| Editorial March 2008
Hi-Def Video on Disc: The Battle Is Over,
the War Has Just Begun
 About
half a year ago, near Charles Town, here in West Virginia, a restaurant named Paul’s
opened in a functioning Methodist church. One of the parishioners is a professional chef
with vast experience, and the church itself is very active in the community; it has built
ball fields, and plans to build senior assisted-living as well as low-income dwellings.
The restaurant was started to bring in revenue for these and other projects.
Paul’s serves fantastic food. The chef’s wife
even makes homemade desserts, the kind your mother really used to make. The church already
had a complete kitchen that opened onto a hallway with a serving window; all they had to
do was put up an awning outside and convert two Sunday-school classrooms to dining rooms.
Everyone I’ve taken there says the food is the best,
but Paul’s isn’t thriving. It does a good takeout business, but you never have
to reserve a table. Meanwhile, local franchises of mediocre chain restaurants such as
Applebee’s are going like gangbusters. I go to Paul’s at least once a week
because I’m afraid it will go under and take its great meals with it.
In short, in the marketplace, the best doesn’t always
win -- in business, there are too many mitigating factors. Perhaps some people fear that
because Paul’s operates out of an active church building, they might have to fight
off people trying to convert them (they don’t). Perhaps they don’t come because
Paul’s doesn’t serve liquor. Perhaps they go to chain restaurants because they
believe the ads proclaiming them "the best."
As far as any future development goes, the HD DVD
format is dead. In the interest of staying afloat, Toshiba has stopped making HD DVD
players. The decision was spurred by Warner Bros., Best Buy, Netflix, and Wal-Mart having
deserted HD DVD for Sony’s Blu-ray Disc.
On any technical basis, this turn of events makes little
sense. The HD DVD format has proven itself: Toshiba has made players that work, and
has steadily refined them through firmware updates available as downloads or on disc. The
format has delivered every feature promised by Blu-ray, and at lower cost. I have both
types of players, and I see no difference in picture quality between the two. HD DVD
has had picture-in-picture capability since Warner Bros. released Batman Begins
over a year ago. That title, 300, and a few other technically complicated releases
still aren’t out on Blu-ray.
The sound codec was up to the individual software producer,
but the best Dolby TrueHD tracks found on HD DVDs are the equal of the tracks found
on Blu-rays. All HD DVD players include onboard decoding for Dolby Digital Plus and
Dolby Digital TrueHD, so those with preamps and receivers made before 2008 can play those
formats through their HDMI or 5.1-channel analog inputs. So far, only one Blu-ray model
includes this decoding onboard. With all other Blu-ray machines, the customer must buy
additional electronics to do the job -- on top of the cost of the Blu-ray player itself,
all of which have cost far more than HD DVD machines.
I could go on. Basically, HD DVD is a complete,
working, "better" system pitted against a buggy, relatively featureless one with
only the potential to be the better. It’s a no-brainer to me, but, as with
Paul’s restaurant, better doesn’t always win. In this case, why not?
I’m not sure there’s any single reason.
Universal, one of the two studios that exclusively committed to HD DVD, didn’t
help by releasing a lot of junk titles and withholding its best, or releasing them only in
compromised versions -- such as King Kong without TrueHD tracks or any extras at
all. Maybe Walt Disney and the studios it owns really do have so much power that a format
can’t succeed without them. Maybe Toshiba didn’t buy enough endcap displays at
Circuit City and Best Buy. And on and on.
Whatever the cause or causes, HD DVD was inaccurately
perceived as a system inferior to Blu-ray. Though I can’t prove it, my own little
theory is that, in promoting Blu-ray by making its PlayStation 3 game box also a Blu-ray
player, Sony brought to the format a new, younger crowd that lowered the level of maturity
of the discussion. Of all of the battles in audio/video -- 45s vs. LPs, Beta vs. VHS,
laserdisc vs. DVD -- none has been as nasty as this one, or so full of blatant lies and
promises. I heard one young, know-it-all Wal-Mart salesman tell a customer that Blu-ray
was better because it used a blue laser -- as if HD DVD didn’t. I’ve read
reports of similar misinformation nationwide.
But what’s happened has happened. Not only should HD
DVD fans be graceful losers, Blu-ray fans should be graceful winners. So far, I’ve
seen little evidence of the latter, but instead a lot of immature "Nyah-nyah, told
you so" remarks on various Internet forums. It would be more healing for the victors
to admit that it is actually rather impressive that Toshiba held out as long as it did,
alone making thousands of HD DVD players against an army of Blu-ray competitors.
Some parting thoughts: Those who have HD DVD players
and discs should keep and enjoy them. Don’t panic -- they won’t self-destruct
overnight because the players are no longer being made. (They’re not DivX!) The
upper-end Toshiba players are also excellent DVD players, upconverting standard-definition
DVDs to look very close to hi-def. I made a Toshiba XA2 the main player in my system, and
will continue to use it as such. Moreover, Toshiba has given every indication that it will
continue to offer support for every HD DVD player it has sold, including firmware
updates and repairs. So far, the company has been singular in the high quality of its
customer support; there seems little doubt that it will continue to meet the high
standards it set.
Here’s where we are now: Blu-ray still has to
standardize its players so that all discs will display all features on all machines. It
has to foster good working relationships with all the studios who were exclusively
HD DVD, which might seem a given but might not be. And Blu-ray will have to continue
to compete with SD DVD, as well as with all the HD download systems coming down the
pike from Apple, Comcast, Netflix, Vudu, etc. Blu-ray may have won the battle with
HD DVD, but it has yet to win the hi-def war.
...Rad Bennett
radb@hometheatersound.com |
