CD DVD Duplication Replication News

Friday, June 30, 2006

Blu-ray titles make a good start, but players still slow to sell

Suppliers and retailers called first-week sales of Blu-ray movies encouraging, with Sony Pictures Home Entertainment reporting it sold through 15% to 20% of its initial shipment of titles.

Hardware sales reports, meanwhile, were more mixed.

Ben Feingold, worldwide president of SPHE, was cautiously optimistic about the studio’s Blu-ray launch, which included XXX, House of Flying Daggers, Underworld: Evolution, 50 First Dates and Hitch. The studio shipped around 15,000 units of each title.

“I think we’re encouraged,” Feingold said. “The only issue is hardware supply. In terms of our national accounts, where there’s hardware, the results are encouraging.”

Feingold said the studio is “reformatting” its Blu-ray slate now that Sony Electronics has delayed the release of its Blu-ray player until October. Going forward, the studio plans to release its movies on Blu-ray day and date with the DVD release, which Feingold said should drive sales.

Lionsgate was the only other Blu-ray studio to release movies on the format. Without giving specific numbers, president Steve Beeks called initial results “small but heartening.” The studio shipped between 7,000 and 10,000 units of its first releases of Crash, Terminator and Saw, among others.

Retailers reported mixed results of the first Blu-ray players to hit the market last week from Samsung, with many seeing more brisk software than hardware sales on the format.

Although high-end electronics retailers Tweeter, Abt Electronics and Value Electronics didn’t sell out of their initial stock, at least one Los Angeles-area Best Buy was sold out with no word on when more players were coming. In contrast, initial Toshiba HD DVD player supply at Abt, among other retailers, was wiped out within days due to numerous pre-orders.

Samsung didn’t return calls to comment on initial sales of the BD-P1000 players, which officially launched June 25 but were on sale at many retailers before that.

Retailers speculated that brisk software sales paired with slower hardware sales meant that people were stocking up on titles in anticipation of upcoming players. Blu-ray software can be viewed only on Blu-ray players, such as Samsung’s unit out last week.

The cheapest and most high-profile slated Blu-ray player, the $499 and $599 PlayStation 3 models, will not street until fourth quarter. Both Sony’s and Pioneer’s Blu-ray players are coming this fall as well. Sony’s unit will match Samsung’s $999 pricing. Pioneer’s model is set at $1,300.

“I think some people are waiting for some of the other brands,” said Frank Roshinski, Tweeter VP and general merchandising manager for video. “We ordered the same quantities [as Toshiba HD DVD hardware], about 500 pieces [for the chain]. We didn’t sell out, but it’s still a good seller.”

Meanwhile certain retailers, including DVDEmpire.com, have already sold through initial orders of Blu-ray titles Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day thanks to pre-orders and sales since their June 20 launch.

DVDEmpire.com managers said the swift sell-off was unexpected, as much of the compatible hardware rolls out later this year.

“I feel that many [title buyers] don’t have players yet,” DVDEmpire.com editorial director Shannon Nutt said. “But they’re anticipating that they are going to get PlayStation 3, so they want to have movies now.”

Added Mike Barry, the site’s director of business development, “God knows what fourth quarter is going to be like for [Blu-ray product] stock.”

At Value Electronics, which specializes in selling HDTVs in its Scarsdale, N.Y., store and online, initial Blu-ray player sales have been slow, president Robert Zohn said. Of the 12 Samsung players in stock, Zohn has sold only two.

On the other hand, he can’t keep HD DVD in stock. “HD DVD players are selling even better now given the poor reviews” of Blu-ray, Zohn said, adding, “We’re well-known for HD DVD.”

The Samsung Blu-ray players took a beating in some of the first tech reviews out, with some complaining of muddy picture and poor upconversion on standard DVD movies. Samsung also warns in its user guide that some Blu-ray discs, DVDs and CDs might not play on the players “because disc formats may evolve, and problems and errors can occur during the creation of BD, DVD and CD software and/or the manufacture of discs.”

On the other hand, HD DVD, which also was criticized for glitches such as long load times, is continuing to sell out. Zohn said he has taken 3,000 orders for HD DVD players since April, but has so far delivered only 700 players due to tight Toshiba supplies.

Zohn said he has been getting shipments of 100 or so players every other week, but it hasn’t been enough to meet demand, most of which is from the retailer’s online store. Many orders have subsequently been cancelled as consumers find players at other stores or change their minds.

“Toshiba’s being as fair as they can be,” Zohn said. “I wish I had more, and I think they do too.”

In-store, Value has been packaging HD DVD players with HDTV sales, selling 10 or so players in store every other week or so, Zohn said.

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Posts by DiscBurn, a leader in DVD duplication, disc replication, equipment and VHS to DVD transfers.

Saturday, June 24, 2006

Blu-ray vs. HD DVD: Which Has the Early Edge?

A funny thing happens in a format war: At some point, the theoretical spec one-upmanship gives way to tangible reality--what the rival products are delivering, today.

After looking at the initial wave of products from both fronts, I have a few thoughts about where the format war is heading. The first products deliver on their promises of outstanding high-definition video (Toshiba's HD-A1 and HD-XA1 HD DVD players and its Qosmio G35-AV650 laptop, plus more than 25 HD DVD movies from Warner Brothers and Universal) and high-capacity, rewritable disc storage (Pioneer's BDR-101A, Sony's AR Premium VGN-AR19G notebook equipped with a Blu-ray player/burner). I'm less intrigued by the actual products than I am by what they say beneath the surface about the two warring formats.

High-Def Video: A Capacity Question?
After debuting in fits and starts, and after both formats' encountering delays due to issues surrounding the AACS (Advanced Access Content System) copy controls, HD DVD is still enjoying a slight lead to market on its rival. HD DVD came out in late April, and even though player supplies continue to be tight, new titles are steadily streaming out every week.
Meanwhile, Blu-ray has faced a few additional post-AACS setbacks--although not quite as many as I've seen inaccurately reported around the Web. Sony Pictures pushed its content launch to June 20 after Samsung announced a change in release date for its $1000 BD-P1000 player, from late May to June 25. However, both of those launches remain on schedule, the vendors claim. Jim Sanduski, Samsung's senior vice president of marketing, says, "We'll be in more than 2000 storefronts at launch, and we will have multiple units available at each of these locations. Will we sell out? I hope so. We are launching with more storefronts and more quantity than Toshiba."

Meanwhile, Pioneer shifted its planned Blu-ray player from an early summer launch to September--when the product does launch, though, it will be at $1500, $300 less than the price the company announced back in January at CES. And Sony Electronics has adjusted the expected July release of its $1000 BD-SP1 player by a few weeks. According to a company spokesperson, the move is a strategic one, to coincide with the company's August launch of 1080p televisions and its push to educate consumers about Blu-ray Disc at retail outlets nationwide.

I don't expect that we'll see dramatic, overwhelming differences in image quality between HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc movie content. I do expect it to be tough to isolate which format is superior for delivering video, given the number of variables that come into play--including choices in the video codec, bit rate, and encoder used, not to mention whether you're viewing the output over analog or HDMI, on a display capable of 1080i or 1080p.

We'll probably see subtle differences. Sony plans to encode its first generation of discs in MPEG-2, while Warner and Universal's HD DVDs are using the VC-1 or MPEG-4 AVC codec. RCA's and Toshiba's HD DVD players output at 1080i (even though the movie discs are 1080p), while the first Blu-ray players from Pioneer, Samsung, and Sony all output at 1080p.

I hope to see the same film released on both HD DVD and Blu-ray, at different bit rates and using different codecs. Only then will it be clear, visually, whether Blu-ray's greater maximum capacity of 50GB for dual-layer discs provides a tangible advantage. (HD DVD currently tops out at 30GB for a dual-layer disc; Toshiba raised the possibility of a 45GB triple-layer disc last summer, but according to the DVD Forum it has not been discussed, let alone formally added to the HD DVD spec.)

The rival media's physical storage constraints have the potential to be a greater issue in this struggle than many observers have considered up until now. Before HD DVD's launch, I had privately heard rumblings of studio concerns about HD DVD's lower capacity.

Now that I've taken a closer look at the first eight HD DVD movies I received from Warner Brothers and Universal, I can understand why. None of the eight titles could fit on a 15GB single-layer HD DVD, and half came within a mere 5GB of maxing out a 30GB dual-layer disc--even though all relied on the latest, more efficient video codecs (VC-1 and MPEG-4 AVC). The movies were The Last Samurai (which topped out at 27.3GB), Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles (25.4GB), The Phantom of the Opera (24.8GB), Jarhead (24.7GB), The Bourne Identity (22.7GB), Serenity (19.6GB), The Fugitive (18.2GB), and Doom (16.5GB).

Granted, this is a small, random sampling, but the results nonetheless surprised me, considering that I had for so long heard HD DVD supporters say that even 15GB would be roomy for high-def content. Instead, it seems that HD DVD content is, in many cases, barely squeezing onto 30GB discs today--and the tight space leaves little breathing room for the interactive-video future that Hollywood's creative minds will dream up down the road. All of the titles I saw are first-generation; not surprisingly, their menus and level of interactivity are basic and do not reflect the complexity I expect to see from both formats in the near future. Plus, the existing extras don't take full advantage of the formats, nor were they created natively in high-definition, with high-def, wide-screen presentation in mind. And the soundtracks are more limited, typically only today's 5.1-channel sound, with just one audio commentary instead of multiple commentaries and elaborate features.

Imagine what an innovative director like Peter Jackson might have done with the on-set documentaries and featurettes for his The Lord of the Rings trilogy, had everything been filmed with HD DVD or Blu-ray Disc in mind. Something tells me that a 30GB disc wouldn't come close to being enough, and that a 45GB disc (assuming one does come to market) might get a bit snug--even if one accounts for future improvements and efficiencies in compression and disc authoring techniques.

How much space Blu-ray content will consume remains to be seen; the first titles from Sony are beginning to ship this week, and although none of them will be on 50GB dual-layer discs, other titles will ship on 50GB discs later this summer, according to Sony. But I can't help but think that this format's greater capacity will serve it well over time. That said, I'm not convinced the PlayStation 3 will be Blu-ray's trump card. Sony said nothing at the E3 Expo in May that makes me think it is truly positioning the PS3 for home-theater buffs who want a Blu-ray Disc player that's cheaper than a stand-alone box. And for those consumers who do invest $599 in the premium PlayStation 3 with HDMI output, the machine's primary purpose will likely be for playing Gran Turismo HD and other launch game titles, not for watching Hitch in high-def.

Recording
The advantage in recording is, for now, clearly with Blu-ray: Vendors in this camp are first to market with disc burners for PCs, as well as first to release mobile burners for notebooks--and the format has the higher maximum capacity. PC Blu-ray burners are shipping from Pioneer and I-O Data, with others soon to come; this month Sony is shipping its aforementioned AR Premium Blu-ray laptop, as well as its VAIO RC series of burner-equipped desktops starting at just $2150--not overly outrageous considering that a stand-alone PC burner is priced at $1000.
Officially, the HD DVD camp remains mum on the status of PC burners. Since media was introduced at Computex in Taiwan last week, and since RiData just announced that its HD DVD-R media will ship in July, one might think a burner isn't far behind. The only news from the show, however, consisted of Toshiba's display of a slimline burner for notebooks, the SD-L902A; the company offered little there in the way of specs, pricing, or timing, let alone a demonstration of the drive's readiness (and it hasn't revealed anything since). From the get-go, the HD DVD camp's stated focus has been on the home theater playback experience (with PC movie playback coming in second, and recording not even on the road map). The lack of recording capabilities restricts HD DVD to prepackaged Hollywood content; no aspiring Spielbergs can edit their own high-def films and burn them to disc. It also limits HD DVD's viability as a data storage medium.

Price
No question: HD DVD has the edge in price. RCA's and Toshiba's players start at a highly accessible $499--if you can find them.

The cheapest stand-alone Blu-ray Disc player will be Samsung's $1000 BD-P1000, due out this month. Sony's BDP-S1 will also be $1000 when it ships in August, and Pioneer's Elite BDP-HD1 will be $1500 when it debuts in September. Sony's $499 Sony PlayStation 3, due in November, will be the least expensive player of them all; however, that model won't have an HDMI output, so you won't be able to display all-digital 1080p content. The $599 version will have HDMI, at least. Nonetheless, PlayStation 3's impact as a Blu-ray Disc player may not be as far-reaching as some observers might think; I found it curious that at E3 Sony made no mention of what kind of remote control it will offer with the PS3, and I'm not fully sold on how well the PS3 will serve as a multipurpose entertainment device.

Of course, in this nascent market, one might argue that the early adopters shopping for high-def players won't be dissuaded by a $1000 price tag. But I think that Blu-ray Disc's higher cost could hurt it, unless Blu-ray player manufacturers can adequately convey to consumers that their devices deliver enough value to justify being at least twice as much as HD DVD players.

The AACS Wild Card
Forget that Blu-ray has PlayStation 3 on its side, and that Intel and Microsoft have thrown their collective weight behind HD DVD. Forget that high-definition televisions are still gaining traction, albeit with increasing speed, among consumers. Forget that HD DVD and Blu-ray are both, really, formats in their infancy, both trying to claw their way to dominance to succeed DVD--and to avoid the sad fate of their digital audio format cousins, SACD and DVD-Audio.
For now, both Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD are hampered by the fact that AACS has yet to finalize its managed copy component, the most critical aspect of the spec that remains unfinished. Without a final AACS spec, living-room high-def recorders can't proceed to market, and neither can devices that are designed to take advantage of legally copying and moving content from one disc to another--or to another device, for that matter. Original estimates put AACS's final spec as coming out in May; we're already well into June, and still there are no updates.

Until players can be manufactured to take advantage of everything from media servers to copying content, the first high-def video players from either camp should have limited appeal. I have no doubt that these players, be they Blu-ray or HD DVD, will deliver enticing high-def images. If all they do is play back content, however, they're missing a core part of the innovation that Blu-ray and HD DVD have the potential to deliver.

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Posts by DiscBurn, a leader in DVD duplication, disc replication, equipment and VHS to DVD transfers.

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

HD DVD vs Blu-Ray: Some real machines, some real problems

In tech hardware, perhaps the single biggest controversy is over high-definition optical disks.

The movie industry has been concerned that the DVD format is slowing, and tech companies rightly point out that DVDs don’t have the capacity for real high-definition movies. But unfortunately, the tech companies and the movie studies couldn’t agree on a single standard, so we’ve got two: HD DVD and Blu-Ray.

Both are being positioned for a lot of different things: as a format for movies; for games and other interactive content; and as optical drives for PCs. But judging from the first few units we’ve seen, neither is quite ready for prime time yet.

The first HD DVD device we saw was Toshiba’s HD-A1– a stand-alone player for HD DVD movies. And the unit itself cost $499, which is cheaper than we expect the first Blu-Ray players to cost. And the movies look great on a 1080i HDMI device. However, the unit was slow to boot (feeling more like a PC than a DVD device) and it doesn’t support 1080p output.

I’ve recently been looking at a Toshiba Qosmio G5-AV650 notebook lately. It’s a gorgeous machine with a 17-inch, 1920 by 1200 widescreen display, 2GHz Intel Core Duo, 1 GB of RAM, 200 GB of hard disk (twin 100 GB drives), an nVidia GeForce Go 7600 graphics chip with 256 MB of memory. It also has an analog TV tuner, Media Center software and HDMI output at 1080i - - and especially notable, the internal HD DVD ROM drive (which also reads and writes DVD media).

As a standard multimedia notebook, this $2,999 is hard to beat (although there’s a somewhat lower cost version without HD DVD that I could say the same thing about). But the HD DVD parts of it were disappointing. On the internal display, you can see HD DVD movies in 1080p, while it’s limited to 1080i on an external HDMI display.

With HD DVD movies – we tried a few including Van Helsing and The Last Samurai -- video quality looked wonderful on the 17-inch display. Looking closely, we were able to discern more detail than in DVD versions of the same movies. However, I have to say that DVDs look pretty great on this screen – on both this and the regular version of the Qosmio. But the big problem is stuttering – occasionally, the video will skip a few frames, then speed up to catch up. That’s pretty annoying. The problem is likely due to the Intervideo playback software being not quite ready, and Toshiba is working on patches, but for now, I can’t recommend this.

Here’s Cisco Cheng’s full review.

Blu-Ray is different, in that it’s starting out in a writeable format. We have both a Sony Vaio VGC-RC310G Desktop and a Sony VAIO VGN-AR190G notebook here, both with writeable Blu-Ray drives. The drives are capable of writing 50 GB of high-def content per disk on a dual-layer disk. For now, we only have single-layer 25 GB media, but that’s pretty impressive. (For comparision, HD DVD backers are looking forward to eventually having writeable 15 and 30 GB disks, but we don’t have any drives or media yet).

There are some issues, though. The media is relatively expensive, and you have to be very careful burning a disk: Joel Santo Domingo opened another application during burning, and wound up with a $17 coaster. Subsequent burns worked fine, but it took about an hour and a half to burn and verify a disk. It takes even longer on the slower notebook drive, but it does work.

So for now, Blu-Ray is probably your best choice if you need to create an optical disk with a significant amount of high-definition content, perhaps from a HD video camera. The desktop sells for $2,249 (without display); the notebook will likely sell for around $3500.
Still, we don’t have any Blu-Ray movies yet, so we need to wait until we get some before we can really review the machines. We’ve seen a few Blu-Ray players, which are expected to cost about $1000, but haven’t gotten one in for testing (and of course, we’ll need content first). We expect to have both shortly.

So out of the gate, HD DVD takes a bit of a lead for being first out with both drives and content, but Blu-Ray gets points for having a writeable drive.

For video content, it’s too early to tell – it will depend on the number of titles; and frankly, if you’re viewing this on even a great laptop screen, unless you really look at the two side by side, my guess is most people won’t really see much of an improvement over DVDs. On a big 1080 display, you will be able to tell the difference, of course.

Blu-Ray should get a boost toward the end of the year, when the PlayStation 3 comes standard with such a player, increasing both the number of units out there, and the potential market for titles. And several big PC vendors – Dell and HP – seem to be in the Blu-Ray camp. In fact, if you’re just interested in viewing Blu-Ray content, the PlayStation 3 may well be your best deal, since it’s expected to sell in $500 and $600 configurations, both with Blu-Ray. And of course, it promises to be a great game machine as well. Toshiba and Microsoft are in the HD DVD camp, and Microsoft does plan an HD DVD add-on for Xbox 360, but as an add-on, that’s unlikely to have the unit numbers.

Even if the PS 3 is a hit, that doesn’t necessarily mean Blu-Ray content will be. The PlayStation Portable (PSP) is a winner, but as far as I can the UMD format it uses is working for games, games, but not really for movies. But the sheer number of units Sony plans to ship should lead to lower prices for Blu-Ray over time, and that may matter a lot. On the other hand, HD DVD backers can rightly say the disks are out now, and they say they expect lower prices. We’ll see.
So what should you do now? My advice is to wait. For now, you won’t notice that much of a difference in video quality on a PC – standard DVDs look pretty good. And even if you do want the better content for a big display, it will likely be months until you see a lot of titles – at which point prices will be lower and the devices are likely to work better.

Unlike some of my colleagues, I’m not ready to write off either format yet – but neither am I ready to place my bet.

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Posts by DiscBurn, a leader in DVD duplication, disc replication, equipment and VHS to DVD transfers.

Monday, June 19, 2006

Blu-ray Players Delayed

Samsung, Sony, and Pioneer have pushed back the release dates for their new Blu-ray DVD players. Samsung and Pioneer Blu-ray players will not be available in retail stores until September, and Sony has stated that its BDP-S1 Blu-ray player debut in August.

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Posts by DiscBurn, a leader in DVD duplication, disc replication, equipment and VHS to DVD transfers.

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

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