☠ ► Get 20% OFF @manscaped + Free Shipping with promo code SSFF20 at MANSCAPED.com! bit.ly/2VO51BL ☠️ EDIT: Also want to acknowledge that we could have done a better job explaining how Blu-ray/HD DVD technology works! It's not necessarily that it's more powerful persay, it's that the blue/ultraviolet laser has a higher wavelength, meaning more information could be crammed into a tighter space, and this combined with the a new physical disc structure meant more data could be delivered to the end user. (basically!) I tried to use shorthand and say it was "more powerful" which is kinda true in a colloquial sense, but not from a technical standpoint. Kicking myself over it! - Producer Grace ➕🔥🔥
@@Wyrrlicci No it wasn´t. The VHS won due to porn myth has been debunked for at least 2 decades at this point: knowledgenuts.com/2014/03/05/betamax-didnt-lose-to-vhs-because-of-adult-films/
I like the way you do your promos. It's not just some pre-written preamble given by the sponsor, you do the ad in your own style. I wish more content creators were given that option and tried pursuing it when possible.
2:25 Small correction, a blue laser can read and write more data than a red one not necessarily because it contains "more energy" it's because it has a higher frequency wavelength, that means the laser can be smaller, and thus it can be more precisely focused, that means they could then cram significantly more data into the same amount of physical space as a DVD or CD, and because it can be more precisely focused they could also pack more translucent layers of data into that same amount of space...
Came here to say exactly this lol. Blue light is physically smaller than red light. Weird to think about the size of light, but yes, smaller wavelengths can be focused into a smaller area.
The blue lasers also penetrate the disc less, so they can have more layers on the discs, thus, more space. This graphic from Wikipedia explains it a lot clearer: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray#/media/File:Comparison_CD_DVD_HDDVD_BD.svg
"Business Is War" - Jack Tramiel We need a miniseries on the life and times of Jack Tramiel. An Anglo-American co-production between Netflix and Channel 4, starring Ben Kingsley as either Irving Gould or Mehdi Ali and Timothy Spall as Jack himself.
lnxrox dude Kim Justice documentaries are the best though. She’s like old school history channel but if it was all about cool computer and video game stuff
My dad was a pretty big HD DVD supporter and was pretty salty when it lost, even holding off on getting a Blu-Ray player for a year or so afterward and refusing to get Netflix for a while because of how they dropped HD DVD. Our first Blu-Ray player was a PS3, and he still collects HD DVDs if he finds them at thrift stores (which he plays on our 360 drive).
Y’all knuckleheads saying porn won the format war as if porn didn’t also realize the future was online streaming 🤦🏻♂️ (👆🏻👆🏻ALSO see our pinned comment 👆🏻👆🏻)
They'd be wrong either way... People just like to say porn wins format wars as a truism because it's funny, not because it's accurate, the fact of the matter is that VHS had already won against Beta before porn was even a thing on the format, the people in general chose VHS over Beta because of its longer recording capacity, a single VHS tape could record an entire football game, a Beta tape couldn't... Yeah, that format war was won by you yanks' bootleg rugby... People bought VCRs to do exactly that, Record TV programmes on Video Cassettes, that was in the late 70s, Home Video only became a thing in the early 80s and by then most people already had VHS VCRs in their home so film distributors just decided to support that format over Beta when they couldn't do both... DVD on the other hand had no meaningful competitors, everyone just agreed on the format and it just took over...
Thank you. It helped VHS "win" (maybe), but that's it. There's never been another format war that porn helped pick the winner on, but people keep repeating the same nonsense.
As a commenter from Company Man’s video so eloquently put it: “The first ever DVD released was Twister, and the last HDDVD ever released was Twister.” How poetic.
As someone there at the time, the FINAL nail in the coffin for “HD DVD” was, in my opinion, when Microsoft released the Xbox 360 Elite at a big mark up and it did not include HD DVD as a base feature and you still had to buy the external TURD.
I still prefer physical formats because I have enough experience with weird-ass net connections to not want to put everything online. Besides, I wanna own my shit and hand it down to someone else in the future.
Oh God, you're gonna be the old man giving his grandson some big ass pile of VHS tapes that they're going to awkwardly smile and take and then donate to the Goodwill.
Yea I will always prefer physical media, having that case to display on your shelf and actually owning what you purchase is way better if you ask me Digital stuff can easily get delisted over time or because of stuff like copyright/rights ownership
I worked at Sony during some of this, and was at the CES where Toshiba had canceled the press conferences. Their huge HD-DVD booth on the show floor was a very sad sight to see. I also went to the Microsoft booth and tried to play Guitar Hero, and their demo 360 immediately RRoD'ed on me. It felt like a good time to be a Sony employee.
I'll give ya that one (I usually find the DIO meme annoying). I imagine the manufacturing process for blue laser diodes is or at least was more expensive and possibly slower as well. I might have to jump down a rabbit hole some time to learn how they're actually made (usually better precision requires a slower manufacturing process in my experience but my experience doesn't include electronics manufacturing).
I only remember this war from the sidelines. I had no idea how deep it went. Good thing Sony learned their lesson and didn't invest in a portable media format that could only be played on a handheld console
didn't usb have a theoretical limit of 255 devices per root port? (using hubs). Practically you're limited by the port's bandwidth... which for USB2 is 480Mbits/sec. Controllers and keyboards however use mere bytes of bandwidth so I'd guess you can connect 200 of those...
I'd much rather have blu-ray movies for the clarity of both sound and picture and the fact that I can sell it to someone else or even give it to family members if I get legitimately bored of the game. Online only is still a bunch of BS... P.T, connection issues, DRMs and the fact that companies can remove these games without any warning... Man... I'm still wishing that Scott Pilgrim vs the World would still make it onto the ps4, XboneX, steam or GoG....
ᐅᓇᓕᒃ Nanuq I didn’t have a ps3 back then but having played it once at a party I’d preorder on amazon ASAP if it got a rerelease on modern platforms but we know that likely can’t happen since licensing
@@alistair4909 Played the game before watching the movie and enjoyed if very much. Yeah, it sucks but that's what happens when there's too many cooks involved. :s
Speaking of royalties on formats and whatnot, you all should make a video about the history of Nintendo completely avoiding every single one of the "main" formats used during these consoles lifetime. They always did their own thing, and I'd love to hear an in-depth story about that.
Yeah it was basically due to Nintendo not wanting to have to pay any other company money to use their cd/dvd or whatever drives and it led to nearly 10 years of stupid decisions by Nintendo. The cartridges are what sealed N64's fate as a failure and the small half sized disks that could only hold 1GB held the gamecube back also. Thank god Nintendo finally saw sense and just stuck a DVD drive in the Wii.
Oh man, I knew a guy who went in hard on this device. Bought every single movie that released and kept saying Blu-Ray sucks and would fail. Boy was he embarrassed after Blu-Ray won.
Terrance Addison As soon as I found out Blu Ray could hold more data and it had a hard protective coating that reseated scratches I knew they win. Plus PS3 helped and in general Blu Rays where a bit sharper and better audio at the time it used uncompressed LPCM audio then later got DTS HD Master and Dolby True HD audio where HDDVD was using Dolby Digital Plus As there audio choice.
Kylie McInnes Dreamcast was ahead of PS2 by a long shot but never got its support and reckless company decisions along with failed marketing led to its downfall real quick which is saddening. Dreamcast had better graphics, it had a internet browser, along with keyboard and mouse support, along with online play. Too good for it’s time.
@Cal Peace I've seen them in the clearance section at HPB but I haven't bought any, because at this point any of the titles worth having already have superior Blu-Ray releases. I might pick up one or two for the novelty of it now, they're cheap enough.
@@rayfran06 It's a meme for kids who still think LD is inherently better because of analog fascination nonsense. There literally no reason to horde laser discs outside of maybe the big art work.
@@garaschneider4808 haha ok thank you! I was confused ...I subscribe to his channel and wonder why he would hate on Blu Ray, I mean I am aware of people and an argument of people that don't like the format. I was just confused....now I'm showing my age! Lol thank you
Did Sony really win though? I don't remember DVDs coming bundled with VHS, but 13 YEARS after Sony "won," the Blu-Ray/DVD combo pack is STILL more common than Blu-Ray only.
@@mariokarter13 that's a really valid point. Even if you consider it's mostly for people that haven't made the jump yet it's taking forever for DVD to fade away compared to VHS. And I think most of the movie watching population pretty much stopped buying DVDs and BluRay in favor of streaming services. That victory from Sony doesn't do much in the end. Physical console game still ship on bluray, that's pretty much the extend of it.
I remember during the midst of this format war. I was sure HD DVD was going to win over Blu Ray solely because of it's name. I figured "HD DVD" was easier for consumers to understand. Of course in the end it would have all been for nothing anyway.
Frisket well I remember reading back than how Betamax had the better name than VHS and lost and how it would be the same for HD DVD as it had the better name than Blu-ray.
Blu-ray is way faster to pronounce and the name sounds very cool though the acronym has always been BD (Blu-ray Disc) but the marketing focused on using the name Blu-ray instead of BD. Mass consumers like quick simple naming with no convoluted pronunciations.
Years late but I'd kinda argue the opposite in a sense. This never occurred to me until it was brought up in a separate comment section, but think about it: There would have been a _ton_ of uninformed parents unaware of the difference between HD-DVD and DVD who would've ended up buying the DVD versions when their kids or whoever wanted the HD-DVD version. It's kinda like the Wii U debacle. Was this an actual factor in HD-DVD's defeat? I don't know, but brand confusion is rarely a good thing and I'm sure there's people who would have expected HD-DVD to work in their regular DVD player because to them both of these formats are just DVDs.
I don't remember the war at all because I didn't care - I was not in the least interested in upgrading. DVD was and still is good enough for me (as well as for most consumers). I probably didn't even realize the two were seperate incompatible formats.
19:13 FYI, there were no "Total Hi Def" discs that ever made it to market. WB announced Total Hi Def at CES '07, but they ended up putting development of these discs on hold in November of that same year because of a lack of interest from other studios.
Right. I think they might have demonstrated it at a trade show but it was never released. It was a dumb idea. Basically it would have crippled both formats to single layers for each version. 15GB (HD DVD) and 25GB (Blu-ray) Let’s not forget I think both LG and Samsung sold players that could play both formats. Other than the OS running the formats the data files were essentially the same types with Blu having the extra storage and larger bandwidth advantage.
I'm pretty sure the 360 included component cables out of the box alongside composite cables. I had a first gen 360, and it included a composite/component combo cable (so 6 RCA connectors total, 2 for audio, 1 for composite video, and 3 for component video). And most HD TVs at the time had component inputs as it was more common than HDMI back then.
The cheaper "core" system (the one without a harddrive) did not, but the standard model with a harddrive did. I had that model, it came with a combo-cable that had both composite and component connections, with a switch on it to choose which one to output over. And yes, most HDTVs back then had component, in fact, the first few HDTVs didn't even have HDMI as that was a standard that came after HDTVs (There were several articles about how HDCP was going to make those TVs useless). HDTVs removing component is actually a recent thing. (My TV from 2015 for example, it's a 4K 120hz 3D HDR SmartTV...... yet it has both HDMI and Component). Most of Derek's videos are incredibly well-researched and have corrected me on many things that I mis-understood before, but this one felt poorly researched. (E.G. like claiming that commercial optical disks have their data burned in by lasers, they do not, they are pressed. It's burnable disks that get written to by lasers. Also every time I have been to an electronics store 90% of the movies are in Blu-Ray format, I don't know where he is seeing stores where the DVD rack is bigger. To say nothing that streaming is poorer quality than disks.)
In 2006 I bought a 720p LCD TV and man was it sweet at the time! I had an Xbox 360 with component cables, so I bought the HD-DVD add on that came with King Kong. I wasn't choosing sides in the format war, I just wanted to view HD content on my sweet TV. I bought four or five HD-DVD movies that year including an HD demo disc with an aquarium and fireplace videos. I was holding out before starting to collect movies to replace my DVD collection. By 2008 the winner was clear, and I bought a stand alone Bluray player and my first purchase was the Matrix Trilogy Bluray box set. Now I own all my movies on Bluray and 4K UHD Bluray. Edit: Physical Media is greater than online streaming anyday!
I remember that too. People didn't want to invest in either format because nobody knew who was going to end up with studio support in the end. I actually think Michael Bay was partially wrong: Microsoft didn't care if both formats failed, and they didn't even care if Blu-Ray won out in the end. They just wanted to delay consumer investment until the digital delivery platform was ready. After that, the people who still wanted to buy physical media could go crazy on Blu as far as MS was concerned.
Isn't mothersbasement the dork who went to task against Uniquenameosaurus' "pirate anime" movement? Because I can't say I'm a fan of his for his one dimensional thinking regarding streaming services fighting over exclusives
@@nabieladrian It was always "superior" (12 bit color, better variance in contrast), it's just that HDR10 is slightly more supported because it's supported by SMPTE.
Small correction, Xbox 360 shipped with dual COMPONENT/composite cables. Always thought it was dope that you only needed one cable no matter where you were going at the time.
Because the PS3 and PS4 had built in blu-ray players, I never bought a standalone blu-ray player until October 2019, when my PS3 had been donated to my mother to watch stuff in her bedroom, and my PS4 was in storage, but I wanted to be able to watch blu-rays with my mother on Sundays (I'd prepare food, then while it would cook, we'd watch something together). Until then, since 2012, I'd had access to a blu-ray player via my PS3, then later my PS4, although before the PS3 purchase in 2012 (I bought it for a specific 2012 release that later came to Vita), I only really used DVDs. I've never once owned any kind of HD DVD player, but I do remember before I had any real interest in either format, I would see both all over the shelves in the shops. However, when blu-ray and HD DVD launched, I was still actually using VHS for my personal use in my shared bedroom with my sister (I was born in 1997, her 1999), and whilst she had a DVD player we could use, DVDs were mostly for downstairs use for family watching, and upstairs we mostly just used VHS. It's fun to reminisce.
In 07 there was still question as to which format would reign supreme: Blu Ray or HD-DVD. When the porn industry (which was much more centralized back then) officially chose blu-ray, I immediately returned my xbox 360's HD-DVD external player and all the movies for a refund from Best Buy and got all my money back. Within months, HD-DVD disappeared. For some reason of all the things I've done in my life accurately surmising the writing on the wall for the HD-DVD is still one of my highlights.
People keep focusing on porn for some reason but the moment when everyone knew HD DVD was done for was when Warner Brothers decided to support Blu-ray only. They held the key to deciding the winner (especially after Paramount had switched to HD DVD exclusivity just a few months prior) and apparently it was very close; the coin could have dropped either way. In any case, once WB announced their decision it didn't take long for all the remaining HD DVD-supporting studios to follow suit and just a few months later Toshiba threw in the towel and declared HD DVD officially dead.
@@Astfgl It's interesting how their management is an older-style one where they allow the 'founders/early adopters' to deal with the biggest problems, then finally decide once enough positive points on one side has been made.
Except the porn industry initially backed HD-DVD, throughout 2007. They only switched to Blu-Ray after WB announced they were dropping HD-DVD. The porn industry has little to do with the result of that format war.
Awesome video as always. I remember working as a gaming journalist at the time here in Brazil and things were just wild with the console war, but HDDVD couldn't even be found at stores, so, that format war was more like a small riot for us.
I liked that HD-DVD had double sided discs that had HD on one side and DVD on the other so you could take them to anyone's house and watch it. It took forever for Blu-rays to even include dvd copies (after they were essentially worthless). PS3 was always a trojan Blu-ray player first and foremost.
That footage of a little Trinitron GOING WIDESCREEN (3:00), I recognise it from a DVD promo at the start of my Matrix VHS. At the time in 2006 I thought it interesting how the 1999 DVD player featured in it looked basically just like the 2006 BD players I was seeing in the local Sony shop's window at the time. Very big, very chunky, trying to fit in aesthetically with big home-hifi amplifiers and AV receivers. Had to stop watching to get down this little trip down memory lane.. haha. Whichever one of you two predominantly finds the B-roll footage, it's always a top-rate job 👍
Unrelated: I found the ball deodorant thing kinda funny, cos I've been using my regular women's deodorant (Sure, by Unilever) in places beyond my underarms for years. Works great on underboob and balls. No chafing with sports bras or the dreaded underboob sweat here. Ah, trans privilege. Literally went "wait, have cis guys just.. been putting up with ball chafing this whole time?". I've got an Old Spice too, cos damn it sometimes I just want to smell like black pepper instead of flowers or cotton. (I don't understand the men's ones that smell like diesel or whatever Axe/Lynx smells of though...). The Old Spice definitely feels less slippery than the women's deodorants, so isn't as diversely useful as the Sure. I'm guessing the anti-chafe stuff is because of the expectation of shaved underarms? So I wonder if Manscaped's Ball Deodorant is basically a women's formula with different perfume...
That was an awesome mini-documentary. I love it when there's a satisfying conclusion that talks briefly about history after the chosen period and how things panned out in the longer term. Was also pleasantly surprised by the mention of the narrowly-avoided MMCD/SD war. But they managed to repeat it in the home hifi realm, with SACD and DVD-audio, which both use red lasers. And in that situation, they kinda both lost. Hardly anyone bought them, instead unwittingly getting a DVD player that could also play SACD or DVD-audio depending on manufacturer (I think the PS3 can play SACD?). Now the people both formats were aimed at buy Blu-ray audio instead, which hold even more music or alternate arrangements/masters of the same music. It's funny that so often what is good for these companies is bad for customers, and vice versa. Almost all regular people, if they were aware of VHS/Beta, were super glad that it didn't happen with DVD and there was no way they'd be stuck with a pseudo-dead player the next year. But as you said, companies don't like it because the royalties got split between more of them.
@@kaitlyn__L One format "war" that almost never gets mentioned is the DVD v. DIVX battle, although it was more a skirmish due to how bad a curb-stomp battle it was.
Man, I remember this "war." Still used DVDs for the most part so I didn't care who won. Ended up siding with Blu-ray near the end simply because I liked the name better.
It was kind of a saving grace that HD-DVD was quickly dropped, since the final nail in its coffin was the discovery of how stupidly easy it was to crack the copy protection(every disc made, used the same code if I recall?).
I remember having problems reading Devil May 4 texts on an SDTV (it was possible, but it made my eyes tired), and that was the game that made me buy an HDTV for my Xbox 360.
What a lot of people seem to have forgotten is that while they were released at a similar time, HD DVD was much more complete and functional than Blu-ray out of the gate. HD DVD players had all the interactivity and online features right away and pretty much Just Worked™, while Blu-ray had to go through two or three profile updates in its first year to get up to feature parity. Not only that, but every Blu-ray player that wasn't a PS3 was sloooooooow thanks to the use of the bloated Java framework for interactivity. For an early adopter, these things mattered. A lot. Oh yeah and let's not forget that the HD DVD format was generally more affordable too, making the barrier of entry for getting into HD movies much lower.
Astfgl I had a PS3 witch loaded blu rays really quick and any firmware update was done by the console updates themselves. PS3 too this day is still by far the best blu ray player.
Correct ... few people remember the HD experience of 2006-2009, but PS3's could take up to 30sec for the JavaRT to load, since it wasn't baked into the firmware by design (& rightly so given Java's vulnerabilities).
I still have my HD-DVD drive for 360, I don't regret it because you can get the majority of HD-DVD movies for pennies. I still have it hooked up and still use it every now and then. When you use it, it actually tells all your friends that you are playing "Xbox 360 HD-DVD Player". So i get some funny messages from time to time when people on my friend list see that.
Actually I remember lots of tvs back then had component IN. It’s new tvs now that don’t have it. HD-DVD would have still lost because the Xbox wouldn’t have sold that many units at $500.
they could have added it to the elite which was a few years later from the release. the tech would be cheaper and with how they had multiple tiers of systems the elite could have come out with a variant with the hddvd player in it, the later pro models could have as well, also i do believe the 360 was sold at a profit its entire life span so they could have sold at cost or at slight loss and pushed the medium
Yes, but the screen formats were a bit of a mess. I stopped using PAL end of the 90ies for obvious reasons. VGA was a lot better and later came the digital panels with DVI. Console support was lacklustre, so another reason to play on the PC. Later consoles finally got a digital output with HDMI - which fit only on the newer "TVs". They were expensive and the old monitors were still good. You can convert HDMI to DVI-D lossless, but then again, at least Sony required HDCP capability for BD playback - which most screens didn't support. So also for viewing movies, it was easier to just play a BD rip on a (HT)PC. No consoles for me from that era, but I later bought a Wii U, which plays all the Gamecube, Wii and Wii U titles on a standard HDMI screen which include some pretty good multiplayer titles. And that for me is a reason to run a console besides the PC I already have.
Indeed, considering how well-researched Derek's videos usually are I was surprised about the several errors in this one, including about component. HDTVs came out before HDMI was a thing, the first few HDTVs were composite-only. And composite was VERY common in HDTVs back then, it's removal was a recent thing. I have a 2015 TV that's 4K, HDR, 120hz, HDR, and a SmartTV.... yet it still has both composite and component. Hardly unheard of for even 2015 for a TV to still have component.
Great video! During my time in college approximately 6 years ago I did a 30-35 page research paper on this Blu-ray/HD-DVD battle & oddly I very much enjoyed the research. Especially when I presented it coupled with a PowerPoint & seeing almost everyone in my class have no idea this event even happened. I'm a new subscriber with this being in the first few videos I've watched! I'll definitely be back to watch! Great presentation & research overall! Thanks!
Superb video as always! You guys really made this whole thing even more fascinating and entertaining than I expected. The worst part about this war is that you just know Michael Bay is an "I told you so" kind of guy. The real losers here are his friends who have to hear him tell the story of how he predicted streaming was the future back when Blu-ray and HD-DVD were duking it out.
Thanks! I really enjoyed this one. I still have my 360 HD DVD player and a whole bunch of HD DVD’s. At the time, if you already owned a 360 it was a comparatively accessible way to play HD movies on your brand new flat screen HD TV. And since my local video (rental) store had a 60/40 split between HD DVD and BluRay and nobody knew who would win the format war, the 360 HD DVD player made sense to me back then. Ultimately though, I ended up with many HD DVD movies that I can’t use anymore unless I hook up my old 360. 😅 But for its time it was an amazing movie watching experience.
Ngl, i kinda wish HD DVD had won the format war If only for the fact that it just sounds like a more natural continuation/evolution of DVD technology in terms of the name
Isn't mothersbasement the dork who went to task against Uniquenameosaurus' "pirate anime" movement? Because I can't say I'm a fan of his for his one dimensional thinking regarding streaming services fighting over exclusives
Some people believe that Microsoft was going to announce a 360 with a built-in HD DVD drive at CES 2008 but canceled at the last minute when Warner Brothers announced dropping the format on the eve of the opening. I would have loved to hear the offers getting flung around between companies at that time.
Remember that Microsoft is only a thing in certain regional markets. In Japan, for example (the home of both companies), it was a home run for Sony as it had the ONLY HD video game system, which had a blu ray player in it.Things like this made the studios move to blu ray. I didn't even know that Microsoft had a console until a few years ago and I've been gaming for 40 years.
Energy in the laser has NOTHING to do with capacity. Blue laser is higher wavelength and can be focused on a tighter beam. Hense be able to read smaller data spirals
SSFF, component was used for HDTV before HDMI, and continued to be supported on HDTV's well after HDMI became the standard. My first HDTV had component and DVI (which also came before HDMI), and I had to use an HDMI to DVI adapter cable.
That's what I thought as well. At first I was wondering if the supposed "rarity" of component was an American thing, as I'm from Europe, and at least here component was anything but uncommon, in my experience anyway. I bought a budget 42-inch TV in 2013, and it still supported component cables, as did my previous two TVs (both were small, and quite cheap), the oldest was only HD-ready and from 2006.
I'm also seeing this too. UA-cam probably had a glitch that messed up this video since there was no sync problem when I saw this video when it first released.
99,00,01? No thanks That striker system...not to mention how broken one of those three was... I stick to 95 for the old school,97/98 for the new one... And never got anywhere near to the 3D ones No Stay away from me! I want the beatiful pixel art! Not this pseudo anime crap!
I still use my HD-DVD drive pretty regularly. It's plug-and-play with a Windows computer. I think I'm at 116 discs right now. Hell, I just found four more of them at a thrift store last week!
Not sure if you care, but during this war I worked in an adult store. The industry went all in on HD DVD. There was not a single Blu Ray in the store while I worked there. Guess that wasn't enough to win the was either lol.
"Even if one managed to have this, it was really rare and expensive to have an HDTV that supported something other than HDMI, even at the time." .... O_O ... Uhhh WHAT???? HDMI didn't even EXIST on early-mid 00's HDTV's, it was ALL component video (or VGA if you were using a monitor). Meethinks your memory has gotten crazy fuzzy and distorted about HDMI's rise to ubiquity. HDMI wasn't truly commonplace on TV's till like 2007-2008. When the PS3 launched in late 2006, it was still near exclusively the domain of brand new, premium sets.
Why is the audio in this video so horrendously out of sync? It starts out in sync...but then goes WAY OFF starting at 2:33 at least obviously. I have a suspicion it breaks at 2:25 but that's just a guess. It's REALLY distracting.
I definitely predicted the outcome of this format were in correctly at the time. I believed HD-DVD would win because it had nailed down the three pieces of media format success: price, piracy, and porn. That’s right, when the HD optical formats came out, the pornography industry was not allowed to release their movies on Blu-ray, so for the remainder of the format war, if you wanted your naughty bits in 1080p, you needed HD-DVD. Combine that advantage with the cheaper players and less aggressive digital rights management that Derek discusses in this video, and the relative failure of the PlayStation 3 console compared to the Xbox 360 and even the Wii, and I thought for sure HD-DVD would be the winning format.
*Sigh* I remember not understanding the difference between DVD and HD DVD, being dumbfounded when my copy of Serenity wouldn't play in anything I owned, and shelling out the $500 for a Toshiba HD-A1 in April of 2006. Picked up a bunch of HD DVD's for cheap on eBay once the format was dead. In April of 2009, Warner Brothers began offering a trade in deal where you could send them the cover inserts of your HD DVDs and they would send you a matching Blu-Ray. Perfect timing for when I picked up a used PS3.
Not to overstate, but this is such a well-produced video, it's a great story, told/presented well, killed all my confusion on this incarnation of the format wars, and it's well worth sticking around to the end. With other, more recent videos in mind, just felt this had to be said. Thanks, SSFF.
Blu-Ray won the physical Hi-Def format war against HD-DVD, but I believe what Derek is saying is that its downfall was that it never won supreme over everything like VHS won over Selectavision, LaserDisc, and Betamax. It beat HD-DVD just in time to compete with the budding streaming industry, and still never put standard DVD into the grave like DVD had done with VHS.
@@stu729 DVD's have been given away as freebies with most Blu-rays for years now. If they couldn't play DVD in Blu-ray players, the adoption rate would've been better.
Not just one of my favorite videos on SSFF, but on UA-cam. Damn good work Derek. I learned quite a bit today thanks to you & a "Hello" from Anchorage my friend! +1 :D
I'm sorry but, a year later I'm watching this (since it was posted) and NO ONE else mentioned a problem with the audio? Why is it behind like 10-20 seconds?
Doesn't blueray contain more data because a blue laser is narrower and therefore can fit more pits and lands in the same space as a dvd and not because it has more energy?
There were two major reasons I liked HD DVD over Blu-ray, and neither had anything to do with console support. I could buy an XBOX 360 HD DVD drive and connect it via USB to my Windows Vista PC, install a driver from Microsoft via Windows Update/Microsoft Update, install a compatible HD DVD codec (by purchasing something like Cyberlink's PowerDVD or Intervideo's WinDVD HD software) and I instantly had full HD media playback support for my PC. In fact, if I were to then purchase another piece of software from a vendor called Slysoft, I could then rip HD-DVD's to my hard drive as well as play HD-DVD's on any screen, including ones such as my 1920x1200 Apple Cinema display which lacked HDCP support which would normally prevent viewing of HD-DVD content. Second, HD-DVD had these nifty combo discs which included both the HD-DVD version of the film as well as a standard DVD version, meaning that even if I didn't own an HD-DVD player, I could still watch the film on my regular DVD player. This also made it much easier for things like sharing films with friends and family as most people didn't have any kind of HD disc playback device (regardless of how many PS3s were sold; in fact, I knew maybe 1 person who owned one for the entire duration of that console generation and I certainly didn't, though I did eventually purchase one during the subsequent console generation for the sake of playing one game which at the time I couldn't play on PC due to my hardware not measuring up and the PS3 being the cheaper option). If Sony had managed to make a combo type format that could play on standard DVD players and drop the price of Blu-ray discs to something even remotely reasonable (seriously, they STILL cost like $25~$30 even after all these years, unlike regular DVDs which saw a massive price drop a few years into that format's lifespan making it much more accessible as a format to replace VHS; I think cost is a much bigger factor here than Sony and many others may realize, beyond the simple convenience of streaming content via Netflix and the like). Still, ultimately Microsoft was right, and streaming was/is the way of the future. Physical media is pretty much dead (when was the last time you bought a DVD or even a CD? I know it's been years for me) and digital streaming as well as digital downloads have pretty much become the standard now that faster internet connections are more widely available, so in the long run winning the last great format war didn't do Sony much good. It still bums me out that HD-DVD lost though, because I still think it had some key advantages that Blu-ray hasn't provided.
I was saying to my brother what a load of crap it is they STILL sell DVD here for $20 new. We are talking 576i in 2019?.No.Blu-rays should be $20 IF THAT as you stated BLU-RAY never recieved a price drop. Bought ONE blu ray to try it 2 years aso 28 days later......which after popping it in and after a google searched realised it was nt a true blu ray release.
@@aussieguy1012 Yeah, I just looked it up, and apparently that film was shot in 720x576 resolution (i.e. lower than even 720p) so it's not surprising that the Blu-Ray wasn't a true HD Blu-Ray because all they can do with a low-res source like that is try to upscale it, which is bound to look bad, especially on a good HD TV because it will reveal all the flaws and artifacts from the digital processing and upscaling (just like watching a low quality DVD upscaled on a 1080p screen). From some of the reviews I read about that release, apparently the quality is so bad that it isn't even as good as some regular DVD releases (they rated it between a VHS and DVD for picture quality, which is not great for a DVD and absolutely horrible for an HD-DVD/Blu-Ray). They definitely shouldn't have charged those kinds of prices for a film like that.
☠ ► Get 20% OFF @manscaped + Free Shipping with promo code SSFF20 at MANSCAPED.com! bit.ly/2VO51BL ☠️
EDIT: Also want to acknowledge that we could have done a better job explaining how Blu-ray/HD DVD technology works! It's not necessarily that it's more powerful persay, it's that the blue/ultraviolet laser has a higher wavelength, meaning more information could be crammed into a tighter space, and this combined with the a new physical disc structure meant more data could be delivered to the end user. (basically!) I tried to use shorthand and say it was "more powerful" which is kinda true in a colloquial sense, but not from a technical standpoint. Kicking myself over it! - Producer Grace ➕🔥🔥
@@Wyrrlicci No it wasn´t. The VHS won due to porn myth has been debunked for at least 2 decades at this point:
knowledgenuts.com/2014/03/05/betamax-didnt-lose-to-vhs-because-of-adult-films/
Stop Skeletons From Shaving My Balls
I like the way you do your promos. It's not just some pre-written preamble given by the sponsor, you do the ad in your own style. I wish more content creators were given that option and tried pursuing it when possible.
Deodorant for your woznames? And it's NOT a Roll-on? They missed a Trick!
Manscaped does not ship outside of the US? The fuck...I tried to order the perfect kit using your promo code. I am located in Canada :/
2:25 Small correction, a blue laser can read and write more data than a red one not necessarily because it contains "more energy" it's because it has a higher frequency wavelength, that means the laser can be smaller, and thus it can be more precisely focused, that means they could then cram significantly more data into the same amount of physical space as a DVD or CD, and because it can be more precisely focused they could also pack more translucent layers of data into that same amount of space...
Cool
cool
Came here to say exactly this lol. Blue light is physically smaller than red light. Weird to think about the size of light, but yes, smaller wavelengths can be focused into a smaller area.
The blue lasers also penetrate the disc less, so they can have more layers on the discs, thus, more space. This graphic from Wikipedia explains it a lot clearer: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray#/media/File:Comparison_CD_DVD_HDDVD_BD.svg
I knew someone would be straight in on this 😂 "it contains more power" where did you even find that statement 😂
“Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.” -The Art of War
Nice. I too like Sabaton
"Business Is War" - Jack Tramiel
We need a miniseries on the life and times of Jack Tramiel. An Anglo-American co-production between Netflix and Channel 4, starring Ben Kingsley as either Irving Gould or Mehdi Ali and Timothy Spall as Jack himself.
That would bei awesome. I guess you are aware of kim justice? If not: m.ua-cam.com/video/nd9kmBn0M9k/v-deo.html
lnxrox dude Kim Justice documentaries are the best though. She’s like old school history channel but if it was all about cool computer and video game stuff
@@alistair4909 I am pretty sure Kim Justice is a he and not a she.
All these fools fighting over disc formats were never prepared for the xbox 360's ZUNE MARKETPLACE!
#ZuneNationREPRESENT
I had a 30gb brown one..
😂
Don't laugh, but I still use my zune. I prefer its software to organize my music.
I love my Zune.
My dad was a pretty big HD DVD supporter and was pretty salty when it lost, even holding off on getting a Blu-Ray player for a year or so afterward and refusing to get Netflix for a while because of how they dropped HD DVD. Our first Blu-Ray player was a PS3, and he still collects HD DVDs if he finds them at thrift stores (which he plays on our 360 drive).
what a trooper
What a sore loser. He subjects himself to inferior encoding and lossy audio!
Lol that's hardcore
@@Clay3613 oh yeah? then why does your Mom keep visiting his dad to HD DVD and chill every Saturday night?! 😉
Wow. I just kinda gave up on the format when it lost. All I have left is my old Harry Potter box set.
Y’all knuckleheads saying porn won the format war as if porn didn’t also realize the future was online streaming 🤦🏻♂️
(👆🏻👆🏻ALSO see our pinned comment 👆🏻👆🏻)
They'd be wrong either way... People just like to say porn wins format wars as a truism because it's funny, not because it's accurate, the fact of the matter is that VHS had already won against Beta before porn was even a thing on the format, the people in general chose VHS over Beta because of its longer recording capacity, a single VHS tape could record an entire football game, a Beta tape couldn't... Yeah, that format war was won by you yanks' bootleg rugby... People bought VCRs to do exactly that, Record TV programmes on Video Cassettes, that was in the late 70s, Home Video only became a thing in the early 80s and by then most people already had VHS VCRs in their home so film distributors just decided to support that format over Beta when they couldn't do both...
DVD on the other hand had no meaningful competitors, everyone just agreed on the format and it just took over...
Thank you. It helped VHS "win" (maybe), but that's it. There's never been another format war that porn helped pick the winner on, but people keep repeating the same nonsense.
@@zandert33 It's called a meme.
@@Puremindgames it's a freaking boring meme
@@zandert33 It's subjective.
As a commenter from Company Man’s video so eloquently put it: “The first ever DVD released was Twister, and the last HDDVD ever released was Twister.” How poetic.
😅
I've cornered the market on Peter Jackson's King Kong on HD-DVD
DanVanRob that’s the only HD DVD disc I could picture before this video.
Hmm.. I'll just take my 5 copies to the open market
Capitalism wooooooooooooo 🐍🐍🐍
I'm so jealous
Could wind up being worth hundreds of bucks down the road...ya never know
I’ll give you my twelve copies so you can just have every copy
As someone there at the time, the FINAL nail in the coffin for “HD DVD” was, in my opinion, when Microsoft released the Xbox 360 Elite at a big mark up and it did not include HD DVD as a base feature and you still had to buy the external TURD.
That is a good point that it never got integrated.
I still prefer physical formats because I have enough experience with weird-ass net connections to not want to put everything online. Besides, I wanna own my shit and hand it down to someone else in the future.
Oh God, you're gonna be the old man giving his grandson some big ass pile of VHS tapes that they're going to awkwardly smile and take and then donate to the Goodwill.
@@Xbob42 Nah, more like DVDs and Blu-Rays.
That and you can rip a physical disk (excluding 4k Blu-ray disks)...
@@alexdhall And even those may start to be cracked soon.
Yea I will always prefer physical media, having that case to display on your shelf and actually owning what you purchase is way better if you ask me
Digital stuff can easily get delisted over time or because of stuff like copyright/rights ownership
I worked at Sony during some of this, and was at the CES where Toshiba had canceled the press conferences. Their huge HD-DVD booth on the show floor was a very sad sight to see.
I also went to the Microsoft booth and tried to play Guitar Hero, and their demo 360 immediately RRoD'ed on me.
It felt like a good time to be a Sony employee.
Damn, that's pretty funny. Do you have anymore stories from your time at Sony?
Sony employees would find HD DVD demise sad.
@@RobertK1993 Why? We were team blu-ray.
You thought Sony was responsible for the PS3 delay.
But it was me, DIode!
plasticbutler This comment is underrated
I'll give ya that one (I usually find the DIO meme annoying). I imagine the manufacturing process for blue laser diodes is or at least was more expensive and possibly slower as well. I might have to jump down a rabbit hole some time to learn how they're actually made (usually better precision requires a slower manufacturing process in my experience but my experience doesn't include electronics manufacturing).
It was me Dio.
Zener or rectifier
@@grn1 You're not very fun at parties.
I only remember this war from the sidelines. I had no idea how deep it went. Good thing Sony learned their lesson and didn't invest in a portable media format that could only be played on a handheld console
That could be pligged into a tv
"Massive" 120 GB. Ah, memories
Why in quotations?
@@yellowwasanimposter520 Because he was... quoting something?
@@JackOfHarts96 nailed it.
120 GB aka 1/4 of Call of Duty
"all about that dongle lifestyle"
Might be a punching weight challenge: how many accessories/dongles can be active on a console at once?
No Good Call Apple and ask
Just get a lot of USB Extension cables and you're done
didn't usb have a theoretical limit of 255 devices per root port? (using hubs).
Practically you're limited by the port's bandwidth... which for USB2 is 480Mbits/sec. Controllers and keyboards however use mere bytes of bandwidth so I'd guess you can connect 200 of those...
Ask Sega
I'd much rather have blu-ray movies for the clarity of both sound and picture and the fact that I can sell it to someone else or even give it to family members if I get legitimately bored of the game.
Online only is still a bunch of BS... P.T, connection issues, DRMs and the fact that companies can remove these games without any warning...
Man... I'm still wishing that Scott Pilgrim vs the World would still make it onto the ps4, XboneX, steam or GoG....
ᐅᓇᓕᒃ Nanuq I didn’t have a ps3 back then but having played it once at a party I’d preorder on amazon ASAP if it got a rerelease on modern platforms but we know that likely can’t happen since licensing
@@alistair4909 Played the game before watching the movie and enjoyed if very much.
Yeah, it sucks but that's what happens when there's too many cooks involved. :s
greenland here
What if it was announced to be rereleased... as a Switch eShop exclusive
Lol
Speaking of royalties on formats and whatnot, you all should make a video about the history of Nintendo completely avoiding every single one of the "main" formats used during these consoles lifetime. They always did their own thing, and I'd love to hear an in-depth story about that.
yeah they managed to have 3 generations of disk systems that couldnt play movies or music kinda crazy
Yeah it was basically due to Nintendo not wanting to have to pay any other company money to use their cd/dvd or whatever drives and it led to nearly 10 years of stupid decisions by Nintendo. The cartridges are what sealed N64's fate as a failure and the small half sized disks that could only hold 1GB held the gamecube back also. Thank god Nintendo finally saw sense and just stuck a DVD drive in the Wii.
Oh man, I knew a guy who went in hard on this device. Bought every single movie that released and kept saying Blu-Ray sucks and would fail. Boy was he embarrassed after Blu-Ray won.
Terrance Addison As soon as I found out Blu Ray could hold more data and it had a hard protective coating that reseated scratches I knew they win. Plus PS3 helped and in general Blu Rays where a bit sharper and better audio at the time it used uncompressed LPCM audio then later got DTS HD Master and Dolby True HD audio where HDDVD was using Dolby Digital Plus As there audio choice.
Sounds like my friend who thought Dreamcast was going to dominate the PS2.
Same shit really you see the same movie lmao
Kylie McInnes Dreamcast was ahead of PS2 by a long shot but never got its support and reckless company decisions along with failed marketing led to its downfall real quick which is saddening. Dreamcast had better graphics, it had a internet browser, along with keyboard and mouse support, along with online play. Too good for it’s time.
@@nesswatch7935 The reality of the Dreamcast couldn't match the *hype* of the PS2, especially after how bad the Saturn was handled in the States.
Honestly, the durability and capacity advantage of Blu-ray is what really killed the war before it even began.
I've got one of these things! Bought it at a garage sale with like 20-30 movies.
@Cal Peace I've seen them in the clearance section at HPB but I haven't bought any, because at this point any of the titles worth having already have superior Blu-Ray releases. I might pick up one or two for the novelty of it now, they're cheap enough.
"That's why it's called the 360. It goes in a circle. I'm dizzy."
Never change, Derek.
Damn, really giving LGR a run for his money with this tech tale.
He kinda looks like him. Like they could definitely be related.
Another great video dude! But screw blu-ray, LASER DISC FOR LIFE!
McMuscle
Why?
@@rayfran06 It's a meme for kids who still think LD is inherently better because of analog fascination nonsense. There literally no reason to horde laser discs outside of maybe the big art work.
@@garaschneider4808 haha ok thank you! I was confused ...I subscribe to his channel and wonder why he would hate on Blu Ray, I mean I am aware of people and an argument of people that don't like the format. I was just confused....now I'm showing my age! Lol thank you
Laserdisc? Got nothin’ on CED.
I never thought someone could make the blueray/hddvd war so exciting lmfao
Sony: "We won the HD format war!"
Microsoft: "I'm gonna do what's called a Pro gamer move."
huh?
Did Sony really win though? I don't remember DVDs coming bundled with VHS, but 13 YEARS after Sony "won," the Blu-Ray/DVD combo pack is STILL more common than Blu-Ray only.
@@mariokarter13 that's a really valid point. Even if you consider it's mostly for people that haven't made the jump yet it's taking forever for DVD to fade away compared to VHS. And I think most of the movie watching population pretty much stopped buying DVDs and BluRay in favor of streaming services. That victory from Sony doesn't do much in the end. Physical console game still ship on bluray, that's pretty much the extend of it.
Imagine a world where HD DVD won..
Dash120z imagine a world where your console doesn’t come out with
A) Built In HDMI
B) Built In DVD Drive
Well, until 2 years later
Haha great video!
- Sent from my Xbox 360
Noice.
I remember during the midst of this format war. I was sure HD DVD was going to win over Blu Ray solely because of it's name. I figured "HD DVD" was easier for consumers to understand. Of course in the end it would have all been for nothing anyway.
Frisket Blu Ray sounded more cool and cutting the E off of Blue was ballsy
Frisket well I remember reading back than how Betamax had the better name than VHS and lost and how it would be the same for HD DVD as it had the better name than Blu-ray.
Blu-ray is way faster to pronounce and the name sounds very cool though the acronym has always been BD (Blu-ray Disc) but the marketing focused on using the name Blu-ray instead of BD.
Mass consumers like quick simple naming with no convoluted pronunciations.
Years late but I'd kinda argue the opposite in a sense.
This never occurred to me until it was brought up in a separate comment section, but think about it: There would have been a _ton_ of uninformed parents unaware of the difference between HD-DVD and DVD who would've ended up buying the DVD versions when their kids or whoever wanted the HD-DVD version.
It's kinda like the Wii U debacle. Was this an actual factor in HD-DVD's defeat? I don't know, but brand confusion is rarely a good thing and I'm sure there's people who would have expected HD-DVD to work in their regular DVD player because to them both of these formats are just DVDs.
I don't remember the war at all because I didn't care - I was not in the least interested in upgrading. DVD was and still is good enough for me (as well as for most consumers). I probably didn't even realize the two were seperate incompatible formats.
19:13 FYI, there were no "Total Hi Def" discs that ever made it to market. WB announced Total Hi Def at CES '07, but they ended up putting development of these discs on hold in November of that same year because of a lack of interest from other studios.
Right. I think they might have demonstrated it at a trade show but it was never released. It was a dumb idea. Basically it would have crippled both formats to single layers for each version. 15GB (HD DVD) and 25GB (Blu-ray)
Let’s not forget I think both LG and Samsung sold players that could play both formats. Other than the OS running the formats the data files were essentially the same types with Blu having the extra storage and larger bandwidth advantage.
"Massive 120GB Drive."
Haha
When I bought my XBox 360 Elite, it didn't come with a hard drive.
Just like 60 GB of flash storage. Literally, the HDD bay was empty.
@General Grievous The Galactic Hero it was big back when it launched but it's laughable now
I'm pretty sure the 360 included component cables out of the box alongside composite cables. I had a first gen 360, and it included a composite/component combo cable (so 6 RCA connectors total, 2 for audio, 1 for composite video, and 3 for component video). And most HD TVs at the time had component inputs as it was more common than HDMI back then.
Nope
@@xSnappa ?
The cheaper "core" system (the one without a harddrive) did not, but the standard model with a harddrive did. I had that model, it came with a combo-cable that had both composite and component connections, with a switch on it to choose which one to output over. And yes, most HDTVs back then had component, in fact, the first few HDTVs didn't even have HDMI as that was a standard that came after HDTVs (There were several articles about how HDCP was going to make those TVs useless). HDTVs removing component is actually a recent thing. (My TV from 2015 for example, it's a 4K 120hz 3D HDR SmartTV...... yet it has both HDMI and Component). Most of Derek's videos are incredibly well-researched and have corrected me on many things that I mis-understood before, but this one felt poorly researched.
(E.G. like claiming that commercial optical disks have their data burned in by lasers, they do not, they are pressed. It's burnable disks that get written to by lasers. Also every time I have been to an electronics store 90% of the movies are in Blu-Ray format, I don't know where he is seeing stores where the DVD rack is bigger. To say nothing that streaming is poorer quality than disks.)
In 2006 I bought a 720p LCD TV and man was it sweet at the time! I had an Xbox 360 with component cables, so I bought the HD-DVD add on that came with King Kong. I wasn't choosing sides in the format war, I just wanted to view HD content on my sweet TV. I bought four or five HD-DVD movies that year including an HD demo disc with an aquarium and fireplace videos. I was holding out before starting to collect movies to replace my DVD collection. By 2008 the winner was clear, and I bought a stand alone Bluray player and my first purchase was the Matrix Trilogy Bluray box set. Now I own all my movies on Bluray and 4K UHD Bluray.
Edit: Physical Media is greater than online streaming anyday!
I worked in high end home electronics during this war and the consumer confusion, tension, and apprehension was almost palpable.
I remember that too. People didn't want to invest in either format because nobody knew who was going to end up with studio support in the end. I actually think Michael Bay was partially wrong: Microsoft didn't care if both formats failed, and they didn't even care if Blu-Ray won out in the end. They just wanted to delay consumer investment until the digital delivery platform was ready. After that, the people who still wanted to buy physical media could go crazy on Blu as far as MS was concerned.
Wow. Michael bay sounds like he lives in his mother's basement.
[i-see-what-you-did-there.jpg]
*bum-duh-tiss*
Given what his movies are like, it wouldn't surprise me.
Isn't mothersbasement the dork who went to task against Uniquenameosaurus' "pirate anime" movement?
Because I can't say I'm a fan of his for his one dimensional thinking regarding streaming services fighting over exclusives
Bigbrainjoke.png
And now we're dealing with another format war - Dolby vision vs Samsung's HDR10+
Isn't Dolby sound and HDR10 more color visible on the screen?
@@Notfallkaramell more dynamic range between darks and brights as well as a wider color gamut
@@AltimaNEO CMIIW, recently HDTVTest stated Dobly Vision being superior, because HDR peaked its bitrate something.
It's been going for years and I wish it would end. I hesitated for years buying a 4K TV because of this color format war.
@@nabieladrian It was always "superior" (12 bit color, better variance in contrast), it's just that HDR10 is slightly more supported because it's supported by SMPTE.
i found an hd dvd drive literally 2 minute walk from where i live for like 10 CAD lmao
That's like 5 cents US lmao
Small correction, Xbox 360 shipped with dual COMPONENT/composite cables. Always thought it was dope that you only needed one cable no matter where you were going at the time.
Not all of them, mine only had Composite AV Cable.
Oh damn, that’s whack :O I guess the bigger question is did you even have an HDTV thou? Lol
@@Indremafan I got the premium 360 at launch and it came with the dual video cable. Maybe it depended on the model bought?
@@Indremafan Not back then no, still had a crt :)
Core came with composite
Wonderfully done!
Man, I feel old now. I was 19 when the 360 launched. I watched all of this happen, and yes, had the HD DVD drive and a PS3 by 2007.
Since when did pink gorilla games sell weird peripherals like that?
Josh Cooley they’d had it for months too!! 🤩 I was so e x c i t e d
Because the PS3 and PS4 had built in blu-ray players, I never bought a standalone blu-ray player until October 2019, when my PS3 had been donated to my mother to watch stuff in her bedroom, and my PS4 was in storage, but I wanted to be able to watch blu-rays with my mother on Sundays (I'd prepare food, then while it would cook, we'd watch something together). Until then, since 2012, I'd had access to a blu-ray player via my PS3, then later my PS4, although before the PS3 purchase in 2012 (I bought it for a specific 2012 release that later came to Vita), I only really used DVDs. I've never once owned any kind of HD DVD player, but I do remember before I had any real interest in either format, I would see both all over the shelves in the shops. However, when blu-ray and HD DVD launched, I was still actually using VHS for my personal use in my shared bedroom with my sister (I was born in 1997, her 1999), and whilst she had a DVD player we could use, DVDs were mostly for downstairs use for family watching, and upstairs we mostly just used VHS. It's fun to reminisce.
In 07 there was still question as to which format would reign supreme: Blu Ray or HD-DVD. When the porn industry (which was much more centralized back then) officially chose blu-ray, I immediately returned my xbox 360's HD-DVD external player and all the movies for a refund from Best Buy and got all my money back. Within months, HD-DVD disappeared.
For some reason of all the things I've done in my life accurately surmising the writing on the wall for the HD-DVD is still one of my highlights.
At a game store near me I went there and they had a HD-DVD movie and I was like holy crap that thing is dead
That's resume material
People keep focusing on porn for some reason but the moment when everyone knew HD DVD was done for was when Warner Brothers decided to support Blu-ray only. They held the key to deciding the winner (especially after Paramount had switched to HD DVD exclusivity just a few months prior) and apparently it was very close; the coin could have dropped either way. In any case, once WB announced their decision it didn't take long for all the remaining HD DVD-supporting studios to follow suit and just a few months later Toshiba threw in the towel and declared HD DVD officially dead.
@@Astfgl
It's interesting how their management is an older-style one where they allow the 'founders/early adopters' to deal with the biggest problems, then finally decide once enough positive points on one side has been made.
Except the porn industry initially backed HD-DVD, throughout 2007. They only switched to Blu-Ray after WB announced they were dropping HD-DVD. The porn industry has little to do with the result of that format war.
Awesome video as always. I remember working as a gaming journalist at the time here in Brazil and things were just wild with the console war, but HDDVD couldn't even be found at stores, so, that format war was more like a small riot for us.
What a video, holy shit. This story really delivered. Keep up the great work!
We're the generation that gets to say "Beta max? pffftt, remember HD DVD?"
....This joke was stolen from StormDainProductions.
bigevilworldwide1 wait like into the 2010s?! That’s crazy! I gotta look that up
UHD Blu-rays? Wow, that's potato quality. HDR? Wtf, that's SDR now.
"This creates frustration levels only previously achieved by Blast Corps."
bigevilworldwide1 Beta should have won better picture and sound quality and tapes much more portable.
I liked that HD-DVD had double sided discs that had HD on one side and DVD on the other so you could take them to anyone's house and watch it. It took forever for Blu-rays to even include dvd copies (after they were essentially worthless). PS3 was always a trojan Blu-ray player first and foremost.
Supposedly dual sided Blurays were going to come out too. It's like they abandoned the idea and just stuck a separate DVD in the box.
That footage of a little Trinitron GOING WIDESCREEN (3:00), I recognise it from a DVD promo at the start of my Matrix VHS. At the time in 2006 I thought it interesting how the 1999 DVD player featured in it looked basically just like the 2006 BD players I was seeing in the local Sony shop's window at the time. Very big, very chunky, trying to fit in aesthetically with big home-hifi amplifiers and AV receivers.
Had to stop watching to get down this little trip down memory lane.. haha. Whichever one of you two predominantly finds the B-roll footage, it's always a top-rate job 👍
Unrelated: I found the ball deodorant thing kinda funny, cos I've been using my regular women's deodorant (Sure, by Unilever) in places beyond my underarms for years. Works great on underboob and balls. No chafing with sports bras or the dreaded underboob sweat here. Ah, trans privilege. Literally went "wait, have cis guys just.. been putting up with ball chafing this whole time?".
I've got an Old Spice too, cos damn it sometimes I just want to smell like black pepper instead of flowers or cotton. (I don't understand the men's ones that smell like diesel or whatever Axe/Lynx smells of though...). The Old Spice definitely feels less slippery than the women's deodorants, so isn't as diversely useful as the Sure. I'm guessing the anti-chafe stuff is because of the expectation of shaved underarms? So I wonder if Manscaped's Ball Deodorant is basically a women's formula with different perfume...
Oh hey, you showed more from that promotional DVD film at 3:55.
There were actual widescreen CRTs, with the Sony GDM-FW900 being the most notable.
That was an awesome mini-documentary. I love it when there's a satisfying conclusion that talks briefly about history after the chosen period and how things panned out in the longer term.
Was also pleasantly surprised by the mention of the narrowly-avoided MMCD/SD war. But they managed to repeat it in the home hifi realm, with SACD and DVD-audio, which both use red lasers. And in that situation, they kinda both lost. Hardly anyone bought them, instead unwittingly getting a DVD player that could also play SACD or DVD-audio depending on manufacturer (I think the PS3 can play SACD?). Now the people both formats were aimed at buy Blu-ray audio instead, which hold even more music or alternate arrangements/masters of the same music.
It's funny that so often what is good for these companies is bad for customers, and vice versa. Almost all regular people, if they were aware of VHS/Beta, were super glad that it didn't happen with DVD and there was no way they'd be stuck with a pseudo-dead player the next year. But as you said, companies don't like it because the royalties got split between more of them.
@@kaitlyn__L One format "war" that almost never gets mentioned is the DVD v. DIVX battle, although it was more a skirmish due to how bad a curb-stomp battle it was.
Man, I remember this "war." Still used DVDs for the most part so I didn't care who won. Ended up siding with Blu-ray near the end simply because I liked the name better.
It was kind of a saving grace that HD-DVD was quickly dropped, since the final nail in its coffin was the discovery of how stupidly easy it was to crack the copy protection(every disc made, used the same code if I recall?).
Hey! That's the Snatcher record my label produced behind ya there! You have excellent taste, my friend!
11:44 From my experience, playing Dead Rising in Standard Definition makes NES Battletoads look easy!
I remember not having any issues with it,though I remember reading about others having them.
I remember having problems reading Devil May 4 texts on an SDTV (it was possible, but it made my eyes tired), and that was the game that made me buy an HDTV for my Xbox 360.
It seems that, since the Xbox 360 was launched, the interface of almost all Capcom games were designed specifically for HDTVs.
What a lot of people seem to have forgotten is that while they were released at a similar time, HD DVD was much more complete and functional than Blu-ray out of the gate. HD DVD players had all the interactivity and online features right away and pretty much Just Worked™, while Blu-ray had to go through two or three profile updates in its first year to get up to feature parity. Not only that, but every Blu-ray player that wasn't a PS3 was sloooooooow thanks to the use of the bloated Java framework for interactivity. For an early adopter, these things mattered. A lot. Oh yeah and let's not forget that the HD DVD format was generally more affordable too, making the barrier of entry for getting into HD movies much lower.
Astfgl I had a PS3 witch loaded blu rays really quick and any firmware update was done by the console updates themselves. PS3 too this day is still by far the best blu ray player.
Correct ... few people remember the HD experience of 2006-2009, but PS3's could take up to 30sec for the JavaRT to load, since it wasn't baked into the firmware by design (& rightly so given Java's vulnerabilities).
I still have my HD-DVD drive for 360, I don't regret it because you can get the majority of HD-DVD movies for pennies. I still have it hooked up and still use it every now and then. When you use it, it actually tells all your friends that you are playing "Xbox 360 HD-DVD Player". So i get some funny messages from time to time when people on my friend list see that.
I HIGHLY appreciate the jumping flash music in the video
These videos are always super informative and fun.
Especially all the drops into previously done videos here. It's great!
Actually I remember lots of tvs back then had component IN. It’s new tvs now that don’t have it.
HD-DVD would have still lost because the Xbox wouldn’t have sold that many units at $500.
they could have added it to the elite which was a few years later from the release. the tech would be cheaper and with how they had multiple tiers of systems the elite could have come out with a variant with the hddvd player in it, the later pro models could have as well, also i do believe the 360 was sold at a profit its entire life span so they could have sold at cost or at slight loss and pushed the medium
Yes, but the screen formats were a bit of a mess.
I stopped using PAL end of the 90ies for obvious reasons. VGA was a lot better and later came the digital panels with DVI. Console support was lacklustre, so another reason to play on the PC. Later consoles finally got a digital output with HDMI - which fit only on the newer "TVs". They were expensive and the old monitors were still good. You can convert HDMI to DVI-D lossless, but then again, at least Sony required HDCP capability for BD playback - which most screens didn't support.
So also for viewing movies, it was easier to just play a BD rip on a (HT)PC.
No consoles for me from that era, but I later bought a Wii U, which plays all the Gamecube, Wii and Wii U titles on a standard HDMI screen which include some pretty good multiplayer titles. And that for me is a reason to run a console besides the PC I already have.
Indeed, considering how well-researched Derek's videos usually are I was surprised about the several errors in this one, including about component. HDTVs came out before HDMI was a thing, the first few HDTVs were composite-only. And composite was VERY common in HDTVs back then, it's removal was a recent thing. I have a 2015 TV that's 4K, HDR, 120hz, HDR, and a SmartTV.... yet it still has both composite and component. Hardly unheard of for even 2015 for a TV to still have component.
Great video! During my time in college approximately 6 years ago I did a 30-35 page research paper on this Blu-ray/HD-DVD battle & oddly I very much enjoyed the research. Especially when I presented it coupled with a PowerPoint & seeing almost everyone in my class have no idea this event even happened. I'm a new subscriber with this being in the first few videos I've watched! I'll definitely be back to watch! Great presentation & research overall! Thanks!
Superb video as always! You guys really made this whole thing even more fascinating and entertaining than I expected.
The worst part about this war is that you just know Michael Bay is an "I told you so" kind of guy. The real losers here are his friends who have to hear him tell the story of how he predicted streaming was the future back when Blu-ray and HD-DVD were duking it out.
Thanks! I really enjoyed this one.
I still have my 360 HD DVD player and a whole bunch of HD DVD’s. At the time, if you already owned a 360 it was a comparatively accessible way to play HD movies on your brand new flat screen HD TV. And since my local video (rental) store had a 60/40 split between HD DVD and BluRay and nobody knew who would win the format war, the 360 HD DVD player made sense to me back then.
Ultimately though, I ended up with many HD DVD movies that I can’t use anymore unless I hook up my old 360. 😅 But for its time it was an amazing movie watching experience.
Ngl, i kinda wish HD DVD had won the format war
If only for the fact that it just sounds like a more natural continuation/evolution of DVD technology in terms of the name
I wish they both won and shared the market together so we had more choices.
It was region free as well. Unlike Blu Ray.
@@bubba842 Most Blu ray disc are region free now it's optional
Geoff from mother's basement doing michael bay's voice was unexpected! :o
Isn't mothersbasement the dork who went to task against Uniquenameosaurus' "pirate anime" movement?
Because I can't say I'm a fan of his for his one dimensional thinking regarding streaming services fighting over exclusives
Imagine the quality of games if Microsoft went for the integrated HD-DVD.
Some people believe that Microsoft was going to announce a 360 with a built-in HD DVD drive at CES 2008 but canceled at the last minute when Warner Brothers announced dropping the format on the eve of the opening. I would have loved to hear the offers getting flung around between companies at that time.
Bruh maybe Oblivion wouldn't have had so much cut content
Remember that Microsoft is only a thing in certain regional markets. In Japan, for example (the home of both companies), it was a home run for Sony as it had the ONLY HD video game system, which had a blu ray player in it.Things like this made the studios move to blu ray. I didn't even know that Microsoft had a console until a few years ago and I've been gaming for 40 years.
The History of Media Wars are always entertaining to watch.
Energy in the laser has NOTHING to do with capacity. Blue laser is higher wavelength and can be focused on a tighter beam. Hense be able to read smaller data spirals
I thought I recognized that voice, the "professional shitbag" hint made me laugh so hard
SSFF, component was used for HDTV before HDMI, and continued to be supported on HDTV's well after HDMI became the standard. My first HDTV had component and DVI (which also came before HDMI), and I had to use an HDMI to DVI adapter cable.
That's what I thought as well. At first I was wondering if the supposed "rarity" of component was an American thing, as I'm from Europe, and at least here component was anything but uncommon, in my experience anyway. I bought a budget 42-inch TV in 2013, and it still supported component cables, as did my previous two TVs (both were small, and quite cheap), the oldest was only HD-ready and from 2006.
Somehow the audio sync is super off now
I'm also seeing this too. UA-cam probably had a glitch that messed up this video since there was no sync problem when I saw this video when it first released.
Does anyone else remember Gates commenting that physical media was moot and the future was digital streaming?
Man, I remember playing Dead Rising on a big, chunky, "standard" TV...
Anyway, the 360 was awesome!
I remember hooking my 360 to my PC monitor using a VGA cable and used my surround sound system for audio. Was the best way to play it prior to HDMI
Agreed. I still use a PC monitor with my PS4, they just are easier to look at and run at 60hz.
2:27, KoF 99, Love those games
99,00,01?
No thanks
That striker system...not to mention how broken one of those three was...
I stick to 95 for the old school,97/98 for the new one...
And never got anywhere near to the 3D ones
No
Stay away from me!
I want the beatiful pixel art!
Not this pseudo anime crap!
I've not seen this guy for years, wasn't he the Happy Video Game Nerd. I used to enjoy your videos, good to see you still around.
HD DVD, Blu-ray, cool cool. I’ll just be over here with my VCR watching 90’s anime I recorded on VHS tapes. :P
4k movie collection slowly growing. Can still remember the first blu-ray way back when it was initially coming out.
I still use my HD-DVD drive pretty regularly. It's plug-and-play with a Windows computer. I think I'm at 116 discs right now. Hell, I just found four more of them at a thrift store last week!
It's wild to me that Xbox One S has a UHD player, but PS4 Pro doesn't. Sony isn't even bothering to include physical media technology that they own!
Fascinating. But I'd still turn to Technology Connections for a thorough explanation of how HD-DVD worked.
Does he have an episode on that?
Not sure if you care, but during this war I worked in an adult store. The industry went all in on HD DVD. There was not a single Blu Ray in the store while I worked there. Guess that wasn't enough to win the was either lol.
This dude looks like William Osmans brother.
I love the use of music from Fall of Cybertron when going over the Michael Bay segment.
"Even if one managed to have this, it was really rare and expensive to have an HDTV that supported something other than HDMI, even at the time."
.... O_O ... Uhhh WHAT???? HDMI didn't even EXIST on early-mid 00's HDTV's, it was ALL component video (or VGA if you were using a monitor). Meethinks your memory has gotten crazy fuzzy and distorted about HDMI's rise to ubiquity. HDMI wasn't truly commonplace on TV's till like 2007-2008. When the PS3 launched in late 2006, it was still near exclusively the domain of brand new, premium sets.
This episode remind me of the always important question, what if the N64 used the CD format instead the old cartridge system?
Uh, SSFF? You might want to look at this upload because the A/V is wildly out of sync.
What also didn't help either format was that the Great Recession was in full swing by the late period of the war, slowing HD sales even more.
Why is the audio in this video so horrendously out of sync? It starts out in sync...but then goes WAY OFF starting at 2:33 at least obviously. I have a suspicion it breaks at 2:25 but that's just a guess. It's REALLY distracting.
Same here. Must be something with UA-cam since this problem was not here when I first saw this video when it was originally released.
I definitely predicted the outcome of this format were in correctly at the time. I believed HD-DVD would win because it had nailed down the three pieces of media format success: price, piracy, and porn.
That’s right, when the HD optical formats came out, the pornography industry was not allowed to release their movies on Blu-ray, so for the remainder of the format war, if you wanted your naughty bits in 1080p, you needed HD-DVD.
Combine that advantage with the cheaper players and less aggressive digital rights management that Derek discusses in this video, and the relative failure of the PlayStation 3 console compared to the Xbox 360 and even the Wii, and I thought for sure HD-DVD would be the winning format.
HDTVs did have composite in even if they didn’t have hdmi.
*Sigh* I remember not understanding the difference between DVD and HD DVD, being dumbfounded when my copy of Serenity wouldn't play in anything I owned, and shelling out the $500 for a Toshiba HD-A1 in April of 2006. Picked up a bunch of HD DVD's for cheap on eBay once the format was dead. In April of 2009, Warner Brothers began offering a trade in deal where you could send them the cover inserts of your HD DVDs and they would send you a matching Blu-Ray. Perfect timing for when I picked up a used PS3.
I remember getting one of those when it first came out I still have a few HD-DVDs myself it was actually pretty cool at least to me it was
I was passively listening to this and the cut to "Michael Bay" happened and I heard Geoff Thew and was like, "this isn't an animu" great cameo. 👍
Was that a Pink Gorilla price sticker?
Not to overstate, but this is such a well-produced video, it's a great story, told/presented well, killed all my confusion on this incarnation of the format wars, and it's well worth sticking around to the end. With other, more recent videos in mind, just felt this had to be said. Thanks, SSFF.
Is the travel bag called "the sack"?
11:30 In my family's case, we didn't even have an HDTV until 2011 & even then we couldn't use it because it came without a remote!
Downfall of Blu-ray? Don’t you mean downfall of HD-DVD?
Blu-Ray won the physical Hi-Def format war against HD-DVD, but I believe what Derek is saying is that its downfall was that it never won supreme over everything like VHS won over Selectavision, LaserDisc, and Betamax. It beat HD-DVD just in time to compete with the budding streaming industry, and still never put standard DVD into the grave like DVD had done with VHS.
@@stu729 DVD's have been given away as freebies with most Blu-rays for years now. If they couldn't play DVD in Blu-ray players, the adoption rate would've been better.
Not just one of my favorite videos on SSFF, but on UA-cam. Damn good work Derek. I learned quite a bit today thanks to you & a "Hello" from Anchorage my friend! +1 :D
I'm sorry but, a year later I'm watching this (since it was posted) and NO ONE else mentioned a problem with the audio? Why is it behind like 10-20 seconds?
I've watched the whole video. There aren't any audio issues that I can see
Update: Google didn’t beat them at their own game.
Doesn't blueray contain more data because a blue laser is narrower and therefore can fit more pits and lands in the same space as a dvd and not because it has more energy?
Yes, and the focus on writing with the laser is also strange. Most disks are pressed. I'm not sure an HD-DVD writer even reached the consumer market.
Cyborg -Pixel-Fox Nah man, it’s because of MOAR POWAR!
There were two major reasons I liked HD DVD over Blu-ray, and neither had anything to do with console support. I could buy an XBOX 360 HD DVD drive and connect it via USB to my Windows Vista PC, install a driver from Microsoft via Windows Update/Microsoft Update, install a compatible HD DVD codec (by purchasing something like Cyberlink's PowerDVD or Intervideo's WinDVD HD software) and I instantly had full HD media playback support for my PC. In fact, if I were to then purchase another piece of software from a vendor called Slysoft, I could then rip HD-DVD's to my hard drive as well as play HD-DVD's on any screen, including ones such as my 1920x1200 Apple Cinema display which lacked HDCP support which would normally prevent viewing of HD-DVD content. Second, HD-DVD had these nifty combo discs which included both the HD-DVD version of the film as well as a standard DVD version, meaning that even if I didn't own an HD-DVD player, I could still watch the film on my regular DVD player. This also made it much easier for things like sharing films with friends and family as most people didn't have any kind of HD disc playback device (regardless of how many PS3s were sold; in fact, I knew maybe 1 person who owned one for the entire duration of that console generation and I certainly didn't, though I did eventually purchase one during the subsequent console generation for the sake of playing one game which at the time I couldn't play on PC due to my hardware not measuring up and the PS3 being the cheaper option). If Sony had managed to make a combo type format that could play on standard DVD players and drop the price of Blu-ray discs to something even remotely reasonable (seriously, they STILL cost like $25~$30 even after all these years, unlike regular DVDs which saw a massive price drop a few years into that format's lifespan making it much more accessible as a format to replace VHS; I think cost is a much bigger factor here than Sony and many others may realize, beyond the simple convenience of streaming content via Netflix and the like). Still, ultimately Microsoft was right, and streaming was/is the way of the future. Physical media is pretty much dead (when was the last time you bought a DVD or even a CD? I know it's been years for me) and digital streaming as well as digital downloads have pretty much become the standard now that faster internet connections are more widely available, so in the long run winning the last great format war didn't do Sony much good. It still bums me out that HD-DVD lost though, because I still think it had some key advantages that Blu-ray hasn't provided.
I was saying to my brother what a load of crap it is they STILL sell DVD here for $20 new. We are talking 576i in 2019?.No.Blu-rays should be $20 IF THAT as you stated BLU-RAY never recieved a price drop. Bought ONE blu ray to try it 2 years aso 28 days later......which after popping it in and after a google searched realised it was nt a true blu ray release.
@@aussieguy1012 Yeah, I just looked it up, and apparently that film was shot in 720x576 resolution (i.e. lower than even 720p) so it's not surprising that the Blu-Ray wasn't a true HD Blu-Ray because all they can do with a low-res source like that is try to upscale it, which is bound to look bad, especially on a good HD TV because it will reveal all the flaws and artifacts from the digital processing and upscaling (just like watching a low quality DVD upscaled on a 1080p screen). From some of the reviews I read about that release, apparently the quality is so bad that it isn't even as good as some regular DVD releases (they rated it between a VHS and DVD for picture quality, which is not great for a DVD and absolutely horrible for an HD-DVD/Blu-Ray). They definitely shouldn't have charged those kinds of prices for a film like that.
the death of streaming is capped ISP's I've heard horror stories about it