I have the HD DVD of Terminator 2, I’d say its interactivity was pretty complex. The loading times remained rather short.

“I’ve been programming in a myriad of languages for well over two decades now. Javascript has Zero to do with C++, in fact you are the first person I’ve heard make that mistake, usually they think it derives from Java. The object model is utterly different than C++ or Java and Javascript is far more a functional language than any C or Java variant. There’s a reason for that – Javascript is really based on Scheme (and Self), with a Java-like syntax overlaid at the last moment”

Well, I learned that in my studies (I am making the Bachelor in applied computer science with emphasis on media). Wikipedia says it has the syntax of C-type languages, too. Obviously it differs in that C++ is more object-oriented, but I believe I said so myself. Maybe my formulation was bad or the history of Javascript is different, but the syntax is clearly based on C. Wikipedia also calls it a slim programming language.

“Which obviously was a Marking Lie since they support the format just fine today, even on older hardware.”

No, the BD+ VM takes a fair amount of hardware resources and BD playback is only smooth on very fast systems or an systems with modern GPUs decoding it. That’s not very different from HD DVD, though.

“While supported, thankfully almost no video is encoded using this any longer. I disliked the artifacts it produced.”

I only have a 40″ TV, but I couldn’t really see any differences between AVC, VC1 and MPEG2 at high bitrates. Reviews for example on highdefdigest.com usually concluded the same, so I don’t think it was just me. No artifacts.

“You said that Blu-Ray was better for having some competition, but competition is healthier when it occurs within a single agreed-upon standard. The competition between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD just confused the market and almost killed both formats, and in the end lent no benefit to Blu-Ray it would not have had anyway.”

I’m not sure if the BDA would have invented profile 1.1 or profile 2.0 if it weren’t for the feature war against the HD DVD. That’s also what I originally said. Of course, that’s speculation, but seeing the history of the BDA, that’s not the most unbelievable thing to assume. BTW I forgot another major advantage of the HD DVD over the BD, and that is region coding. HD DVD had none. That was pure awesomeness.

“I’ll let you have the last comment since arguing about the past is pointless and the reality is there for anyone who cares to look, I just felt compelled to note the technical inaccuracies of your post regarding Java and Javascript.”

You are right about the past, I just don’t like seeing someone beating a dead horse for anti-MS propaganda. I don’t think the article depicts the reality correctly (I guess that’s what you mean by “the reality is there for anyone who cares to look”?). Thanks for the clarification on Java and Javascript and for the links, though.

BTW I’m using BD myself and am happily awaiting the 3D extension planned for 2010!

Because they were not really exercising Javascript, just loading up the XML and processing. That has nothing to say about the language used for more complex tasks.

“Actually, Javascript is a highly stripped down version of C++”

I’ve been programming in a myriad of languages for well over two decades now. Javascript has Zero to do with C++, in fact you are the first person I’ve heard make that mistake, usually they think it derives from Java. The object model is utterly different than C++ or Java and Javascript is far more a functional language than any C or Java variant. There’s a reason for that – Javascript is really based on Scheme (and Self), with a Java-like syntax overlaid at the last moment (you’d have to listen to the podcast linked to in order to know the full story, but the Wiki article is close enough):

http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail4090.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript

The HD DVD died because Warner ceased its support for the format. Now I can only speculate why they did that.

It’s because it was stupid to continue (actually that was true long before but there were contractual reasons they were stuck supporting HD-DVD for as long as they did). It didn’t matter what sales WERE, it was all about what sales would BECOME. With a single hardware maker, and no Disney or Fox the format was doomed to niche status if they had continued. Warner wanted to be part of a larger pie rather than king of a small tidal pool.

“By the way, in the early days Bill Gates backed the HD DVD saying that the Blu-ray Disc would be incompatible to PCs due to its hefty BD+ VM.”

Which obviously was a Marking Lie since they support the format just fine today, even on older hardware.

“Its VC-1 is still being used in the BD”

While supported, thankfully almost no video is encoded using this any longer. I disliked the artifacts it produced.

“If it had really cared, it had built HD DVD right into the Xbox 360 Elite and it would have most likely made the Windows Media Center HD-DVD-enabled. It did neither, because it didn’t really care that much.”

Now that I totally agree with, that may have won the war – just like Sony’s move won the war for them. It would have meant there was at least a fight. But without that move, without that level of commitment there was never a fight, just a delaying action until the format died.

“on the BD front, the PS3 was the only player that was any good, so that wasn’t really any better.”

It was because there was still competition, which improved the PS3 features and playback too. You said that Blu-Ray was better for having some competition, but competition is healthier when it occurs within a single agreed-upon standard. The competition between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD just confused the market and almost killed both formats, and in the end lent no benefit to Blu-Ray it would not have had anyway.

I’ll let you have the last comment since arguing about the past is pointless and the reality is there for anyone who cares to look, I just felt compelled to note the technical inaccuracies of your post regarding Java and Javascript.

And yet Java-enabled BDs load much slower than HD+ titles.

“Furthermore, you deride Java because it is a “full blown programming language”. Well – so is Javascript. Google is using it for applications today, and it’s still the same Javascript it was back then.”

Actually, Javascript is a highly stripped down version of C++, in a way you could call it a subset as well. There are no real classes or other more advanced OOP features. Google is only able to build applications with it because it has created many libraries to overcome the shortcomings of Javascript and make it a more solid language. But without all these extensions, Javascript is very small feature-wise. More than enough for interactive menus, though.

“You also claim HD+ was not proprietary because it is built atop Javascript and XML. But just as Mac OS X is proprietary even though built atop open source components, HD+ was very much proprietary in the language used was owned by Microsoft – XML is just a way to encode a particular language you want to use and HD+ is one such language. Anyone making an HD-DVD player would have *had* to pay royalties to Microsoft for the use of HD+.”

I meant proprietary in a WMA-way, in that it’s not publicly documented and in the will of a single company. HD+ may not be licensing-free, but it’s open and it’s standardized. Talking about licensing fees, the Blu-ray Disc falls short anyway. They only recently lowered their licensing fees, before that they were much higher than those of the HD DVD. Remember, both groups have/had patent pools for all the companies that contributed proprietary technology. Even the video codecs are all patented and require fees. In the end only the sum of all fees is important, and the HD DVD succeeded over the BD in this regard.

“Lastly, looking back in hindsight yes Sony took a huge risk – but it paid off, as is fitting for the gamble they took. Some note that the PS3 is still not selling as well as the 360, but how much was winning the entire HD format war worth? Probably it was well worth the somewhat slow sales of the PS3, even today. Would Sony really be better off if the sales positions of the PS3 and 360 were reversed, but they had lost the HD format war? No.”

The HD DVD died because Warner ceased its support for the format. Now I can only speculate why they did that. The sales number ratio of the two formats was steady at about 60:40 in favor of BD. Maybe Warner just didn’t want to invest in both formats anymore or maybe they had an argument with the DVD forum. The PS3 has been a great contributor to the coverage of 60% of the HD software sales, but it wasn’t necessarily the reason why the BD won. Again, the trigger was Warner, not the consumers.

It certainly wouldn’t have been better for Sony to lose the HD war and be slightly ahead of Microsoft in the console war. But by betting everything on the BD, Sony risked its Playstation business. And the Playstation brand is by far the most lucrative part of Sony’s business.

My point is this: Sony had guts. But mostly luck. The article above reads as if it was an easy task for the BD to win, but it was not. Sony was damn close to losing everything. I was one of the early adopters, I read the news every day.

“In contrast, Microsoft especially never really took a firm step forward with HD-DVD and most of the partners were generally not as committed as Sony and some of the studios.”

That’s true, and that’s especially why I think this article is just flawed. Microsoft took sides in the HD format war, but it was not _its_ war. Its VC-1 is still being used in the BD, it only lost HD+ (I’m not sure if it is used in the Xbox Video Marketplace nowadays). If it had really cared, it had built HD DVD right into the Xbox 360 Elite and it would have most likely made the Windows Media Center HD-DVD-enabled. It did neither, because it didn’t really care that much.

By the way, in the early days Bill Gates backed the HD DVD saying that the Blu-ray Disc would be incompatible to PCs due to its hefty BD+ VM. And that wasn’t so far from truth, BD+ was a challenge for software companies trying to make BD software players as well as to customers, who had to update their software often. In that regard, HD DVD was definitely more PC-friendly. In the meantime, both have been cracked open, though. ;)

“You were also incorrect that Blu-Ray player prices “stayed above $1k for some time”, they dropped to $500-$600 very quickly after the PS3 launch (because after all they had to compete against the PS3, and they were not built by a single company the way HD-DVD players were).”

The first BD players were released mid-2006 and cost about 1500$ (Samsung something-1000). After the release of the PS3, this very Samsung was sold off for 1000$ and later got down to about 600$. This crap wasn’t even worth that, though, since it had bad image quality (everyone else than Samsung was to blame for that, of course) and due to its profile 1.0 was obsolete hardware anyway. Many other players stayed at around 1000$, though. This was absurd especially because the PS3 was cheaper AND kept being the best BD player until around early 2008. HD DVD players may have been only available from Toshiba, but on the BD front, the PS3 was the only player that was any good, so that wasn’t really any better.

Javascript (although nothing to do with Java) has the same performance penalties as Java does – in fact only recently have we seen what are considered fast Javascript implementations, with Chrome and more recent versions of Safari and Firefox using highly upgraded engines. None of that existed during the lifespan of HD-DVD. What did exist were many highly optimized Java engines, including hardware built specifically to execute Java – and the Java used in BD development is only a subset. Java made far more sense from a performance perspective at the time for use in hardware, exactly the opposite of what you are saying.

Furthermore, you deride Java because it is a “full blown programming language”. Well – so is Javascript. Google is using it for applications today, and it’s still the same Javascript it was back then.

You also claim HD+ was not proprietary because it is built atop Javascript and XML. But just as Mac OS X is proprietary even though built atop open source components, HD+ was very much proprietary in the language used was owned by Microsoft – XML is just a way to encode a particular language you want to use and HD+ is one such language. Anyone making an HD-DVD player would have *had* to pay royalties to Microsoft for the use of HD+.

Lastly, looking back in hindsight yes Sony took a huge risk – but it paid off, as is fitting for the gamble they took. Some note that the PS3 is still not selling as well as the 360, but how much was winning the entire HD format war worth? Probably it was well worth the somewhat slow sales of the PS3, even today. Would Sony really be better off if the sales positions of the PS3 and 360 were reversed, but they had lost the HD format war? No.

In contrast, Microsoft especially never really took a firm step forward with HD-DVD and most of the partners were generally not as committed as Sony and some of the studios.

You were also incorrect that Blu-Ray player prices “stayed above $1k for some time”, they dropped to $500-$600 very quickly after the PS3 launch (because after all they had to compete against the PS3, and they were not built by a single company the way HD-DVD players were).

“The embedded industry favored Java over Microsoft’s latest proprietary efforts to own interactivity. HD-DVD died because the industry collectively worked to kill it as a proprietary monster that would enslave users, studios, and developers to Microsoft’s software. It wasn’t a simple disc format struggle.”

That is most likely the most ridiculous thing I have read in a long time. Let’s review the differences of those two formats for a moment: Both featured the same video and audio codecs, both featured AACS. The basic differences were the scripting languages used for interactivity and the BD’s inclusion of BD+.

Now, HD DVD used Microsoft’s HD+, a feature you seem to associate with the devil. In fact, HD+ was a simple scripting language based on XML and ECMAScript (yes, that’s Javascript). Being standardized, it was obviously openly documented and could not be altered for proprietary extensions, a thought that naturally arises when talking about Microsoft. HD+ was powerful, fast, easy to adapt and light on resources.

Blu-ray on the other side uses Java. Java is a full-blown programming language and thus more complicated to implement and more complex. Java is not at all known for its speed, more so for the lack of it. Java supporters often claim that to be untrue, but many Blu-ray Discs like T2 have proven so by introducing loading times of up to several minutes. The only advantages of Java are the well-known syntax and its open-source nature. But since HD+ is standardized as well, where is the benefit?

The second main difference is BD+. BD+ is a VM that runs on your BD player (we should read that again: a virtual machine that runs on your BD player – a virtual machine!) and makes sure that you don’t manipulate the data stream. To hardware manufacturers, it means a much more complex and complicated implementation of the BD standard. To end-users, it offered incompatibilities at the beginning and introduces even longer loading times.

Summing up, I really don’t see the enslavement of users or vendors here. Studios and developers were free to use MPEG2 or AVC over VC-1 anyway, so they really had nothing to do with it anyway. Your argument of enslavement or harmful proprietaryness seems to be based purely on the fact that HD+ was invented by Microsoft.

You also criticize the launch of the HD DVD. It’s true, at the beginning the hardware was so expensive that Toshiba had to subsidize it to reach the proposed price of 500$. It’s also true that this first HD DVD player used PC components. Interestingly though, you fail to mention that the first Blu-ray player, the PS3, was actually exactly the same, a subsidized PC. HD DVD players with standard consumer electronics came up shortly after, while Blu-ray players remained at a price range way above 1000$ for quite some time AND were, in fact, incomplete. While Toshiba made compromises regarding its first HD DVD player hardware in order to launch in time, Sony and the BDA, struggling with the same time problem, decided to compromise on the BD’s feature set instead. The Blu-ray Disc launched with an incomplete BD profile 1.0 which was only finalized in version 1.1 a whole year later. Of course, all BD players to this time except the PS3 became obsolete, since they couldn’t be upgraded. The same occurred again when introducing the optional BD profile 2.0 (BD live) some time later. I don’t call this consumer-friendly…

Today the BD features the same advanced interactivity the HD DVD had and low prices, so home theater enthusiasts have no reason to bemoan the past or be upset about the outcome of the HD format war. I believe, though, that the format war was a good thing for consumers because it forced the BDA to improve their BD and it made the prices fall much quicker than usual. The DVD took much longer to achieve a reasonable install base and lower prices.

You also comment on the video game console war. It’s true that the PS3 was a big factor for the success of the Blu-ray Disc, but that could hardly be said the other way around. In fact, Sony took a big, I mean a really BIG risk by implementing Blu-ray into the PS3. It not only made the console much more expensive, which concluded in the most expensive mainstream console ever and, oh wonder, a much lower popularity then with the PS2 half a decade earlier. It also delayed the launch of the system by half a year. The PS3 was originally planned to be released in spring 2006 in Japan, but due to problems with the blue laser diode it had to be postponed until fall 2006. By the way, that is also the reason why the PS3 is technically not superior to the Xbox 360: although released a year later, its hardware is basically from the same time. The Blu-ray Disc is also the reason why the HDD is mandatory on the PS3 in difference to the optional HDD on the Xbox 360: due to the immaturity of the technology back in 2006, the BD drive only has 2x speed. That translates into 9MB/s, merely 55% of the Xbox 360’s DVD drive speed. Today, every modern PS3 game has to be installed on the HDD. The install times vary between few seconds and up to an hour, since many games are shoveling several Gigabytes of data onto the HDD. On Xbox 360, you simply put the DVD in the console and you are good to go. Sure, the Xbox 360’s DVD drive is much louder, but you can install your games on HDD at any time as well. The difference is that it’s optional. The Xbox 360 is alive and healthy, by the way. It is still the lead development system for most multi-platform developers and still leads in hardware sales over the PS3. The Wii blows both of them, but that console is a completely different story anyway.

So, the BD-drive delayed the launch of the PS3 significantly, it increased the price of the PS3 significantly, it increases loading times significantly and mandates an HDD for caching. And, as mentioned earlier, it was a big risk. The success of the BD was absolutely not predictable, not at its mediocre launch (expensive hardware and launch titles with inferior image quality), and certainly not the years before that when the PS3 was designed. If the BD had failed, chances are the PS3 had failed, too. And that would mean the end for Sony. So, Sony played poker, on the backs of its customers.

I am sorry that I wrote so much (hope someone will even read it) and I apologize for any grammar mistakes in advance, I’m from Germany. I really like your blog, but the unbelievable hate you have against Microsoft that often clouds your objectivity is at times really enraging.

i found a number of glaring mistakes in this artical,

1. vista has been a huge sucess dispite bitching & moaning from the “cool techs” (as of now over 200 million copys have been sold worldwide)

2. zune sales have been good as far as i’ve seen (btw for a personal note i cant wait till there here in australia, ipods have a bad record of high failure rates, i;ve had 25 returned since xmas with ipods batterys failing)

3. blu ray will proberly never be anything more then a nitch market since it risks being leap froged by downloadable content (would have been the same with hd dvd too if it won) & with the worlds economy as it is leaves little room for high priced entertainment.

one thing i found which looked interesting, hd dvd seems to be making a small comeback since its death, seems that ppl are buying it since most hd dvd players can be found for below 100 bucks & movies as low as 5 bucks.
http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/09/30/hd-dvd-sales-apparently-still-going-strong/

[Yes you're right, Vista, Zune, and HD-DVD are all going strong and will no doubt return with a vengeance any moment now. Keep the faith - Dan]