Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater HD DVD

I gave my girl my old Toshiba HD DVD player, told her to buy some of them on Amazon if she wants $3 brand new high def movies, cant beat it really if you like the limited catalogue. There's nothing more I hate than format wars, I got burned originally going for the HD DVD player!

Yes format wars do indeed suck big weenies. A product of huge corporations with even bigger ego's throwing their weight around regardless of which one is better. The biggest problem is that consumers are the one's who ultimately get caught in the crossfire. Usually the lines are drawn up pretty evenly. I mean if HD DVD had only had a 5% market share, then it wouldn't even be considered a war. But when it's closer to 30 - 40%, then that leaves a lot of people who have invested their hard earned money on the format, out in the cold.

If there was a format war going on when the industry changed over from VHS to DVD then I don't remember it. All I remember was all of a sudden DVD's popped up & they were a quadrillion times easier to use than VHS tapes. So the choice was clear, you either kept buying VHS tapes and hoped DVD's would go away, or you started buying DVD's.

I was actually a bit stubborn (didn't know they were a quadrillion times better) when DVD's came out. It was due to the fact that I had built my car stereo system around cassette's (reversable, pro-logic Kenwood tape deck, and about 400 cassette tapes in my collection), and when CD's came out I was refusing to have to go replace all of my cassette tapes, so I didn't buy into CD technology for years. All my friends would tell me how much better CD's were, but I refused to listen. I would give reasons like, "well tapes don't skip when you're driving down the road (the first generation auto CD players were notoriously bad about skipping when going over even the slightest bumps), plus you can record your own tapes (CD's took a while to come out with burning capabilities), plus they're too small... you can fit hundreds of those things in a tiny little case, which makes it too easy for a thief to make off with your ENTIRE music library"!!!

They were all lame excuses. Truth be told I was very interested in CD's, but felt like I had invested way too heavily in cassette's to change over to the different format. Then I heard about the new digital tape format (D.A.T.) that was supposedly going to come out and blow away CD's, and the D.A.T. players would play regular cassettes, so I wouldn't have 400 worthless tapes layng around, I could just add on to my library with the new digital tapes. So that news really solidified my resolve to stay away from CD's. I figured I'd let all my buddies waste their time and money on CD players, and I would wait for D.A.T. to take over the market and be the last one laughing when I became the 1st person with a D.A.T. player in my car.

Well, I doubt many of you even heard of D.A.T. let alone saw any products on the shelves anywhere. That pretty much sums up what happened with D.A.T.... NOTHING!!! I really don't know if the audio signal was better on the D.A.T. tapes than CD's or not, but once consumers got ahold of CD's, and the ease of use that came along with them, they weren't about to go back to screwing around with rewinding, fast forwarding, tape players eating your tapes or anything else that had to do with cassettes. CD's were the future and nothing was going to stop them. When I got together with my first wife in 1993, she had a huge CD collection and a CD player. That was the 1st time I ever messed around with a CD personally... I instantly fell in love with being able to skip to whatever song I wanted to listen to without having to hit the search button on my tape player. It was like all of a sudden I 'GOT IT'..... "Ahhhhh, so THIS is why every single person I know switched over to CD's and tried to convince me to as well"!!! I felt like a fool really. Hell who am I kidding, I WAS a fool! Such a fool that I let my stubborness about switching over from tapes to CD's carry over into my refusal from switching over from VHS to DVD's. I despised everything that had to do with those little disks... UNTIL I tried them out for myself. Once I tried both CD's & DVD's it was like hitting a crack pipe, I was instantly hooked and wanted MORE!!!

So anyways, my point (before I took off on that ridiculously long tangent) was that I don't recall anything except standard DVD's being available when the industry switched over from VHS. But that could be due to the fact that I wasn't in the game (so to speak) at that time. I was too busy buying or renting VHS tapes. So if there was a format war back then, I missed it. But I do remember the 'Beta vs VHS' war a little bt. We lived in Littleton, Colorado at the time (1980), and I remember my friend down the street having one of those enormously huge Beta tape players and showing us movies on it. Of course I was only 9 years old so it wasn't like I was doing any critical comparison's against our other neighbor who had a VHS player. And yet another neighbor had one of those players that played movies off of discs the size of vinyl records... What were those things even called???

So anyway I don't remember seeing very many of those Beta players. Besides that one perhaps one or two others was all I ever saw. But then again back then not everyone had a movie player. I know we didn't have anything until we'd lived here in Indiana for a while, I'm guessing around 1985 or so was around the time when we got our first VHS VCR player. I'm assuming the war was pretty much over by then.

Today I honestly don't know anyone who doesn't have some sort of movie player in their house. Even most grandparents at least have an old VCR kickin around somewhere. So it's not so much a question of 'do you have a movie player in your home', as much as it is a question of 'which movie player do you have in your home'? So now these format wars induce quite a lot more casualties as far as people going out and wasting their money on a player that will be doomed to becoming obsolete. And there's no real way to be able to tell which will be the victor of the format war until the dust has settled and there's only 1 left standing. So it's a 50/50 crap shoot. Roll the dice and hope for the best.

That's about all we can do.

New longest post evar award

I was confident I could out do him!

DAT cassettes aren't interchangeable with audio cassettes. DAT tape shells are smaller, and the helical (not linear) recording was digital. The cassettes were drawn into the deck, horizontally, on a tray.

DAT never had much impact in the consumer market, but was "the standard" for small recording medium in the pro audio world, the way BetaCam SP was in the video world.

I still have an awesome Tascam deck in my rack that I used when I needed to make live, longer-than-74-minute recordings than my Tascam CD Recorder could make, or when a voiceover actor was in the soundbooth...as it allowed me to place "markers" along the recording to mark good/bad takes.

Well you would know better than I. The information I got on DAT came from the television program 'Beyond 2000', which was a show that touted future technologies and fads. In the program I watched they said that you would be able to play your standard cassettes in the new DAT players (much like you can play regular DVD's on BD players). So perhaps they had orignally planned on developing DAT players that would be able to still play regular cassette tapes? I really don't know where they would have gotten that information if that's not the case?

Some other things they said about it was that the players would have LCD screens that would display the lyrics to whatever song you were listening to. And that the audio would be superior to DVD's... were they right about either of those?

I watched that show long before the internet (& even more importantly b4 'Google') was at my disposal, so I wasn't really able to do my own research on it. So I was going on their word alone. So far they are 0 for 2 (being able to play regular cassettes, & replacing DVD's), did they get anythng at all right about it? Lol

An archaeological dig in my grandmothers backyard recently revealed a Beta player. Don't think its in working shape.

I don't know if DATs could have side-band lyrics, but regular CDs had that in the spec. Regular CDs also had previsions for quadraphonic sound with half the running time in the Red Book, but no one ever made a player which would read it.

DATs ran at a sampling rate of 48 kHz, rather than 44.1. DVDs support stereo LPCM @ 48 kHz, but with 24-bit samples. So DATs don't quite reach the max of DVD quality, but come close.

There was a Digital Compact Cassette (DCC), which used 1/4" tape just like the analog compact cassette tape, but was single sided (think like a VHS tape which doesn't have the holes all the way through). DCC players were backward compatible with the double sided analog cassettes. They used a lossy compression scheme (predating MP3). The biggest competitor was Sony's Mini-Disc (also lossy, using ATRAC encoding).

Wow Micah excellent post I feel there is a short film in there waiting to be made. DVD had to compete with divx It looked just like a dvd. But it would start to corrode after being played. It was only good for 24 to 48 hours, depending on which one you bought. They were the same price as a rental you could also order movies on demand with it. It was only sold at Circuit City, some say it was the reason CC went bye bye.


I am going by memory so I could be wrong on some things about divx it was 13 years ago.

Divx didn't corrode (there was another spec which did that). Divx was actually for most intents a DVD, not a competing technology. Though it did require a special player which had a modem inside it. When you first played a disc you had 48 hours to finish watching it. That was included in the initial price. You could play it again after paying again. If you had a disc which you wanted to play often, you could "Silver" it for a fixed price and use it in one of your players any time you wanted. There was also a higher "Gold" rate which would allow that disc to be played in any player.

The biggest problem with it (and any phone-home DRM scheme), is when the servers were finally taken off line, those Silver and Gold disc could no longer be played. CC did issue some refunds for a limited time.