Blowing the Blu-Ray Way
Just before my elder brother left for his vacation to India, my younger brother asked him for a couple of DVDs, to which his response was a big NO. He isn’t being stingy, just a little reluctant to squander money on something whose value is being seriously contested.
With blu-ray discs threatening to become the standard soon, no one seems to want to invest in DVDs anymore. They will become obsolete in next to no time, just like our tapes and records did. Now is a good time to weep for that glorious DVD collection in your shelves, and even your VHS tapes if you haven’t already.
Tapi has been trying to put sense into my head and prevent me from buying the third season of Battlestar Gallatica and many other films for the same reason. I see his point, but it's tough! Despite the mandatory move to HD in a few months, I don't see myself watching movies in their hi-def glory at home any time soon. Am I in denial? Maybe.
I can see blu-ray discs trickling into the stores, and how people are taking to them quickly. At work, I am thrilled to be able to use blu-ray and it really is a blessing. The fact that I can store 50GB of content or upload an uncompressed hi-def video directly onto a disc straight after editing is truly amazing. But as a regular consumer, I know that the demand for blu-ray players is higher than the number available in the market, and even if that changes, I suspect that we'll see skyrocketing prices for a long long time. The question is not whether it is worth it. The reality is that there is no escaping it.
I keep getting asked if hi-def is really higher quality. Yes. The difference will definitely make you say WOW. It’s not even a subtle difference. I know people who can’t tell “film” from standard definition, but I don’t know people who don’t recognize hi-def. HD with it's flawless image rendering is a celebration of visual clarity. Film with it's cracks, pops and hisses is a celebration of amalgamation. It's hard to pick one over the other. I like the smoothness of HD as much as the texture of film. But, there are some filmmakers who use HD cameras to replicate the film look. Irony, if you ask me, but it's nice to have that option. What difference does it make if you can't tell what camera was used to create a look as long as there are different looks.
All this aside, my mom who has with some difficulty made the shift to the DVD player from her VCR doesn't understand the difference between Blu-Ray discs and DVDs, and cannot at all comprehend why her perfectly working DVD player will soon be considered obsolete. I had to explain the mandatory shift to hi-def, and that it’s not like she has a choice. But more than anything I had to tell her how hi-def is better quality than standard-def and how blu-ray discs with higher storage capacity can fit two hi-def films, or even her whole "Mind Your Language" season into one disc instead of many DVDs. While she was amazed at all this, and can see the benefit, it’s still hard for her to imagine the advanced technology in her head. I suspect this theory of hi-def’s better quality is all Emperor's New Clothes to her. I don’t blame her. But, she has seen a shift like this before. She moved from analog tv of the good ol’ days to standard def. Wasn’t that a huge difference?
Still, HDTV is quite complicated. You would think that advancement in technology should simplify people’s lives apart from improving quality. But, simplification is actually a complicated process. Buying a hi-def tv is not as easy as picking a size, a price and a brand. You need to choose a path. You need to pick a display technology from a wide array – there’s plasma, DLP, LCD, LCoS, D-ILA, CRT.. and if that isn’t confusing enough there’s direct view, rear projection, front projection, flat panel, wide screen, big screen displays. It’s a maze, and quite inane considering all it does is show you good image and sound. Is it worth the effort of going through that decision making process if it doesn’t promise direct interaction with the characters on the screen, if Brad Pitt won’t walk out of the box and shake hands with you, or if you can’t join Harry Potter find the Philosopher’s stone?
In light of all this, it is ironic that I’ll have to say Blu-ray and hi-def will simplify our life by creating a unified format. No, this is not a contradiction to what I said before. You see, just as we can play a DVD on TV or on a computer, the type of hi-def display technology
may be different, but they will all project the same hi-def video. Moreover, when connected to a blu-ray player (like the DVD player), it will play the hi-def movie in blu-ray format, which is a unified acceptable format all over the world. And that unified format is what we need to look forward to.
After all this, here’s a detail that will send your head spinning. As of now, NTSC, PAL and SECAM will be replaced by three digital broadcasting systems called ATSC, DVB, ISDB, DMD. So where’s the unified format and how is blu-ray creating it you ask? I really don’t know. This entire post is a whole lot of claptrap. I am just pretending to know more than I do. Ah well, it’s not ALL bunkum. It turns out that HDTV and blu-ray formats work with all these new digital broadcast systems, so as long as there are only blu-rays and HDTVs in this world, we will have unification. So why have three formats? Same reason why we had NTSC, PAL and SECAM. Very ironic, really. The people who created these formats don’t want to give up theirs in favor of the other and in the process they are all here to stay until we witness Darwin’s survival of the fittest. It happened with blu-rays and HD-DVDs, where the two competitors tried to kill each other and in the end blu –ray emerged victorious and HD-DVD died a brutal death, ending the format war.
What I do know is that as of today, the world has more films than we have access to because they are not available in the format of our choice. I know of a lot of films that I could not watch in India because they were not available in PAL. Imagine a unified format, where the options are limitless with nothing stopping us from sponging up more entertainment. If access to information has only to do with laws and regulations and there’s no technological hindrance, isn’t that something to look forward to?
