Actually the Toshiba player can support an average rate of 30 Mbit/sec:

Lets start on the greed part. In the past, Sony could charge a premium for their products because they often had superior technology in the product. (e.g. Sony Trinitron CRTs) However lately, they have been force to justify the premium on brand name alone. See http://www.dfcint.com/game_article/may06article.html If Sony had joined the HD-DVD camp, they would have to duke it out with dozens of other manufacturers. To justify their premium prices, Sony needs to develop their own proprietary technology.

Now the PS3 is what Sony used to lure the Hollywood studios in their camp. They promised the studios that would have an installed base of millions of households with a PS3/Blu-ray machine. That was the carrot they used to bring most of the studios on board. Now with the recent announcement of a $600 price tag for the PS3 and early game developer gripes that the PS3 is very difficult to program because of the Cell processor, Sony’s grand projections don’t look so grand after all. More and more game developers will develop cross-platform games to support their huge development costs and the games on the PS3 will be no better than on the X-Box 360 which is $200 cheaper.

A previous blogger noted the difficulties with the manufacturing of 50GB dual layer Blu-ray discs which limits the current batch of Blu-ray disks to 25GB. What wasn’t mentioned is that Sony owns over 100 patents on MPEG-2. Although the Blu-ray spec supports VC-1 which is much better quality than MPEG-2, this was a last minute inclusion. Sony’s insistence on using MPEG-2 is probably because they are not interested in losing licensing revenues to Microsoft. Also, notice that almost all of the early Blu-ray discs don’t include any extras. What’s the point? That was a big plus for DVD when it came out and Blu-ray can’t even provide that.

Unless Sony can start manufacturing 50GB discs soon, then there is really no justification for the format. No mater how you slice it, a 25GB Blu-ray disc is less than a 30GB HD-DVD disc. Given the current costs and difficulties with Blu-ray disc manufacturing and the huge premiums on the early Blu-ray machines, I just can’t see how Sony can win this one. The studios will follow the money and market share and that leads directly to the HD-DVD camp.

No Blu-ray partner has shipped a stand-alone recorder (In the United States) much less one capable of recording “my own HD content. Be it TV programming, or video recorded by an HDV camcorder.” So the 50GB recordable discs are still relegated to the PC world for the time being. And unless these recorders are 5C compliant (or similar), I have to wonder what if any real-world HD recording we’ll be doing with them.

As to your assertion that “45 gig HD-DVD discs, which will only be available as recordable media.” Granted, while the 45GB discs aren’t relevant to today’s players and pre-recorded content, they may very well wind up in future HD-DVD recorders, and as someone who’s already expressed interest in recorders surely you’ll find that relevant.

As to “I don’t disagree with pointing that out. But it is a little misleading to say that currently HD-DVD is capable of more storage. I wanted to point that out.”

We can agree to disagree on many things Tang, but the phrase “HD-DVD is capable of more storage” does not appear in my article. I even made the (could easily change with the introduction of the 50GB discs) notation in several different places throughout the article.

I don’t know how many different ways I can re-word Blu-ray movies aren’t shipping on 50GB discs and currently there aren’t any Blu-ray recorders here in the U.S., so I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree on that one.

I thought that I was very careful and deliberate to make distinctions based on what’s available (Today) yet many of the comments (on other sites) spiral into speculation and borderline on pure fantasy as to ‘what’s possible’. Listen I love to speculate on the possible as much as the next guy, that’s why I subscribe to Popular Science, but when it comes to home theater I’m much more interested in today.

My reason for pointing out the existance of dual layer recordables is that, of great interest to me is using blu-ray to record and author my own HD content. Be it TV programming, or video recorded by an HDV camcorder.

I did not assume that this article was purely limmited to home theatre users who did not use recordable devices or HTPC’s. You do mention 45 gig HD-dvd discs, which will only be available as recordable media.

I think Sony are guilty of making a lot of misleading and foolish claims to help market their product.

I don’t disagree with pointing that out. But it is a little misleading to say that currently HD-DVD is capable of more storage. I wanted to point that out.

Blu-ray’s 50GB disc space was one of their biggest selling points, if “could the reason for the 25Gb be that after encoding the movie that is ALL the space needed” is true doesn’t that make one of their two biggest areas of superiority a moot point?

As to the VC-1 part of your statement, “MPEG2 was probably used as it already was a standard and thus didn’t require reinvestment in new tools/time. The quick and cheap way to get a disk to market”

For the life of me I can’t see how or why the ‘technologically superior’ Blu-ray format would ever want preessings (at launch) done quick and cheap. Again why hype up how superior to HD-DVD they are, only to push out mediocre pressings? I mean do “quick and cheap” disc pressings really instill a lot of confidence in you?

CODECS/Quality:
Basically both formats support the same CODECs, so it’s up to the compression artist to decide what to do. While I’m no huge fan of VC1 (I prefer h.264), both formats support both options. The point is, because a compression artist chose to encode a video file using MPEG 2 as opposed to h.264 does not mean one format is better than the other. It’s stupid to encode as MPEG 2, but it’s not really a format difference that’s an authoring difference. I don’t think it’s fair to knock an entire format because of a couple of poorly encoded discs. I have no doubt that a bad compression artist will come along and screw up an HD-DVD disc some day, possibly soon.

Disc Size:
Today HD-DVD is the clear winner, but so what? The technology is still in its infancy and we have no idea who will be the leader here. Sony and the BluRay forum are not going to let dual layer discs just fall by the wayside. Both the Toshiba crowd and the Sony crowd will do everything in their power to get the size and quality of the discs as high as they can. While at the very beginning of the release HD-DVD is ahead, in the long run this will have no bearing on what the technology will actually do. On paper BluRay does have more storage and I fully expect that we will see that storage come to light. When DVDs first came out they were about the quality of VHS tapes, and in some cases were worse than their older cousin the LaserDisc. Today it’s a very different story. Expect the same thing to happen to HD based optical media.

My only point is that it’s far too early to make quality/judgement calls on any of the HD formats available. This industry is changing on a weekly basis and until it settles down a bit, neither technology is better than the other, they are just playing a game of leapfrog.

Just my $0.02

Recordable disc are made differently. Multiple layer BlueRay recordable will be easier to manufacture but to manufacture pre-recorded BluRay due to the first layer is only .1mm you can not mold this layer on a .1mm layer disc. You have to mold a substrate of acrylic, metalicize and then separate the layer off.

You need to know that HD DVD is made the same way DVD is made. Two .6mm disc bonded together. A HDDVD line can make DVD. The only difference is your stamper has smaller pits and the final inspection is more critical for HD DVD. You mold two disc. The information-a spiral of bumps like a bar code-is molded into the two disc. You put a reflective layer on the surface with the bumps. The reflective layer on the first disc is thin layer of silver and it is like a two way mirror. The other layer is aluminum. The two reflective surface discs are glued together and the player can focus on one layer or through the bonding material to the other.

So making a dual layer HDDVD is the same as making a dual layer dvd9. There are many replicators of DVD Like me that already have HDDVD lines, but only use them for DVD manufacturing. But BlueRay Dual layer manufacturing of pre-recorded disc is state of the art. My definition of state of the art. It’s so new it does not work.

As this sites primary focus is home theater, I thought it would be obvious that any comment about Blu-ray’s disc size would pertain to stand alone consumer (movie) players and the pre-recorded content for those players.

I now realize I shouldn’t have made that assumption. So let me clearly state, thus far the pre-recorded movies shipped to retailers aren’t on the highly touted 50GB discs. I’m a little confused as to how the existence of rewritable 50GB (we’re talking about players not recorders here after all) changes the fact that they weren’t used on the first batch of movies.

As to the TDK DVD 50GB BD-RE (Rewritable) itself, that’s interesting and noteworthy, I have to wonder though if those discs are ready for production, why not use that extra 25GB’s for the movies? Isn’t it mission critical to put the best foot forward for Blu-ray’s launch? If Blu-ray’s original assertion that 30GB’s wouldn’t be enough for HD movies, then surely 25GB’s isn’t enough, right?

As to the “they (comments) seem biased towards disproving the idea that Blu-ray is any better than HD-DVD” I fully admit to being biased, I’m biased for a quick and decisive end to all of this nonsense, If Blu-ray can bring that to fruition, then I’ll throw my hat in their ring and never look back.

I won’t however do so, on the back of the truth. The 50GB capacity was a big selling point for Blu-ray. Pointing out that the first batch of Blu-ray titles shipped on 25GB discs, doesn’t seem the least bit “biased” in my opinion. If Toshiba had failed to deliver the 15GB’s they promised, I assure you I would have been all over that, oddly enough they shipped on 30GB discs, but that’s neither here nor there.

No where in my article did I assert that Blu-ray was incapable of VC-1, for example I stated “Until Blu-ray either adopts VC-1 as their sole video codec” plainly illustrates that I’m aware Blu-ray is capable of VC-1 support. The truth of the matter is (sadly) the first batch of discs simply don’t utilize it.

The truth here is that both companies have laid out a road-map for bringing pre-recorded HD content to consumers, but so far that road-map took a detour somewhere off reality street. I’ve seen missteps from both camps. (some minor, some seemingly major)

I’ve changed the bit about the 45GB discs nearing production, to “reported the development of a 45GB (3-layer) disc”, simple case of memory less accurate than written text.

I’ve also clarified that the first movies, were shipped on 25GB discs, again I thought the fact this was a home theater site would have drawn that logical conclusion for the reader.

Also, I want to thank everyone for the kind comments. I have to admit I’m somewhat surprised by the response to all of this.

One of the more factual I have seen posted onthe web. I would make a few corrections:

in your “blueray supports 1080p” section, you may want to point out that the Toshiba and Samsung players use EXACTLY the same broadcom chipset which is limited to 1080i. Toshiba decided to another digital step to the process (deinterlace) to get an output of 1080p. EVERY 1080p set on the planet already has a built in 1080p deinterlacer, most of them will be of superior quality to the one built into the samsung.

Thus, the only difference is WHERE the deinterlacing happens – at the video projector, or within the player

Of course if Sony does hook up with VC-1 then you’ve got room for a 3 hour movie on 25 BD disks and all would be well. But what about those 50 giggers?