Cerebral Gibberish

I’m a supporter of HD-DVD myself and even though it isn’t looking good right now for HD-DVD, I’m still hopeful. Here is a funny video that explains the current status of the HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray format war.

Any ways, my main problem with Blu-Ray is that Sony is greedy and instead of supporting a unified standard they rolled their own proprietary “standard” so they can collect royalties. The other thing that bugs me about Blu-Ray is that they released an inferior product compared to HD-DVD and then started to play the catch up game. So the first Blu-Ray players supported Blu-Ray profile v1.0 which then got upgraded to v1.1 to add interactive bonus features but you can’t upgrade the v1.0 players to v1.1 (unless you have a PS3). Now they are coming out with profile v2.0 which adds network content support but if you have a v1.0 or a v1.1 player (except for the PS3) you can’t upgrade to v2.0. Now the funny thing is that all these “new” features that Blu-Ray is adding via profile v1.1 and v2.0 were part of the HD-DVD standard when it was first released. So Sony is pretty much screwing over all their early adopters who won’t be able to utilize Blu-Ray to the fullest unless they buy a newer player. Granted, if the only thing you want to do is watch the movie and could care less about the bonus content, it does not matter what profile version your player supports. They even go as far as saying:

The guys that bought the first Blu-ray players are the guys who bought the first laser discs. They know the risks.

Talk about a slap to the face. I was a first generation DVD player buyer and up until it died several years later, it never had a problem playing a DVD movie or accessing any special features of a DVD movie. The DVD standard did not change after it was finalized thus a first generation player can play the latest movies and all the bonus features without a problem. Yes it is true that newer generation of DVD players added addition features like mp3 playback, CD-R/RW & DVD-R/RW support, etc.. but those features have nothing to do with the actual DVD standard, they were convenience / bonus add-ons to make the player more enticing to the buyers. What is the use of a standard if you keep changing it.