the top HD formats can manage is a resolution of about 2 megapixels. And regular, humble DVD? About .3 of a megapixel.
What's my point? None, really. I was attempting to prove that HD and regular DVD really don't make much of a difference, but I'm wrong. It does. But fact is, it's still TV. If seeing the hairs on the buttcrack of the pornstar you WON'T be seeing on Blu-Ray really makes that much of a difference to you, then shell out the 400 dollars out of your fancy Gucci crocodile skin wallet.
I'm happy with my DVDs.
But. This blog is only SORT OF my personal soap box.
So. Today's thing of interest is the final defeat in the epic format war of the robust HD DVD versus the slick 'n shiny Blu-Ray. Ooooh. Ahhh.
What's the history here?
For those of you who haven't heard, the entertainment market wasn't always the peaceful, joyous world of expensive gadgets and TV refrigerators. (Which I realize is also an expensive gadget, but is so incredibly ridiculous it deserves a specific mention). No, there was once a plucky young format known as Betamax.
Betamax wasn't proud. It only wanted to dominate the entertainment format countryside, waving it's cute little pocket-sized arms. Unfortunately, like Joan Benet Ramsey, Betamax soon found there were disadvantages to being cute. Betamax had a maximum record time of one hour.
"Outrageous!" Cried RCA heads. They swore that they could produce a format that was longer than the cute little Betamax.
Sony brashly ignored the firey young RCA execs and went on touting the superiority of their cute little competitor. RCA, abashed but not defeated, went into negotiations with Matsushita Corporation and eventually produced a 4-hour recorder.
Sony scrambled to beat the VHS format, but found their baby Betamax ending up too expensive and with too low a recording time to beat the mighty VHS.
But Sony, like the great Phoenix (we can argue forever about how that's spelled, shut up) rose from the ashes of the fallen Betamax and....about thirty years later popped out the sleek, shiny Blu-Ray.
The secret to the Blu-Ray is that it uses a shorter wavelength laser to write to the discs, thus allowing more data to be stored on it, thus blah blah blah blah...
Sony chuckled at its own ingenuity. It would not repeat the mistake of the Betamax. Blu-Ray would rule the entertainment countryside!
But the dark lords of the DVD Forum were not satisfied. They remained split, due to the fragility of the Blu-Ray discs, which had to be packaged with a special protective cover that was both expensive and hard to deal with. They began toying with the dark art of dual-layer DVD9 discs to encode HD media.
Still worse, the forum itself was headed by none other than the Toshiba Kings. Together with their lackeys from NEC, they began toiling over a format that would come to be called Advanced Optical Disc. They soon realized that was a way lame name for a shiny gadget, so they called it HD DVD. Which wasn't much better, but these are people from a council called the "DVD Forum", do you really think they're the best minds in the world?
This new unveiling caused a deep split in the Jedi Council...I mean, DVD Forum. And in the end resulted in a media war that would scar the fertile, silicone fields of the entertainment industry.
And after a long and hard-fought battle, we finally have a victor.
On February 19th, Toshiba lay battered upon the corporate battlefield. Studios, video companies, all its allies had abandoned it. The Blu-Ray stood triumphant over its thwarted foe.
"But why? I only wanted to introduce the usage of new, slicker encoding mechanisms into the HD media format?!" Toshiba lamented its loss. Its dearest friends, Wal-Mart and Netflix, had discarded the rugged young HD DVD. Toshiba reluctantly announced that it would no longer be producing HD DVD players and recorders.
Peace is restored.
BUT AT WHAT COST!?
I guess the better question is...
Who the hell cares?!
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