I’ve been vaguely aware of the format war between the new high-definition video disc formats hoping to be the successor to DVD: Blu-ray and HD DVD. But, to be honest, I’ve not paid much attention – I assumed that the two formats would just be different approaches to making pictures so pretty and detailed that they would be hard to tell apart, and that ultimately it would be stuff like pricing, licensing approaches, deals between supporters, and other more business-related drivers that would make the difference.
But, with all the coverage of high-definition video that CES has stirred up, I thought it was about time that I find out a bit more about them.
There are a number of differences between the formats. There is no shortage of comparisons between Blu-Ray and HD DVD on the Internet, so I wont repeat them all here – but it’s worth a read. It makes for more interesting reading than I expected.
For example, the Blu-ray format includes players having a Java virtual machine which will be used to implement menus. This suggests that developers will be able to create interactive elements without having to learn a lot about a whole new platform, and I look forward to seeing how this will be exploited.
According to John C Dvorak in a recent TWiT (54 mins in), HD DVD will have a number of interesting features, such as:
…the ability to skin various objects within a movie… for example… if the movie was filmed with this in mind, you could watch a Batman movie and put your face on Batman through the entire film…
The potential of this sounds amazing – imagine watching a film where you get to choose the cast yourself. Early simpler examples of this can already be seen in movies such as Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, which lets you create your own version of one of the cars from the movie. Using a paint application in one of the film’s menus, you can give the car your own paint-job, and then watch the movie with car in the film replaced with your customised one.
I’m not about to rush out and buy one of these players any time soon, but it’s good to see that the different teams are actually coming up with different approaches to how we could consume video in the future.