02.27.08

Tangled Up In Blu

Posted in Movies, Rants, Television at 7:12 am

Note: I’m in abject misery; an honest-to-god cold has struck me, as opposed to surprise!badfood from two weeks ago. I don’t know how my parents managed to digitize their plague and transmit it over the telephone to me, but they did, and I have them (and the crystal-clear reception of my cell phone) to thank for this round of “will it nauseate?”. What I’m trying to say is that you probably shouldn’t count on a big long diatribe tomorrow.

I came across an interesting little factoid yesterday: apparently, the HD-DVD drive for the Xbox 360 is now priced at $50. That would certainly make it a very tempting prospect if I had not also come to a realization– a fundamental paradigm shift that better explains how I’ve been looking at the whole, now-over “format war”. The revelation is this: I’m not ’smart’ enough for anything better than standard DVD.

Bear with me; this isn’t self-flagellation (well, all right, it’s not just self-flagellation).

See, the way I’ve been looking at the format war to this point is not as “the next step”, or as the next format that is going to supercede DVDs. This sort of a format transition is not like the one that occurred between VHS and DVD, or cassette and CD (bad example on that one, I suppose). The war between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray was not to be the one to take over once DVD ends, because DVD is not meant to end so soon; after all, VHS had a run of twenty-some years, and DVDs have only been mainstream since about 2000 or so! Extrapolating from that, by the time the successor to DVD comes about (if non-physical delivery isn’t that successor already, which I doubt it will be– folks like having tangible ’stuff’), both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray will be old technology, over a decade old, and something new will undoubtedly be on the table.

So if both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray aren’t meant to replace DVD, then what purpose do they really serve? Aren’t they both more or less failed, if they can’t unseat the current standard? Nope. They won’t replace DVD because they were never meant to replace DVD. Granted, this might not be as earth-shattering a revelation to you folks as it is to me– I tend not to pick up on things as quickly as other folks– but it definitely made me rethink why I was coming close to dragging a 40GB PS3 to the register each and every time I so much as saw a Best Buy. And you know what made me come to this revelation? Of all things, UMDs.

The UMD, for those of you who aren’t gamers (hi Mom), was Sony’s attempt at creating a new standard for portable video. Small, high-capacity optical disks which, despite their best application as the software delivery medium for the PSP’s games, got shoehorned into use as an extra-less DVD format for the portable. I’m fairly certain that I’m not the only one who didn’t give them a second or even first thought; staring at the PSP’s small screen and draining the battery life while not completing a game was not something I felt was the best application of the hardware or my time or my money. To wit, I’ve ripped a couple movies as well, for use “on the road”, and to date I’ve not even bothered to watch more than twenty minutes of it. If I want to watch a movie, I’ll do it on my actual TV.

So UMDs failed (as a video-only delivery format) because they were trying to be something that consumers didn’t want. Well, that initially seems to be a bad analogy to HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, because, well, people obviously like having the ability to see and count each individual pore on Keira Knightley’s cheek in any arbitrary frame of Dead Man’s Chest. And you’re right, it’s not like the market for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray isn’t there; there are certainly some films which deserve that kind of OCD reproduction at home.

I’m just not in that market; same with maybe 50% of the world.

See, Sony (and to a lesser extent, Toshiba) knew this. That’s why HD-DVD and Blu-Ray were targetted towards high-end enthusiasts, folks who feel the need to have home theaters which truly deserve that appellation (as opposed to my setup of “some yutz with a widescreen and a cheap stereo”). I’m certainly appreciative of the tech that’s involved in the high-end video market; I have to admit that I do see a difference in how HD-level video sources look compared to the current sources. Of course, that is the root of the problem: I don’t watch much that commands such detail.

Think back as to what I’ve blogged about watching over the past, oh, six months. Mostly anime and television shows, right? Stuff that’s not exactly super-realistic or high-powered in terms of detail. That’s not to say I don’t have a full shelf of cinema-type movies; I’ve been meaning to run the whole of the Lord of the Rings Extended Edition at some point. But on a day-to-day basis, in general, it’s mostly just TV, either sourced from an upconverting DVD player to 1080i or from my cable box’s DVR; or, more often, games, which may or may not reach such great heights of resolution.

If I want to see a movie that demands such care in its presentation, I’ll usually see it in the theater. $6-$10 for a ticket isn’t that bad, actually, and it sure beats the hell out of the four grand it would take for me to implement the barest bones of a “home theater” solution in my apartment. Anything that I miss in the theater, well, I didn’t want to see it that badly that it impacted my schedule. It’s great and all that people have the ability to put that kind of a setup in their homes, and yes, if I had a larger library of movies, I’d be considering it. But, in the end, it’s really not something I want that badly.

So, how does this impact my PS3 purchasing? Honestly, it really doesn’t. It was slightly different with the PS2 and its DVD capabilities (it was my first DVD player that connected to a TV), but the Blu-Ray movie capability of the PS3 is now, for me at least, a complete and total non-issue. Sort of like the backwards compatibility. There’s no value added or lost there that means anything to me. Unless and until something gets released exclusively on Blu-Ray (to quote an overused meme, “HA HA FAT CHANCE“) the capability will remain completely meaningless to me. DVD is good enough for me for now.

That said: the money for the PS3 is pretty much set aside. I keep feeling the pull– mostly owing to Folklore and Uncharted– but I figure all I need to do is hold out until my birthday. Then, it’s just one month until Metal Gear Solid 4 lands (the most accurate date I have right now is June 12th), and I’ll really want the machine. Until then, I certainly won’t be feeling Blu.

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