entirely safe and fun

Adapted from this, and likewise made available under the GFDL

Toshiba, key player behind the HD-DVD format, announced this week that they’ve called in the priest for last rites. The conventional wisdom holds, then, that the competing Blu-Ray format “wins” the high-def format war. Honestly, I don’t buy it. It’s not clear to me that there’s anything to win. Downloaded or on-demand content is the next, and in some senses final, medium of choice for movie distribution; Blu-Ray gets to be King of Nothing for a day at best.

Consider: High-end computer monitors already offer resolutions of 1600 lines (2560×1600 glories in the entirely parody-proof name “WQXGA”) or more, compared to the 1080 lines addressed by today’s “high-def” content. Next year, there will be even more monitors with more than 1080 lines than there are this year, as an inevitable consequence of computer desktop creep. The year after that, there will be still more. At some point, it will become a selling point for high-end TVs that they are, as electronics salesthings are wont to say, “future-proof” in the same way as those computer monitors. Right around that time, some enterprising person, probably in the adult entertainment industry, will decide to sell content with 1600 or more lines of resolution, targeting the profligate. As a hard-coded standard, Blu-Ray is completely incapable of filling that many lines; it was written with VC-1 as its (arguably) highest-efficiency codec in terms of pixels/Mbit, and with Blu-Ray’s hard limit of 40Mbit/s video throughput, VC-1 can paint at most 1920×1080 at 24fps. On the other hand, a general-purpose computer, driving that same monitor, can add a new codec at any time. There is no pre-set limit on the throughput of its storage or network devices, and in fact we can expect that to remain a fast-moving target; thus, there is nearly no limit on the number of pixels per frame, or frames per second.

You will have your five-megapixel QSXGA smut, sure enough, but it is going to have to be delivered as “just data” rather than on a disc of the older, player-based kind. It may come on a BD-ROM, at least for a little while, but eventually will ship over the ever-accelerating Internet. Blu-Ray simply isn’t enough format, a problem compounded by the popularity and youth of the DVD format, and it seems likely that it’s destined for a northern winter’s day in the sun.