Is there any example of a technologically superior and higher quality option winning over a cheap and simple one? (In media recording and replay, at least).
This seems to happen again and again, with the cheap and simple option always winning.
This seems to happen again and again, with the cheap and simple option always winning.
What do I mean when I say "relative to"? When DVD became available, people bought DVD players, which were superior to VHS. And TV+VHS was a superior technology compared TV alone. And TV displays have become much better than they were when VHS was brand new.
So was it cheaper? No, I don't think so, but Sony was willing to eat a loss to make it "cheaper" for the end consumer. Technically, people paid more for a bluray than for an HD-DVD player, as a PS3 was definitely more expensive than a standalone player/drive for either, but the value proposition was definitely there, as many people wanted a PS3 regardless.
In short, the value was there, both for the media companies and end consumers, for bluray as opposed to HD-DVD, but I'm not sure it was explicitly "cheaper".
At the time there were many claims that the porn industry would be the deciding factor.
> HD DVD was cheaper.
Correct. Which is why my comment talked about value, and why "X is cheaper" as an individual metric in and of itself is not useful in measuring success. BR and the PS3 was decidedly more expensive. People still bought more of them than HD-DVD/360.
> At the time there were many claims that the porn industry would be the deciding factor.
Which was almost as laughable then as it is now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_cons...
edit: It looks like my claim was not correct, a HD DVD accessory was required to play HD DVD content on the xbox 360.
(Thought to be honest BluRay would probably still have won as dual-format drives based on BluRay appeared later).
Once again demonstrating the murderously huge difference between hardware that ships with the platform and attempts to add on hardware to the install base later.
Exceptions will leap to mind, like the rumble pack for the N64 or the Dualshock controller, but in general, add-on attempts fail and fail miserably for gaming consoles. They don't leap to mind precisely because they failed.
And Sony's partnerships with media companies, yes. Both of these are true.
> PS3 sold about 87.3 million while xbox 360 sold about 84 million
I was referring to sales when xbox been on the market twice as long (2 years) as the PS3 (1 year) at calendar end (2007). If the 360 had an early-to-market advantage, it became irrelevant real quick and never recovered that sales advantage in any meaningful way once a competitor emerged. [1]
> a HD DVD accessory was required to play HD DVD content on the xbox 360.
Yes. Further cements what I was saying about the PS3 being instrumental in BR taking over HD-DVD as a consumer entertainment format. it also further highlights my original point of how "cheaper" doesn't necessarily mean better value, or better selling, or better adaption. There's more to it than "first" or "cheapest". BR/PS3 were more expensive and later to market than their HD-DVD/360 counterparts, and yet both when on to be as successful if not more so than their cheaper first-to-market rivals. The original question of this thread is how important "cheap" is to a technology attaining success. This is a clear example of "it doesn't". There are plenty of instances however where it absolutely helped. This was just an instance where it did not, or at least, not enough to outweigh other factors against it.
1. https://www.vgchartz.com/tools/hw_date.php?reg=Global&ending...
EDIT: Changed 2017 to 2007 because oops, holy hell it's been 15 years since PS3 launch?! I'm old ffs
Sony's PS3 had the bluray player internally, as part of the base spec.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_HD_DVD_Player
It looks like it was released just days before the PS3 anyways.
EDIT: We both seem to have posted this bit of information at the same time. Sorry!
I don't know if this is a problem that can be solved. The framework has to accomodate the lowest common denominator and you know some manufacturer will cut costs to the bone so you can't mandate some fancy graphics chip in the spec because it will kill the format before it can become the standard. Is this why they went with Java?
That's also why so many 4k UHD discs don't have any bonus content on them and usually pack a Blu-Ray in.
No, that was one of the value propositions to HD-DVD: you don't need to update your disc player in order to watch your new movie. Which apparently was a common occurrence in the early days, in that your player needed an update before your player can play that latest release. HD-DVD users were like, "why does a DVD player need an Ethernet port? Uh, oh..."
It could have been cheaper than Java runtimes needed by Blu-Ray players, but one of the requirements they decided they needed in the menus was live previews of movie content and that wanted multiple active streams of video decompression. These days Blu-Rays fake it with effectively just using animated GIFs in the Java menus, but HD-DVD menus would actually play the movie in things like scene thumbnails (which was neat, but maybe unnecessary). Needing hardware that supported multiple active streams of video decompression to support that is often considered the big reason HD-DVD wasn't cheaper than Blu-Ray especially given the licensing costs and expense of BD-J Java systems.
How would the HD-DVD laser cope with having to read multiple streams? or does it read it ahead of time and just cache it somehow? One of the biggest annoyances of DVD was the fact that some player implementation had horrific seek times and so the menu transitions were mind numbingly slow.
I wish they would have watched AVGN's comedic take on DVD and Blu-Ray formats and just created a format that met all those specifications. Have you seen these videos?
Warning: Swear words
Like I said the primary rendering engine was primarily XML driven and XML-based. So far as I'm aware the only implementation in HD-DVD's history was Microsoft's (which was a small complaint among the hardware vendors that there was only one firmware for the "base OS" of HD-DVD players), and it was incredibly performant (because it wasn't using scripting to run animations and such). It supported JS for scripting, but that scripting was almost never used in the vast majority of disc menus, and it was probably a very bare JS engine at that and never needed to guarantee performance. The JS could be under-powered because it was an optional add-on for small bits of interactivity like "games and quizzes", it was not driving hardly anything in day-to-day menus. Think "early days of the web" (or maybe HN itself): almost everything is basic HTML and JS is used sparingly for a minimum for just a small subset of interactive features. But if you built an HTML specifically to be a nicely animated Table of Contents for a movie and had years of DVD movie menus to compare for best practices.
> How would the HD-DVD laser cope with having to read multiple streams? or does it read it ahead of time and just cache it somehow? One of the biggest annoyances of DVD was the fact that some player implementation had horrific seek times and so the menu transitions were mind numbingly slow.
Good questions. I'm not as much a hardware person as a software person, so I don't know the answers beyond that I just recall the approach chosen by the HD-DVD standard was considered expensive in contrast to DVD or to Blu-Ray hardware standards at the time. As a user of HD-DVD, there was some noticeable seek lag in the menus, as I recall, but it was kind of magic when it worked.
Was Bluray technologically superior and more expensive?
Some things never made it, like the fact that HD-DVD was region free. The PS3 was a contributing factor but a minor one, In what basically was a studio fight over consumer friendliness (DRM, region locking, backwards compatibility with DVDs since they could be pressed on the backside, instant play requirements, etc), and which camp was willing to pay larger bribes to "win" before the dual mode players became the majority since the later hardware requirements for bluray made it basically capable of also playing HD-DVDs. Plus, streaming was becoming an ever more present topic.
To this day, the bluray experience tends to be worse than HD-DVD as so few blurays ever behaved like HD-DVD (universal iirc being the notable exception since they appear to have ported their HD-DVD interfaces to bluray for a while) when it comes to just playing the movie when the disk is inserted and overlaying menus over the movie as its playing.
They used the same codecs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_high-definition_...
https://www.avsforum.com/threads/sony-on-mpeg-2-for-blu-ray....
(See also: improvements in audio sstreaming codecs to Bluetooth headphones in the last few years)
(Now I suspect vinyl's main purpose in life is as a marker of being a discriminating consumer who doesn't want to be a victim of the loudness war, since you can't overdrive a vinyl record in the same way for physical reasons. It is unfortunate that one must go to such measures to opt out of "music that sounds like crap because you ruined it, you stupid music companies".)
A record player is mechanically and electrically much simpler. And vinyl disks are just pressed vinyl. You can buy a toy kit to build a record player, a CD player is just too complicated.
you don't need a toy kit, to get sound of a vinyl. but yes it's basically impossible to build a laser and tech to read cd-da and than get audio from it...
well there is https://www.theaudioeagle.com/columns/column07.html but you need a dac and a cdm device, vinyl only needs paper and pencil (fun fact a guy from r&d of dts showed that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaqmdcaF87w)
https://qz.com/2111339/vinyl-outsold-cds-in-the-us-for-the-f...
The pits that represent data in factory manufactured discs are laser etched, so if the polycarbonate layer doesn't decay in 50 years it should be OK. Betting they would as long as kept from moisture. Even if the reflective layer is compromised I think it would somehow be possible to reapply it to the polycarbonate layer which has the pits.
Below is an excerpt from https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub121/sec4/#:~:text=Among....:
CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs are similar in that they are replicated discs-that is, the data are physically pressed into the disc when it is manufactured. ROMs are generally mass-produced and contain music, video, computer applications, or interactive games.
ROM disc longevity is determined by the extent to which its aluminum layer is exposed to oxygen. Oxygen, including pollutants, can migrate through the polycarbonate layer or the hard lacquer layer (CD label side and edge), carried in by moisture. Oxygen or moisture can more easily penetrate through scratches, cracks, or delaminated areas in the label. Oxygen can also be trapped inside the disc during manufacturing, although manufacturing improvements have reduced the likelihood of this.
If left in a very humid environment, moisture-and oxygen-will eventually reach the aluminum, causing it to lose its reflectivity. The normally shiny aluminum, which resembles silver, becomes oxide-dull and much less reflective, like the color of a typical aluminum ladder. The combination of high humidity and increased temperatures will accelerate the oxidation rate.
The life expectancy of a ROM disc therefore depends on the environmental conditions to which it is exposed over time. Generally, it is best to keep ROM discs in a dry, cool environment. If the disc is removed from a humid, hot environment to an ideal condition before damage has been done, it will “dry out” and should be as playable as if it had been kept in ideal conditions all along. Other contaminates, however, such as inks, solvents, and pollutants, have the potential to irreversibly penetrate and to deform, discolor, or corrode the disc, causing permanent reading problems for the laser.
CDs are smaller than vinyl records, so that brings down shipping costs. From a consumer's perspective vinyl records require a lot of maintenance: needles need to be changed, records should be kept free from dust.
Cassettes are small, but complicated. I wouldn't be surprised if cassettes are more expensive to produce than compact discs. It is interesting that while CDs overtook cassette tapes in the 90's (aside from mixed tapes shared between friends), Laser Discs didn't become more popular than VHS until DVDs. Maybe the difference in visual quality wasn't worth the effort to switch media until televisions became larger larger and sharper.
There's pressing a flat circle in a factory somewhere, and there's
- printing album art, making sleeves, etc.
- storage
- distribution
- retail space
- "shrinkage" (ok, stealing a CD is easier)
- ... ?
IMHO there's nothing wrong with your original comment, except perhaps brevity. Maybe somebody was of the opinion that you needed to make the argument that a Walkman is simpler than an iPod.
How else can a downvoted commenter, and bystanders, learn?
Because it contrasts something from 1979 with something from 2001 and fails to explain how this is a relevant example for the discussion.
It was a direct answer to that question, and IMO a good one. Some in this thread appear to feel that we inexorably move towards a disposable culture, and this is a clear counterexample.
How is directly answering a question with a counterexample not contributing to the discussion? I shouldn't be so annoyed at this, but I admit that I am.