Good news by Ars’ Peter Bright. “According to an internal Microsoft e-mail sent to all full-time employees working on the next Xbox, ‘Durango [the codename for the next Xbox] is designed to deliver the future of entertainment while engineered to be tolerant of today’s Internet.’ It continues, ‘There are a number of scenarios that our users expect to work without an Internet connection, and those should ‘just work’ regardless of their current connection status. Those include, but are not limited to: playing a Blu-ray disc, watching live TV, and yes playing a single player game.'” Conveniently ‘leaked’ of course.
For me Bluray is the biggest news here. Good move MS, Bluray is probably the reason for 50% of PS3 purchases.
True, but I don’t know how much it matters any more though. A few years ago, the PS3 was considered the only future-proof bluray player on the market. However, I think the format has matured a lot since then. I paid less than $100 for a standalone one a few months ago and it has played everything I’ve thrown at it, and also does Netflix, Amazon, and about a dozen other different streaming services I’ll never use. And I haven’t had to install a single firmware update as of yet, whereas the PS3 seemed to want to install a system update every other day.
So I’m not real sure that blurray is still the draw it once was. It’s a nice extra, but I don’t reckon it’s going to be the deciding factor for a lot of people. Now days, it will be like ‘well of course it has a bluray player! Why wouldn’t it?
Edited 2013-05-06 19:31 UTC
True. It’s pretty much too late for the Bluray to actually be a major selling feature of the next Xbox, but it doesn’t hurt.
Also let it be noted that I am a huge fan of Bluray, especially now that prices have come down to “normal” levels and a lot of stuff has been remastered for the format. If you have an HDTV and care even a little bit about picture quality, yet you still don’t have some kind of Bluray player, you are really missing out.
Edited 2013-05-06 21:48 UTC
I was pretty much forced, kicking and screaming, to the BR format when studios started releasing movies with special features only on blu. As a whole, I prefer DVDs because:
– DVDs are less expensive
– DVDs load faster
– They’re easier to rip
– They’re easier to play on PCs and consume less resources doing so. If you want a hassle-free experience with BR, you pretty much have to pony up for AnyDVD HD. And I can’t use a f–king mouse to select menu items on BR either.
Plus, a lot of BR discs don’t have support for auto-resume, which nearly invalidates the entire format, as far as I’m concerned. Who was asleep at the wheel when that decision was made? This should’ve been built into the spec from the VERY BEGINNING. (Of course, DVD doesn’t have this either, but it’s pretty much standard on most modern players these days.)
You must be watching them on a low-res TV, then; because DVD quality is utter cr*p on HDTVs.
Eh, I’ve watched movies before on Youtube in 360p. Standard def does not bother me
depends on the TV and Bluray player. the PS3 does a good good of upscalling DVD’s, if your TV is a modern LCD/OLED then that too does a good job with the picture.
Who needs HDTV?!
For a properly mastered DVD the quality may be affected more by the cabling than the disk.
Tried playing one DVD at a friend’s house and the picture was garbage on their 56 inch plasma display, but then I noticed they were using cheap RCA <-> RCA cables.
Turns out the player had HDMI available and we swapped cables. We also tried out a regular TV.
1) HDMI gave a far better pictures but the fine detail also let us see faults (usually in the FX) that we could not see on the TV.
2) The TV gave us a nicer to look at picture on the RCA <-> RCA cables than the plasma display since there were far fewer hard edges in watching the display.
I expect with HDMI and a smaller flat screen display the DVD would had look very good to us too.
Hey pinhead, there is no quality HDTV period. You’re *STILL* watching the same crappy Sporting Events,TV Shows and Movies you always were, you’re just stupid enough to actually pay *MORE* to do so.
PS3 has autoresume on DVD and BR.
It has auto resume only on the discs that support it. Some do, and some don’t.
You make good points. It also pisses me off when there are menus on Blu-rays that you can’t skip over — they tend to be long and extremely irritating to a greater extent than DVDs of yore. But Blu-rays also have some additional advantages (other than the obvious image quality advantage):
-(this is a big one for me) Something like 50% of Blu-rays are region-free
-They are relatively scratch-proof (extra protective coating) = you don’t need to be as paranoid, and there will theoretically be a good future used Blu-ray market (although the death of the video rental shop may make this point moot)
-They are capable of interactive content (this may be good or bad depending on your perspective)
As far as your argument that DVDs are “easier to rip and play on PCs”, that’s just how technology works, you have more data you’re dealing with so of course your computer takes longer to process it. I’ll gladly take that tradeoff for better picture quality, especially considering that I watch 90% of films directly on my TV via the PS3. Anyway, I assume the primary reason for ripping is to watch on other devices, and theoretically at least, UltraViolet is supposed to be the savior there.
But I guess it depends what type of person you are. For me I only actually buy physical copies of movies (as opposed to streaming or whatever) for films that I feel really deserve it from a picture quality/film quality perspective — and then, I want to watch it in the very best quality possible.
Edited 2013-05-07 22:46 UTC
Well, yeah… the PS3 came out with BR something like seven years ago now. How seriously would people take the next Xbox, if it were shipping without it now?
Well, Xbox needs a disc format. It’s not going back to DVD, and Microsoft wasn’t going to invent a new format like HD-DVD. So, really, there was no other choice but BluRay. Not that it matters. BluRay isn’t going to sell more Xboxes. You can buy a decent BluRay player for $50-100 now.
Well, they may not invent a new movie format, but are you sure they wouldn’t go with a proprietary something-something that doesn’t play movies? Both the Dreamcast and Gamecube went with non-standard formats, so it’s not like it’s never been done before. We’ll forget about the fact that those two systems weren’t exactly stunning successes
As long as they have a disc format that can load approx 50gb (or whatever the BR standard is), then it probably doesn’t matter if it can play blu-ray movies or not.
On the other hand, this ‘leak’ seems to point at blu-ray support, so ….
I agree. Disc-based media is on its way out. Streaming is the future.
I am yet to get any Bluray player.
DVD is enough for the local library stuff and for the rest there is the local cinema and streaming.
Yep, especially with the sickening DRM there it doesn’t look very useful.
But how many bought it JUST to play Blu Ray and thus made Sony lose money?
Frankly I’d say BD is a dead format, look at the number of DVD sales compared to BD sales and its not even close, most titles are selling dozens of DVD for every BD they sell. Sure it’ll make a good storage format for games but its obvious that folks are going streaming and DVD instead of BD, at least where I live.
To me the bigger question is how Sony and MSFT are gonna keep their new systems from looking dated in less than a year thanks to the weak as hell chip they chose. I build AMD exclusively and have my whole family and myself on AMD so its not hate here, its just reality, and the reality is that Jaguar is a netbook chip not a gaming chip.
So I think it’ll be interesting to see how they squeeze enough horse out of a Bobcat based quad to do 1080p games with heavy physics, tons of HDR lighting, and tons of particle and smoke effects that folks are gonna expect.
I don’t even have DVD roms anymore on any of my computers. Except for laptop as that one is built-in.
Just like you can’t trust Sony not to cut features they will go back on this once their installed base is large enough so that most people will just keep buying games for it or will cave and buy one because they want to game with their friends that already have one.
I just hope that Microsoft doesn’t nickle and dime us again on the storage front. Sometimes i just don’t understand the manufacturers, the only one who makes sense is Nintendo.
For me there is one of two choices for game console manufactures. You either make money on each downloaded game from your market place or you make money from the storage, you can’t do both.
I own a Vita, but don’t buy many online games as the memory cards are a joke. I recently brought a Sandisk 32GB SD Extreme for my DSLR for £25 which is a fraction of the cost of a 16GB card for the vita. The loser Sony, as i don’t purchase half as many games as i would.
Microsoft’s the same, the Xbox360 had a crappy proprietary format for Hard disks that cost a stupid amount. I think they realized this error rather late in the game as the slims hdd’s are cheaper.
People who got this right was first Nintendo, 3DS and the Wii (dunno about the Wii U), bog standard SD card, yep no problem. Me going on the Wii store buying loads of games, yep no problem.
PS3, bog standard 2.5″ SATA HDD, easiest upgrade ever, i went from 60GB to 600GB, i have videos on there, games downloaded from the PSN on the plus service (which in itself is an absolute bargain and worth buying a PS3 alone for).
If Microsoft want’s people to purchase content, if they want the Xbox to be the center of our living room then they need to do one of two things. Either make the HDD easily upgradable a la PS3. Or if they feel like they need a proprietary solution, make sure it’s cheap, make it break even and when HDD manufacturers release a bigger drive don’t take 3 years to offer it.
Games are getting bigger the internet is getting faster, more and more people will want to store content.
Edited 2013-05-07 09:04 UTC
the Wii U also takes standard SD cards.
pretty much what i expected of Nintendo
Wouldn’t this be up to the developer of the game?
Does Microsoft have to bless everything developed for Xbox?