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redspear on 15 December 2008
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MikeB said:
frybread said:
kanariya said:
BD will replace DVD in a few years jsut like DVD replaced VHS.

The public liked DVD because:

1) It was smaller than VHS.

2) They were allowed to skip to any scene.

3) Freeze-frame pausing.

4) MOST OF ALL:  No more rewinding.   Rewinding was a huge pain, it would break vcrs (causing people to buy rewind machines) and if they forgot to rewind, Blockbuster would sometimes charge a penalty.

 

Oh, it also had a clearer picture.  So did Laser Disc.  So did Beta Max.  Clear pictures do not sell formats to anyone except ... well, us geeks.

Blu-Ray disc has all those advantages in addition to new ones. So did Laser Disc offer many of these features, but was huge. And so did Video CD (a success in China and India), but usually required muliple discs with not so great quality improvements.

Blu-Ray content makes sense for HDTV owners.

 

VCDs were low quality MPEG 1s usually worse then VHS becasue of poor compression and the resolution was not a step. Also Menus were not prevelent in the majority of the early VCDs and as you say VCDs were inconvinent for the multiple discs.

They became popular in asia because of their low price compared to VHS. Laser Discs were expensive and never went down in price. Laser Discs were also awkward as they had different read types by machine though in the 90's they came together it still meant that you had to be careful that you bought the right discs. Compression hadn't come along far enough and it could only hold just under 2 hours of video per side in the right format. The other format only held 30 minutes of video.

Laserdiscs were more suceptable to stratches and dust and there were issues of getting frames mixed up on the screen at the same time. DVD also bought in USOPs and copy protection 2 things that helped drag in the studios after the battle of VCRs in the 80s

Also laserdiscs did not have menus an in your face feature that spelled control as a feature. Although in realty LDs did have direct control of play and stop and fast forward.