http://www.christopherprice.net/dvd-with-hdi-take-two-282.html

I don’t see MS updating the original Xbox with HDi, I suspect the code for HDi will be taken from the HD DVD player on the 360.

The point is that you just need one DVD player with HDi in your house. You could then watch the HD version via streaming on your HDTV, and have the versatility (no pun) of taking your DVD with you on all those old players.

I suspect Toshiba and Panasonic will update high end DVD players with HDi, Xbox 360 and Windows will get an update, and the rest… will buy a single new player. That’s a whole lot better than having to add Blu-Ray to every source you watch a movie on. I don’t see $50 portable LCD Blu-Ray players any time soon.

Panasonic and Toshiba want HDi to succeed. They’ll update players that can be updated (and I suspect that includes their HD DVD players too). Microsoft wants HDi to succeed as well.

Sony? Well, they’ll play the waiting game and see how much HDi penetrates. I doubt the PS3 would never get HDi… it just might be the last player to get HDi.

But there are millions of standalone DVD players, and only a very small percentage of them have network connections. And even if they do have a network connection, that doesn’t mean they have the processing power and memory to run HDi applications. In fact, I’d bet most of them don’t – they generally don’t have much in the way of CPU power at all, far less than HD DVD players used for HDi.

So yeah, it is a bigger pool than just the HD DVD capable systems, but it would still be a very small percentage of the DVD install base, and that’s *if* vendors released updates for the boxes in the field. And what incentive do they have to do so as opposed to trying to sell a new unit with the capabilities baked in? Unless they charged for the update.

The point of HDi is to work with network-enabled systems. Presumably most network-enabled players can firmware update, and thus, can take advantage of HDi. The problem will be getting device makers to push those firmware updates out (I suspect the game consoles, Mac, and Windows will embrace it… other platforms probably won’t).

I think the DVD Forum is hoping that with HDi on DVD discs, that BD-Live content will wind up playing on the DVD variant of discs through HDi. The producers will simply simulcast that content to both formats, giving HD on DVD.

Theoretically, you could stream HD over the web, and offer an HD digital download via HDi, and leave the DVD as standard definition. And, that would really scare Blu-Ray, with iTunes/Netflix eating away on one end, and DVD gaining HD over the web too.

Any DVD 2.0 spec would need to be *at least as good* as DVD9 for existing customers. So you’re forced to look at flippies or more layers – and other of those options drops yields, as discussed. That will *always* be the case. DVD9 has lower yield than DVD5, DVD18 has lower yields than DVD9. That’s because each layer, or side, is another step in the manufacturing process, and you will have *some* defects at every step. You’ll never have perfection. So the more steps, the more net rejects. That’s unavoidable.

Now, the rate of increase in rejects might be restrained – early on DVD5 dominated because DVD9 was lucky to get 50% yield, but eventually it DVD9 got up over 90%. BD50 started out around 50% yield, but it is between 75-80% now and increasing rapidly. That’s the teething pain of any new process. HD DVD benefited from being close to DVD so yields were better than BD, but the gap was narrowing fast as BD could make rapid gains, but HD DVD was already closer to being debugged to start. DVD 2.0 would probably have a similar initial benefit from being based on DVD, but how good will BD be by the time it comes out?

And, since DVD isn’t going away any time soon, the BD vendors have an instant competitive solution if another format were to emerge – just start bundling the DVD. They don’t have any real reason to do so today, so they don’t. But if there were any threat from a hybrid format, they could do it in a heartbeat. Suddenly you’d have full DVD quality *and* full BD quality in one package, up against a compromise hybrid.

Wanting to have a portable copy is something the studios are aware of – look at recent moves by Fox and Sony to include ready-made portable H.264 versions on some of their BD releases. You can copy them off using a PC with a BD drive, or over the network from the PS3 (and BD-Live players to come). Versions of the movie ready to run on your iPod or PSP. Expect this to become increasingly common. Another alternative that have been tried with BD and DVD is to include a download code with the disc to allow the user to download a portable copy online. Either solution is easier than ripping a DVD and re-encoding for a PMP. And I do think studios will increasingly support this as a value-add to sell more movies. Fox in particular seems pretty gung-ho about this approach.

Blu-ray already has 8% of the home media market, DVD the other 92%, as of last week – according to Nielsen VideoScan. That’s a rapid increase, it was 6% the previous week, and 2-3% at the end of the format war. More and more people are buying BD be cause the uncertainty is gone, and there are more titles to buy because the studios are putting out more titles on BD. Some of them have said they plan to have *all* new releases day and date on DVD and BD.

Even if they do add HDi to DVD doesn’t mean it will get used. Three-layer HD DVD was also approved by the DVD Forum and never shipped. They’ve have other DVD specs that have never really been used. HDi will require new players – well, maybe DVD with HDi will work in the HD DVD players out there, but that’s a TINY market. Chicken & egg – which studio is going to invest in putting HDi content on their discs without players, and who is going to make the players without content? That’s been an issue for Blu-ray with Profile 1.1 and BD-Live. Hardware vendors have been slow to add them because there weren’t discs to use them, but studios were slow to add them because of a lack of players. Sony’s helped to jump start things by upgrading the PS3, the overwhelmingly dominant BD player, to BD-Live/2.0 so not studios are planning the titles, and that will pull other vendors into releasing updated players.

Humberto, you are WAY off on your numbers, it its first week of release ‘I Am Legend’ shifted 3,557,634 units, and 802,651 in its second week. Check out the data at http://www.the-numbers.com/ While only a relative handful of titles will shift millions of copies, a number of titles will sell well over 100,000.

Its also the only format to have every major Hollywood release available since the 1980s despite the low adoption numbers in the US.

VHS was never the sole option for home video, but it was the most common thanks to its low price and ubiquity.

DVD is now in the same boat as VHS is regarding price and ubiquity and the prior hurdle of recording that prevented people from jumping ship to DVD way back in the late 90s is now as common as 8 hour blank VHS tapes were.

You’re kidding yourself if you think millions of Americans buy DVDs. Fact is, major releases break below 100,000 sold and niche releases sell between 5,000-10,000 copies.

The only reason consumers are buying less DVDs is because of less discretionary income and other priorities, not because of the transition to HD.

Anime distributors and publishers in Japan are already doing what you suggest in terms of bundling DVD and Blu-Ray discs together, with mixed results.

Ultimately the fact that few people wanted combo discs means we’ll keep seeing the current publishing trend until player costs start to decrease.

Users knowing they will have that option will keep them from going to Blu-Ray. The market research on Combo DVD + HD DVD proved that all too late.

I wouldn’t have published this if I didn’t think it wasn’t a viable option for the Forum. Re-branding HD DVD wouldn’t fly (for obvious reasons of negative publicity), but taking the tenants of HD DVD and integrating them into a new spec will. Making that spec compatible with HD DVD is another option.

Blu-Ray is really shooting itself in the foot in terms of adoption. I refuse to buy two copies of the same movie, and with DMCA laws in their present state… that’s what the Blu-Ray consortium wants right now. I have to buy a Blu-Ray disc for at home, and a DVD for on the go. That is something both high-end consumers and low-end consumers will resist tooth-and-nail.

There are hundreds of millions of people in the United States with the same opinion. That’s why Blu-Ray still has to tackle DVD… and that’s why DVD has room to fight back in the HD scheme.

As to HDi, it’s not speculation on my part, the Forum is already working on a spec to integrate it. Check on WG-12 for more info.

For consumers, and I mean the un-savvy, un-videophile consumers, Blu-Ray’s pitiful managed copy solution still doesn’t let them take movies on the road… unless they buy new player devices.

MegaZone brought up yields, and it’s an interesting aspect of the discussion. I would hope that with the amount of money that Toshiba has invested in HD DVD, and with the amount it is investing in CH DVD, that the yield aspect would improve for a DVD 2.0, based on the work already accomplished.

Consumers never benefit from a monopoly. VHS had terrible quality for a decade, and we call that a win? Thankfully, there is DVD, and until Blu-Ray tackles it… the majority of their growth will be in a single product, PlayStation 3.

Now, I would suggest to Blu-Ray to embrace combo DVD and Blu-Ray discs, or bundling to include both a DVD and BD in a single set without significant price increases.

And to the publishers, I would use myself as a perfect case study. I don’t buy DVD’s because they aren’t in HD. I don’t buy Blu-Ray because they aren’t backwards-compatible. So, aside from a fire sale on HD DVD, I haven’t bought any movies in awhile. I’d like to, but I won’t. Millions upon millions of Americans are in the same boat.

HD-DVD was developed as an evolution to DVD in order to avoid the headaches of combo discs or multiple layers on standard DVDs, and yet it still managed to fail because studios don’t like to compromise on anything regarding content, consumers wern’t interested in repeating VHS/Beta, and the players were too cheap.

I can see where the old market ideas regarding competition would lead ou to believe that the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray format war was good for the consumer in terms of subsidies for players and media on both sides, but the reality is that model was already attempted by Sony during the VHS/Betamax era, and it failed miserably as a consumer product, but flourished as a broadcast standard.

Toshiba would be better off repurposing HD-DVD as an evolution of DVD-ROM.