Recent Comments:
Will Blu-ray audio discs take off, or flounder aimlessly à la DVD-A / SACD? {Engadget HD}
Jul 10th 2008 11:02AM The trend at the moment is for background listening of music rather than listening to music as the sole activity. Combine with this the loudness wars and MP3s reducing fidelity and you have the masses unable to discern good sound quality or just apathetic about sound quality and music in general.
Blu-Ray has potential as a music format, but to succeed it will need to draw in the apathetic as well as audiophiles (who may have already invested in DVD-A and/or SACD) and it'll need to come in at a far more attractive price point than the current crop of BR players.
To satisfy the audiophiles you need to have great stereo and multi-channel sound and use volume levelling to eliminate "the loudness wars". You'd also need to support audio only players.
Then to draw in the rest you need to add integrated bonus features (including internet connected content) to make it an obvious functional improvement over CD, DVD-A and SACD. Examples of bonus features are alternate song versions, music videos, interviews, news, tour dates, photos, artwork, lyrics, etc. You also need reasonable pricing of playback hardware.
One other aspect is that any new audio format should integrate iPod/MP3 player direct ripping support. If a format is not ripable then it will really struggle to gain traction (notice how nearly all SACDs are now hybrid SACDs).
Of course none of this would guarantee BD-A success, but it would give the format a fighting chance. In any event BD-A is likely to be one of the last physical music formats.
Does Media Center have a future? {Engadget HD}
Sep 28th 2007 10:59AM Vista Media Center is buggy and too US centric.
44 countries in the world use the DVB-T, however Media Center's support of this well established standard is patchy, to be precise no support for broadcast EPG, interactive services, subtitles, multiple audio streams, radio channels.
Then take something as simple as the music library. If you have two or more albums with the same album name, but different album artists, then the albums appear as separate entities but the track list contains all the tracks from all albums of the the same name. Oops!
I bought Vista because of Vista's Media Center, now I wish I'd spent the money on something more useful!
European HD DVD lobbyists claim '74-percent' market share {Engadget}
Jul 13th 2007 3:34AM In Swansea HMV and Bristol HMV it is a similar story Blu-Ray occupies 80% of the HD Disc section.
