Toshiba talks about its XDE future
By Steven Kim 
posted Jan 6th 2009 12:38PM
posted Jan 6th 2009 12:38PM
posted Jan 6th 2009 12:38PM
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Does the toshiba boot up a lot faster than a Blu Ray player, and have better response times?
I don't know how fast "boot" time is for the Toshiba but I have to ask: What is more important when watching a movie, how fast it starts to play or how good it looks and sounds while watching the entire movie? I'm guessing the mere seconds in difference boot time would pale in comparison to the ~2hrs of quality 1080p video and HD sound you'd get....just spitballing here...
that's simple: people that REALLY care about the best high def stuff already have Blu Ray. A regular person (what most EngadgetHD readers tend to forget about) doesn't want to deal with a disc player that behaves like a 386 computer. BD players aren't seconds, you are looking at a near minute to bootup and get the disc playing compared to a few seconds for a DVD player. A marginal (to them) increase in pic quality isn't as import as a cheap player that just plain works - not exactly BD or HD DVD players.
And HD freaks should remember that normal people aren't going to be able to tell the difference between their old 5.1 and HD sound (and most have crappy home theater in a box setups anyway).
Alex
minutes?????
none of my blu-ray players has EVER taken more than about 20 - 25 seconds to boot up or load a disc to the menu screen
Alex, more accurately some earlier generation BD players are quite slow. Fortunately recent players are far more responsive to the point that it doesn't matter any more. More irritating is the practice by some studios such as Disney to inflict extremely hard to skip trailers and other crap onto the front of the movie. If they want me to watch their stupid trailers, they should at least make it a 1-shot deal (i.e. store the fact I've seen them on the BD player as BD-J allows), or put them on the menu and make viewing optional.
@JDS:
read a little closer sir. "near minute" < "minutes"
For me it's not the blu-ray player booting up it's the barrage of MPAA warnings and previews that don't allow me to go straight to the menu screen. Those take longer to get through than any black or blue screen on startup.
Toshiba begging not to make a Blu-ray player these days. It is something to see a company try so hard to save face after they so publicly last year lost it. I love it if they can't when the HD format war then there is no reason to have an HD format because SD DVD is just fine. LOL
They lost $1B on HD DVD, they're not in a particularly good place financially, and Blu-ray is both a competitive market and one that is still trying to prove any long term viability.
It would be insanity for Toshiba to make a Blu-ray player. That's why they're not doing it.
Look, there would be plenty of "face saving" ways to enter the market if they thought it made sense. Something as simple as a combo player, for example. But it's just not an area they believe they can make money from. And, outside of the Blutard group, I don't think anyone can honestly disagree with their assessment.
I really wish Toshiba would introduce a competitive Blu-ray player. They could have the Blu-ray and the XDE upscaling together and really be an impressive product....
Except that XDE is a transitional/marketing technology which isn't very different than standard upscaling. If they produced a Blu-ray player that incorporated their super resolution technology (which is different than standard upscaling), that would be much more interesting.
Insanity? Why? Perhaps they don't see any future in HD physical media. But wait a minute... they invested nearly $1billion in an attempt to monopolise it. While they're off pretending they don't care anyway, the rest of the world is moving on. Except, that is, people who use words like "Blutard", I mean, get over yourself man that is just so sad.
They spent $1billion on a the technology to support an HD OPTICAL format that would act as a bridge between DVD and an flash based HD format.
I'd be surprised if we don't see a demo of HD at 2160p or higher on flash memory (probably not SDHC) on or before CES 2010.
That said, the screen shots in the linked article are pretty nice. I'd have to see an in person comparison between XDE and my Reon, but wouldn't hesitate to point people that aren't going to buy Blu in the direction of an XDE based player.
Toshiba speculated $1billion on developing, manufacturing, marketing and subsidising HD DVD fully expecting that money back plus plenty more. They couldn't have cared less about "building bridges" to the so-called future utopia of SD cards with movies copied on to them.
No its Sony and BDA that could give a flip about the Future formats. Toshiba and HD DVD PRG was open about certain features of HD DVD being a testing platform for future delivery methods for movies and digital media, thus the requirement for all licensed HD DVD Players to support Ethernet connectivity. The purpose of the Ethernet connectivity with HD DVD was to provide expanded downloadable content for the movie, and the idea being that once people got use to downloading extra content from the internet they would actually start offering full feature/longer expanded content at a later date, which would lead to bypassing disc media all together. The format has bridge platform written all over it, its operation software was developed specifically by Microsoft for online media interaction. That is more than you can say about Blu-ray which has gone through multiple versions of the format already and Blu-disc java which is buggy at the best of times.
Why would I buy HD DVD player only to use it to stream from the internet? TV's are coming out that do that themselves. What utter baloney.
wake up Pete, there are plenty of STBs that stream Netflix. Why not have box that streams also play HD discs?
Aside: personally I never trust TVs with other functionality - the VHS combos, DVD combos, DVR combos, they all are crippled in some way or just plain suck.
You need to pay attention Alex, plenty is my point. Toshiba wasn't looking to invest $1billion where everyone and their dog could dip their toes, it was all about HD DVD i.e. optical HD media.
Pete, you should, perhaps, actually read the HD DVD specs and the white papers. While the first (and last) HD DVD players were disc based, the specs were talking about - from the beginning - an integrated online infrastructure, where movies would be downloaded or streamed, with managed copy used to transfer copies across from any media to any media. The only reason a disc was involved in HD DVD from the beginning was because that's the way the market works today. A disc was absolutely necessary as a transition technology. But the HD DVD standard itself is almost entirely media independent, it requires a disc as a bootstrap, but the DVD Forum never saw discs as the future.
If they had, well, do you honestly think they'd have adopted the 15G HD DVD disc instead of the 25G Blu-ray disc? That actually came up before the DVD Forum. Nobody vetoed Blu-ray media against the wishes of the remainder of the DVD Forum (unlike the BDA, which was pretty much controlled by Sony, and so many decisions that won the support of the vast majority of BDA members were vetoed by Sony, including Advanced Content), they supported the 15G format because while it wasn't particularly high, nobody saw disc based media as having much of a long term impact, so expecting DVD replicators to invest in entirely new plant for a disc system that had, at most, a five year lifetime, was considered ludicrous.
Toshiba got out of the HD DVD market not just because of Warner's idiocy, but because they saw it as an uphill struggle that wouldn't take Toshiba where they, and the rest of the DVD Forum, saw media going. In the end, there were cheaper ways of pushing online content. And this isn't revisionism, Toshiba made it absolutely clear at the time, when they shut down their HD DVD business, that online content was the future, and that with the lack of support HD DVD was getting, it just wasn't worth them continuing to push it as a standardized online content infrastructure. In the mean time, the DVD Forum has been playing with DVD2.0, which is an attempt to revive the HD DVD standards cheaply. As DVD2.0 is an SD format, there'd be no point in them doing this if the aim was anything other than pushing for a standardized online infrastructure.
I'd like you to take a look at this document:
http://www.dvdforum.org/images/Requirements%20Specification%20for%20HD%20DVD%20Video%20Application-July2005.pdf
It shows you what the DVD Forum was trying to do with HD DVD. If the long term end point of HD DVD was disc based media, you might want to ask why HD DVD's requirements included support for online rentals and purchases of content. Why they were so obsessed with low bit rate codecs (H.264 and VC-1) when they could have adopted higher capacity discs. Why support for CPRM, the DRM scheme built into SD cards, was mandatory. Why managed copy was mandatory. Why Advanced Content was standardized rather than being a "Meh, let's just throw in Java and let developers develop their own protocols" system. And why every player, from day 1, had to have a wired or wireless Internet connection, despite it adding to the cost? I mean, why FORCE player manufacturers to include Internet access in their devices?
You really think HD DVD was intended to be disc based forever? If so, you're not asking the right questions, and you're ignoring what the DVD Forum both said, and did.
So basically you're saying they made HD DVD crap on purpose to push internet streaming. No wonder and thank buddha it tanked.
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