HD For Indies

While I agree with the reasons given by WB for their decision, I think they have backed the wrong horse, as far as indie productions are concerned.

With HD DVD Advanced Content there is a healthy scene of people using HDi scripting for HD DVD pop-up menus, picture-in-picture, games etc - which was basically accessible to anyone who could get their head around XML and Javascript. In fact, I am currently beta-testing an OS-X app called HDAfterEdit ( www.dvdafteredit.com ) which can convert HD DVD Standard Content to Advanced suitable for adding HDi features ( like U-Control etc ) to pretty much any HD DVD.

By contrast, BD-J is immature and unreliable, from what I read - and has a much steeper learning curve. Add to that the fact that content protection is mandatory on manufactured BD discs, making them _very_ expensive to produce, relatively speaking, and indie producers will be stuck with "one-size-fits-all" BD authoring and duplication on recordables, rather being able to stretch the boundaries and create truly professional products.

WB have miss-interpreted the bottom line ( is the drop in sales really due to the format war, or simply because most people now have bought all their favourite films on DVD ? ) and missed the bigger picture. A shame.

Ian
 

I work at a HD & HDDVD authoring facility. I can't speak for manufacturing costs, but the authoring cost is the same for both formats. It's the same freaking codec.
 

El Duque -

you are discussing the media encoding costs, which are separate from the issue they were addressing, which is interactivity development costs.

-mike
 

That's just the encoding. The pop-up menus etc are based on two completely different technologies. Simple menu-driven authoring ( a la DVD Studio Pro, Sonic DVDIt etc ) is easy, agreed, but all the "bells and whistles" found on "Hollywood" titles like "Transformers" or "300" is done with HDi - XML and JScript. To get up-to-speed creating that stuff on Blu Ray requires Java programming, which is a whole other kettle of fish. Check this out, especially the comments at the end: http://www.blueboard.com/bluray/qa_dragonslair.htm
 

I don't know about everyone, but I know that I have personally stopped buying a lot of DVDs because I want them in HD, and there's no way I'm shelling out my money until the format war is over.