HD DVD about to fight back...

[kennyt]

No word on pricing yet and they haven't even launched their satellite yet, I think it goes up in October.

This type of system is the future in my mind, I for one wouldn't mind not having any hard media around.

[BDP]

Originally Posted by kennyt

No word on pricing yet and they haven't even launched their satellite yet, I think it goes up in October.

This type of system is the future in my mind, I for one wouldn't mind not having any hard media around.

I pulled this from their press release...

"The XStreamHD solution will be available to consumers in early Q4 2008. The introductory price for a complete XStreamHD home solution, including a Media Server and a Media Receiver, is available to initial subscribers starting at just $399."

My biggest concern is storage. How many HD movies will you realistically be able to store? With libraries for some people in the 100's+ in HD. That's going to warrant a lot of storage space.

1TB probably isn't going to cut it.

[DaViD Boulet]

So,

we've moved from wishing that HD DVD would survive to not caring about HD disc media and wanting downloads?

It seems that Microsoft's mission has succeeded...

[Lotus]

Originally Posted by BDP

I pulled this from their press release...

"The XStreamHD solution will be available to consumers in early Q4 2008. The introductory price for a complete XStreamHD home solution, including a Media Server and a Media Receiver, is available to initial subscribers starting at just $399."

My biggest concern is storage. How many HD movies will you realistically be able to store? With libraries for some people in the 100's+ in HD. That's going to warrant a lot of storage space.

1TB probably isn't going to cut it.

It's a virtual library. I don't know how they're going to pull off what they're talking about.

Basically it's like XBOX LIVE, you "buy once," but have access to it forever. So storage shouldn't be a big problem. The real problem will be a huge catalog and the ability to stream it.

[kennyt]

Originally Posted by Lotus

Basically it's like XBOX LIVE, you "buy once," but have access to it forever. So storage shouldn't be a big problem. The real problem will be a huge catalog and the ability to stream it.

Ahhh... the next headache, bandwidth. I think for storage, say if BR can hold 50 G, maybe the average movie is 30? so maybe 300 movies /Terabyte?

[kkozma]

Originally Posted by DaViD Boulet

So,

we've moved from wishing that HD DVD would survive to not caring about HD disc media and wanting downloads?

It seems that Microsoft's mission has succeeded...

Think about it from my perspective... I got burned already, granted not nearly as bad as if I had picked blu-ray and HD DVD won, but I still ended up on the short side of the stick.

Why should I buy a $500 machine only to turn around with it being useless in 1-2 years to buy another one WHEN downloads take off? This is a valid reason, that many of the blu-ray zealots just can't get a grasp of. There is NO stopping digital downloads. They are coming and it's just a matter of when and how good they are. To be honest with you, I'm willing to place a wager that this xtremehd company can and will LAUNCH a satellite into orbit and sell the machines for less than $500 before ANYONE in the blu-ray camp gets a 2.0 SAL on the market for less than $500. Keeping in mind that the PS3 is NOT a SAL.

Given the fact that I am impatient and have become addicted to HD, I will have a blu-ray playback device, but it's not going to be a PS3 or SAL. I've been slowly building up my PC to get it ready for an HTPC and I just bought the last thing (HD Video card) before the drive itself yesterday.

Hopefully by the time I'm ready to buy the actual drive itself, Slysoft will have worked out all of their bugs with BD playback. However, the drives themselves are still too expensive (anyone but me notice a re-curtring theme with blu-ray?), and I refuse to pay $175 for a BD ROM drive when I can buy an entire HD DVD sal player for that much. So it appears as if Slysoft has plenty of time to get a good working copy of anydvd out there.