Circulan por la red toneladas de información (como todo), acerca de toda la historia de los nuevos soportes audiovisuales Blu-Ray y HDDVD, de Sony y Toshiba respectivamente. Confieso que la mayoría de las veces pasaba de largo esos testamentos unos por exageradamente detallados técnicamente y otros por que sólo eran más de lo mismo. Esto había hecho que mi conocimiento sobre el tema fuera escaso, sin embargo y sin querer, leyendo un newsletter de Divx, descubro un pequeño texto que en pocas líneas y en palabras cercanas me lo aclaró todo de un solo toque. Aquí el texto integral, vale la pena colocarlo:
DivX Certified Blu-ray DVD Players
If you follow the digital media space at all (and, because you signed up to receive the DivX News, I have to assume that you're at least somewhat interested in digital video), you know by now that the format war between Blu-ray and HD DVD has finally ended and that Blu-ray has won. Now that the war is over, chances are a lot of you will be looking to upgrade your home theaters to get in on all that HD goodness. But before you run out and drop a wallet-full of cash on a new Blu-ray player, remember that not all Blu-ray players are created equal. While they'll all play the new HD Blu-ray discs, some of them are DivX Certified as well, meaning they'll also play your collection of DivX videos.
But let's back up a bit. What exactly is Blu-ray, how is it different than HD DVD and what does the end of the format war really mean? Blu-ray was developed by a team of technology companies and movie studios led by Sony, while HD DVD was the brainchild of a different set of companies and studios, led by Toshiba. Both HD DVD and Blu-ray players use a blue-laser to read information off a disc which looks identical to a standard CD or DVD. However, because the blue lasers used by the devices are more precise than the red lasers used in standard definition DVD players, the information on the disc can be written smaller so it takes up less space, allowing for more data to be stored on the disc. With a few exceptions, the user experience each of these formats offer is the same: higher resolution video and audio. For reasons that have a great deal more to do with business alliances than any real technological differences, Blu-ray won.
What then, does the end of the format war and the death of HD DVD really mean? In a nutshell, it means anyone who already purchased an HD DVD player just inherited a very bulky paperweight because after current catalogs run dry, no one will be releasing films on HD DVD compatible discs. But to understand the format war itself, the best way to get some perspective on this may actually be to look into the past. For those of us old enough to remember the 80s, there's a striking similarity here to an earlier format war waged between two videotape technologies, Beta and VHS. During the late 70s and early 80s, these two formats competed to become the standard format for home videotape decks. There was even a time when most video stores (if you're too young to remember video stores, think Netflix without the web) had two sections of tapes, one for Beta and one for VHS. So how'd it all end? Spoiler alert: VHS won the format war and all those Beta players (which actually offered superior video quality) were instantly rendered nearly useless. What's the lesson here? As a consumer, there's not much sense in fighting the tide of technology standards adoption. Pick the wrong one, and you're out of luck. But now that the format war is over, you can rest safe in the knowledge that a Blu-ray player you buy today will have plenty of content available from all the major studios ... until the next thing comes along, but that shouldn't be for another decade or so.
So what should you do if you already bought an HD DVD player? Put it in the closet next to your Beta player, and chalk it up to a learning experience. Sorry, those are just the early adopter breaks.
Recibida vía Divx Newsletter , gracias a Joshua Covington de DivX, Inc. por responderme el feedback de la misma
