These are such simple questions, that I'm almost embarrassed to ask, but you know what they say, there are no stupid questions, only stupid people.

First, what is the difference between regular dvd widescreen and amorphoric widescreen?

Secondly, What exactly are blue ray discs that are supposedly coming out next year?

Thanks.

From my understanding regular wide screen has black bars top and bottom and is not suited to be scaled to fill a wide screen TV. Anomorphic (sp?) has the video recorded such that it can be stretched on an anomprphic ws tv to fill the screen.

A ws TV normally is at ration 1.78:1 (16:9) and a ws video shot in 2.35:1 would need to have blac bars top and bottom to get the entire width onto the tv. Anomorphic allows stretching to better fill the TV.

As for Blueray, it is a new compression and storage standard that would allow 20Gb on a DVD sized disc. Just think of LORT (all three movies) on one disc (no toilet breaks) in the same quality.

There are however two standards which they are argueing about. Can't remember the name of the other.

Thanks. Am I to assume that the new players will be priced through the roof?

And hopefully, will the new players play our old dvds?

This sounds really exciting.

New players will definitely NOT play DVDs. This is the main thing holding back the obliteration of the DVD format. (don't quote me on this though)

Why wouldn't they. From a consumer stand point it would make a lot of sense. DVD ain't even 10 years old yet, people have invested so much money in their colelctions. A new format could easiley be accepted as long as the old format isn't expected to be thrown out.

After all, the PS2 plaed the old PS games.

Anamorphic simply means that the image will properly scale to fit both a 4:3 set and a 16:9 set without having to distort the image....whatever aspect ratio the film was produced in, it will be matted to fit 16:9, meaning that a 2.35 film will have some black bars embedded in teh image so that it properly fits a 16:9 set...a 4:3 set will simply compensate by vertically centering the image and not showing any image data above and below that

If a title is release NON-Anamorphically, that means that black bars are added to the actual image data to suit a 4:3 TV, and if played on a 19:9 TV, those black bars will be displayed as part of the full image and will appear vertically squished.

thats why you hear all teh time about people who have 16:9 TVs how they so desparately crave ANAMORPHIC releases and why they tend to double dip on SE re-releases (like Goodfellas, Princess Bride, etc.) because they were re-released with an Anamorphic transfer - Titanic was not Anamorphic, so that means the image will be squished on my 16:9 set, and I am purposefully waiting for teh SE re-release to get teh anamorphic transfer.

Originally Posted by Moonshadow

New players will definitely NOT play DVDs. This is the main thing holding back the obliteration of the DVD format. (don't quote me on this though)

That would be the Video industry cutting off their own nose to spite their face, and forcing people into having to re-invest in an already exisiting technology that is simply just a minor advancement of existing technology just becasue they had nothing better to do with their time - in any technology that is not what I call "leaps and bounds" ahead of what is already out there, backwards compataiblity MUST be maintained unless that new technology is advanced enough of what is currently available

example, comparing standard DVD to holographic perspective audience interactivity and participation...or....virtual 3D visual and audial experience

blue ray DVD is simply still a disc read by a different laser, allowing the disc to hold more - its not breakthrough technology - its still the same old crap - Disc, Laser, digital video and audio - simply more of it.....it MUST be backwards compatible to regualr DVD - theres far too much of it out there to simply abandon it, and it is no so incredibly advanced to require the abandonning of the TRILLIONS of discs already owned by BILLIONS of people

people will say "well we abandonned the linear maegnetic tape, whynot abandon regular DVD?"

Yes we did abandon linear magnetic tape, but again, DVD is a "leaps and bounds" technology over linear magentic tape - digital transfer, 5.1 audio, non-degrading, non-linear format, widescreen availablity.....all that is far superior to tape, and therefore making tape obsolete.

Does anyone think the industry will decide to go with players that will also play your old discs?

I would imagine that probably not at first, but eventually.

[Paper Pills]

When Blu Ray Comes Out They Will Have Dvd Players With The New Blu Ray and The Old Red Laser So All Your Old Dvds Will Be Able To Play Both Formats

Originally Posted by Moonshadow

There are however two standards which they are argueing about. Can't remember the name of the other.

The other format that is battling Blu-Ray is HD-DVD. And as the upcoming new consoles evolve, Sony PS3 will be using Blu-Ray, and Microsoft Xbox2 will be using HD-DVD.

A article discusses the next generation dvds: http://www.physorg.com/news2320.html

HD-DVD:
Short for high definition-DVD, a generic term for the technology of recording high-definition video on a DVD. In general, HD-DVD is capable of storing between two and four times as much data as standard DVD. The two most prominent competing technologies are Blu-ray and AOD.
Blu-ray:
An HD-DVD format that uses a 405nm-wavelength blue-violet laser technology, in contrast to the 650nm-wavelength red laser technology used in traditional DVD formats. The rewritable Blu-ray disc, with a data transfer rate of 36Mbps, can hold up to 27GB of data on a single-sided single layer disc (compared to the traditional DVD’s 4.7GB capacity), which amounts to about 12 hours of standard video or more than 2 hours of high-definition video.
The Blu-ray format was developed jointly by Sony, Samsung, Sharp, Thomson, Hitachi, Matsushita, Pioneer and Philips, Mistubishi and LG Electronics.