Oliver Van Wynedaele, European Assistant General
Manager of the Consumer Products Division at Toshiba Information
Systems makes the case for HD DVD's Consumer and Industry
friendly Approach.
| HDR | What are HD DVD’s unique selling points? |
| OVW | HD DVD is a format that applies to many different platforms, including standalone players, PCs and game consoles thanks to the 360 add-on drive making it quite a comprehensive product. What we believe is that the market will be won through stand-alone players in the main, because that’s the way it happened with DVD. People who wanted DVDs bought stand-alone players and that’s been our focus with HD DVD. We’re also making HD entertainment cheaper more quickly than our competitors. |
| HDR | What sort of content can HD DVD offer over SD DVD? |
| OVW | The most important thing for us is to bring content and features that simply weren’t possible on DVD with what we call ‘Advanced Interactivity’. All our players take advantage of persistent memory to save things like personal bookmarks and downloaded content. Second, video-screen streaming is also compulsory, so things like Picture in Picture will always work in any HD DVD player. This is what really separates this generation from the last. |
| HDR | HD DVD uses advanced codec video compression and supports Dolby Digital Plus, but what does this mean in real terms of a viewing experience? |
| OVW | HD DVD is offering the very best audio/visual technology today. We have what is known as lossless codecs, which means you get exactly the same quality visuals and audio as you would from the original master. This is available in every player and on every platform. Of HD DVDs being produced right now, about 80 per cent are using VC-1, which is the most advanced codec on the market developed by Microsoft. The rest are using MPEG 4, which is very similar to VC-1. Very few are using the old MPEG 2 codec from DVD. |
| HDR | Could you tell us about HDi and how it’s important? |
| OVW | HDi has been specifically designed for use in HD DVD and if you come from a web designer’s background it is very easy to use HDi because it is a very similar platform. Blu-ray has chosen to use Java, which is established, but is harder to use and needs experience of software design to write for. As an example, when Paramount was developing using both HDi and BD-J programming a chapter jump with HDi was one line of code because Microsoft has scripted everything already, with BD-J it was 100 lines of code. This dedicated language definitely gives HDi the edge. Microsoft is constantly improving upon the HDi format and adding new features to it so who knows what will possible in years to some? |
| HDR | The production costs on Blu-ray were thought to be more expensive, but this doesn’t seem to have made much difference to its price. Why would you say that is? |
| OVW | Well, we’ve managed to bring the price of our players down quite sharply with players as little as €300/£200 from some manufacturers and we believe this is the early beginning of HD DVD breaking into the mass market. We’re aiming for the real massmarket price point of around €200/£140 and we expect to reach that soon. In terms of the discs we are led to believe that the costs can be double as much with Blu-ray as compared to HD DVD, but Sony controls the production so accurate figures are hard to come by. In terms of the on-the-shelf price, Blu-ray can’t really afford to be more expensive than HD DVD despite its production costs, especially when discs have less features, so it’s got more to do with marketability than anything else I think. |
| HDR | How do you think HD DVD compares with Blu-ray? |
| OVW | Blu-ray isn’t going to be a consistent experience for its consumers the way HD DVD is. If you bought a Blu-ray player last year or even this year, you won’t be able to play the content released in 12 months time. Video and audio quality are brilliant, of course, but in terms of content it simply hasn’t delivered consistently yet and HD DVD is. |