You cant just 'make' a blu-ray disc though, you have to film, edit & produce in HD, which is still quite expensive to do.
Also, i dont think people are watching 'adult movies' on their wide screen hd plasmas.

Theyve already got their ideal distribution system, the internet.

Upscaling dvd's is all well and good - but a decent Bluray disc wipes the floor with the dvd

Answers in bold

I think Echo 1 is thinking of sub £100 players - in which case he should stick with dvd

The first cheap dvd player was the Samsung sold by Tescos that broke the £250 barrier - while we were still paying £400 for quality players.

PLAY.COM are doing a Bluray offer of 3 for £30

While adult movies may have shifted VCR's in the US they did sod all to the UK market - mainly as hardcore was illegal and soft porn was boring.

Hardcore did nothing for dvd either .

Although it was legalised in the UK in 2000 it still was not and is not available legally outside sex shops - so its hardly a mass market format.

I would say porn on Bluray is even less important as porn is so easily available from the internet

Any of the older porn films made on 35mm can be turned into superb HD discs for no cost whatsoever

Anything shot on film (i.e. 35mm) has a much higher resolution than 1920x1080.....

I was going to post than then figured he was only referring to porn - which has been video bound for 25+ years.

And I wouldnt say ANYTHING on film is suitable for HD - material shot on 16mm ,even Super 16 wont have enough quality to match true HD - I'm hoping the upcoming Life On Mars Blurays are going to let us see how good super 16 can be and whether its worth selling those dvd's

Blue-Ray will still go the way of Laser Disc.

When video's first started they were rental only and were around 70-80 quid, the first sell-thru title iirc was Raiders of the Lost Ark for £19.99 as I bought it.

The internet is fine as a video delivery system if you live in a big city with a high speed connection, but many people can't get better than 1mb/sec. No good for HD video.

I'd also have thought that a lot of people would be very wary about browsing for "dodgy" material - you never know what you'll find, or who's watching your downloads. Download the wrong thing at the wrong time, and wait for the knock on the door.

Buy on disc, from a reliable source, and you know you aren't doing anything illegal.

Ok and right now you can buy a Samsung BD-P1400 for £149.99. Does that not put them at about the same pace of price dropping? Both formats about 2 years in, both have players available at around the £150 mark.

As a matter of fact it doesn't - because £150 from 2000 is nearer £190 in 2008 money (by RPI) so by that measure Blu-ray is already falling in price faster than DVD did.

Is that cheap Blu-ray player profile 2.0?

No just a basic Profile 1.0 player, but then "cheap" and Profile 2.0 are unlikely to be synonomous for a while - and even a Profile 1.0 player will still play the movie and virtually all extras (the number of discs with Bonus View and/or BD Live is relatively tiny) just fine anyway and are perfect for the budget end of the market.

It won't be long before Profile 1.1 players will be around that price or lower though (they are already approaching £200 which is almost the same as "£150 in 2000") - and Profile 1.1 is the only standard that is mandatory for new players. Having seen what is available on BD Live I really couldn't give two hoots about Profile 2.0 (even though my PS3 does support it) - it just seems to be stuff that could have simply been on the disc in the first place and has just been put in as BD Live features for the sake of being able to say the disc has BD Live features!

Earlier DVD players didn't have all the features of modern players either (e.g. dts output, component out, upscaling), so I don't see that it's a particularly relevent direction to take your point in.

With DVD players they all did the same thing whereas there is little point spending anything on a profile 1.0 player, which doesn't play certain features etc. The same can be said for 1.1. My early DVD player had DD and DTS outputs but obviously no upscaler as HDTV wasn't available in the UK back then. Blu-Ray is a niche product for people who have too much time, money and patience only. Nothing will change that. When retailers start to see that Blu-Ray isn't taking off as hoped, they'll stop stocking it.

Your big issue with any non profile 2 player is the frequency that they can require firmware upgrades. Buy a new disc, especially Fox studios, and there's a high chance you are going to find it doesn't play. With profile 2, it will download new firmware, if not, then you have to download it, burn to CD, and install it on the player. No fun.

I'd agree with those facts.... you could also argue that Blu ray pricing has fallen faster than DVD did.... players appeared in 1997 in the UK and it was around 2001 when we saw the £150 players .... that's 4 years from launch whereas blu ray have achieved similar price points much sooner.

I agree that the various BD profiles is nonsense and smacks of launching unready products onto the public... clearly they rushed it out to counter HD DVD.....but DVD launched and then problems occured when The Matrix had extras that didn't work on lots of DVD players (although mostly fixed by firmware updates)

Incidentally I do have a profile1 Sony blu ray, only because it was almost given away with the Sony lcd I got.

I think I've watched 1 blu ray so far

The only thing that will stop Bluray going the way of the dinosaur is if manufacturers stoped producing DVD players and made Bluray ones only (like the CRT change a few years back)
Bluray players play normal DVD's i cant see why this ant eventually be done.

The main nail in the coffin is that there's no excitement about HD as there was when colour and DVD came out. Its mainly industry hype to get you to buy the latest gimmick AND the equipment is too expensive.
most people are happy with there old CRT widescreen and DVD player that when new was vast improvements for the £

Back in the day vast improvements could be seen hooking your new £100 dvd player to your good old CRT and ditching the VCR. Now however they have to pay for extra services and have new installations, new equipment and connections just to get the same result in a slightly sharper image.

You mean it will be phased out 20 years after its launch?

I dont think Bluray will last that long.

If you are connecting it to LD studio and consumer support its already outstripped what LD managed in 20 years in the UK

You're in a dream world Sonny.

Profile 2 is unimportant.

All it allows a player to do is download stuff from the net and like the much vaunted multi angle feature on dvd - nobody really gives a crap about it.

Profile 1.1 is good enough if you want PIP commentaries -but once again its not that important.

Bluray sales are increasing all the time.
With the gap between dvd and Blu prices only about £3 to £4 people are wising up to the long term value of the Bluray version.

If you buy US Bluray then titles are already cheaper than UK dvd's.

However - I would suggest that Bluray is not going to light up the High Street as they charge too much.

Most Blu buyers buy off the net.

I dont forsee Blu overtaking dvd at any point but although it could be classified as niche at the moment I think its long term future is bright and its already doing better than LD ever did

Analogue HD wouldn't use HDMI. There's nothing technically to stop SCART being engineered for HD, just that HD is mainly a US invention and they always used phono jacks instead. So component via phono leads was used.

System-wise, it probably would have been HD-MAC or else a modified version of PALplus.

i really dont understand people knocking blu, its not overpriced and the discs are everywhere

btw, how do i get pip. i have a ps3 with the latest firmware(i think)

It's generally just lumped in with the other extras - if you have a disc that actually has a PIP feature that is (it's still comparatively a very rare extra feature).

In fact some discs have "pseudo-PIP" that doesn't actually require a profile 1.1 player anyway as they have simply put two versions of the film on the disc - one with the PIP and without. Horrendously wasteful of course, but then with all that capacity it isn't an issue for films that aren't using the space for other things (like uncompressed PCM tracks).

I'm firmly in the camp that Profiles matter far less than doomsayers would have you believe. Barely anyone ever views PIP features and even fewer use online interactive features. If it plays the movie and all the conventional extras then that is all most people are worried about. Oh and firmware updates are not guaranteed for a Profile 2.0 player anyway - it just happens that because it has an ethernet port there is a convenient means of delivering it to the player if the manufacturer happens to provide one.

As long as discs and players are produced to the spec's then a Profile 1.0 player should have no difficulty playing any BD movie - regardless of whether it is Bonus View (profile 1.1) or BD Live (profile 2.0) enabled. Occasionally manufacturers get things wrong and that is when incompatibilities can crop up - but as someone pointed out above, that isn't a Blu-ray specific issue - it's something that can affect any format. And most manufacturers are normally good enough to provide a firmware update (which can usually be burned to a CD/DVD if there is no other means of connection) if problems like that occur.

Essentially its a 'time will tell' scenario. You can't really build an argument that prices haven't dropped since the Blu-ray market is still young; theres every chance that in 5-10 years time the market will be flooded with cheap BR players and disks as with DVD today.

However, Toshiba are still not conceding defeat in the format war, and looking to upscaled DVD. DVD still has a lot of mileage, and there are a lot of large DVD collections out there.

There would be a market for a cheap player that supports Bluray, upscaled/otherwise improved DVD and SCART/HDMI. BHu8t cheao players wont come until more disks are available, and they wont come until the market picks up.

As an informed consumer, I'm waiting for a better quality of manufacture than the cheapest Sony/Samsung offerings. The PS3 is an option but for £295 (80GB, Amazon) or £285 (40GB, Amazon) its still a pricey investment.

My Freeview+ PVR (bought last Christmas from ASDA for £100) has PIP; its a technology that could be added to just about any TV or box if the manufacturers wanted. Sky, Freeview, etc seem the most suitable, and I can only foresee a use for it if BR/DVD players can also show another input (from the TV). It should be built into all TVs as standard IMO.