BluRay Alternatives to iDVD and DVD Studio Pro

Hmm, when did I directly accuse you of stating that "blu-rays were out selling DVDs." Its kinda sad that you have to make things up. I have pointed out that Blu-Rays have never caught on, and the consulting group has indirectly admitted that, stating that 2012 might be the year (hopefully, maybe, guessing).

Consulting firms say what they are paid to say. I wouldn't believe their estimates any more than you should believe RIAA's wildly inflated estimates.

DEG did point out that Blu-Ray sales were in decline for the first half of 2011. The numbers for the second half are not out. And since you don't get it, let me explain to you that a "upward trend" is buzz words for "maybe, hopefully, guessing."

I know you don't want to see that Blu-Ray never caught on and is never going to. None of the people here, who work in the industry, see your wildly opptimistic view of this failed format (again, similar to the fail of DVD Audio).

BTW, Blockbuster was not in decline for years. Its peak year was 2009. A company can rapidly go out of business when the paradigm shifts.

Netflix charges a subscription for physical discs and streaming. How can you state that "streaming makes a smaller percentage of Netflix's services" when one bill pays for both services.

I thinki all the pro/con Blu-Ray posts are interesting as well, but BoBo1's question and agenda are identical to mine. I'm not in the professinal movie market; I video school events, family events, etc. for distribution to students and their parents, as well as family members. Up till now, I've used DVD with great success. And starting even with the compromised HDV format, proper editing and compression have yielded quite good DVD results.

But with the advent of BluRay, I'd like to make these limited distribution on that format, with menues and extras at least as good as the DVD discs I create now. Can't be done for a reasonable price on Mac hardware, even with external burners. The FCP/Compressor/Toast BluRay results are primitive at best; Chapter stops every few minutes without regard to content or MY chaper markers is useless, other than to skip forward quickly. For plays and concerts, I like to have multiple "titles" for the before and after intermission sections, then chapters for each scene or musical selection. Can't do that with the BluRay offerings, short of getting Encore along with a bunch of stuff I don't want.

Delivery for these types of videos is just not in the card via the internet right now. Even the DVDs at 4GB or so is problematic (and regular delivery types like H.264 don't give you the chapters anyway). And HD 1080p30 (or i60) with BluRay level compression is 25GB or more. And the datarate for proper BLuRay is to high to stream properly anyway.

So at least for this type of limited video distribution, DVD and BluRay are the right solution for me. But it is completely unsupported by Apple.

Oh, well.

You should just stick with DVD. You can already do everything you want with DVD Studio Pro, have chapter markers, menus, extras, etc. The only thing that Blu-Ray offers you is HD video. Considering your target audience is students and parents, you are better off sticking with DVD. Blu-Ray never caught on. Consumers, even today in 2012, choose DVD over Blu-Ray. If you did go with Blu-Ray you would be having this conversation all the time;

Parent: "This DVD won't play in my DVD player."

Edward: "Its not a DVD, its a Blu-Ray. You need a Blu-Ray player to watch the disc."

Parent: "I don't own a Blu-Ray player. I just want to watch my kid in the school play."

If you really thought HD video was more important than all the extras you currently provide on DVD, then you certainly could offer Blu-Ray discs that would feature HD video with no "bells and whistles". But, a good percentage of your target consumers would not even be able to view the disc. Then of those that could you would still find many who would choose SD video with all the extras vs. HD video with no extras. If you thought HD video would win that battle you would have already been producing Blu-Ray discs.

Not completely true that BluRay didn't catch on (see above discussions), but that's not my point. I want to offer the OPTION to the people who receive the optical discs. It is not time to switch over complete, and may never be. Eventually, online deliver will be the way to go, but that's at least 5 years or more away. And we will still need "authoring" to allow a similar experience to DVDs and BluRay's now: chapters, alternate audio / video, etc. Right now, that means writing Flash or HTLM5.

Oh, yeah, one more thing: Apple doesn't even support authoring DVD any more; iDVD and DVD SP are gone (hint: keep your old ones!). FCP/X doesn't export chapters, you have to create them externally in a text file for import to compressor, or create them in oompressor, not the natural place to be doing that, imho. I put nice fades to black where chapters go (scenes, next song, whatever) and the chapter marker goes smack in the middle: right when I'm creating the transistion in FCP 6 or 7. Now I get to write all that down somewhere, or create a text file on the side while I'm editing in FCP/X, etc.

So, Apple has ridden Doc Brown DeLorean into the future, but many of us are stuck here. Sigh - good think I kept my FCS!

PS: there is a bluray player for Mac OSX Lion now: http://www.macblurayplayer.com/

Seems to work OK with the bluray disk volumes created by Toast 12; with some shinnanegans, also those from FCP/X. Neither have custom menus designs. Just lists of chapters with helpful names like "Chapter 1, Chapter 2" etc.

So, six months later where are things at now. Well Blu-Ray finished off 2011 pretty bad. Blu-raystats for 2011 Six months later, while sales of Blu-Ray discs have improved vs DVDs, DVDs still out-sell their respective Blu-ray copies. So, it's a pretty acurate statement to say that Blu-ray still has not caught on.

It also looks it is not going to take 5 years for online viewing to outpace DVDs and Blu-Ray combined. It is going to happen this year. 2012_03_online_movies_the_future_today Remember the article talks about DVD and Blu-Ray sales combined vs online. It would be an understatement to mention that means online vs Blu-Ray alone is significantly higher.

And finally, while Macs have never had the ability to natively playback Blu-Ray discs (you have to purchase third party software), Microsoft made a even bolder move. Windows 8 Drops DVD and Blu-Ray Playback Be sure to read the full article.

So yes, history is repeating itself. Blu-Ray players are the 21st century consumer equivalent of the DVD Audio player. Convience beats quality again.

Well I author BD for a living so I have some bias but to be fair....BD was never intended to replace DVD. Furthermore, its always been know that VOD will overtake and crush optical disc completely, but this is years away. Once the entire globe is wired....Not in my lifetime 🙂 Also I personally dont know anyone with a HD Set who purposely goes out and buys an SD DVD Player.

Every major title and TV show is produced and sold on BD so to say BD hasnt caught on is a rather tired statement 5 years on

BD has been and is very profitable.....isnt that the point? I do agree though that BD greatly underpreformed what "they" projected but you know "them"? Always over optimistic haha!

"Well Blu-Ray finished off 2011 pretty bad.."

Blu-ray sold over $2 billion in sales in 2011, making it the formats most successful year to date, up 19% over 2010. Blu-ray was the second highest grossing format in 2011. Your comment doesn't even make sense.

The article on streaming viewings is irrelevant. I've read the real figures from IHS that the article writes about and misinterprets, and they are counting individual viewings: every time someone watches the same movie multiple times, every time you stop and start movies, and if you watch a TV series they are counting each individual episode as a "viewing." It would be interesting if there was something to compare it to, but there isn't someone counting each and every time I use my Blu-ray/DVD player, which would be the only accurate comparison. They only thing they counted are physical media unit sales in a single year. For example, if I bought a BD three years ago and watched it for the first time in 2011 it wasn't counted, but everything watched via streaming in 2011 was counted. Apples and oranges.

You keep tossing out this phrase of "BD is the equivalent of DVD Audio" as if you think you have found some kind of clever quote, and it really makes me laugh every time. BD sold more units in 2011, one year, than DVD Audio did in its entire existence. There is no comparison. End of story.

And you say convenience beats quality as if that is something to be proud of: the equivalent consuming the McDonalds of home entertainment. I am often left wondering if you are being serious, because you comments are so ridiculous.

But even if BD and DVD we're dying (yes they will eventually, but for many purposes, they are alive and well and the sell rate is decent), we still need authoring to provide a decent viewing experience, even with online stuff. Or purchases stored on our hard drive or the Cloud; or viewed on demand from iTunes, whatever.

As it stands there is NOTHING provided for Macs that allow a wysiwyg authoring system for menus, chapter stops, extras, audio stream selection, alternate views, and on and on. DVD SP provided a nifty authoring scheme and was easy to use. It's a shame it was not revamped to allow even it DVD style menus et al to be simply translated to BD or for streaming / online purchase use.

Heck, I'd be happy if I could author HTML 5 or similar with menus and stuff, then write that to a BD for distribution. Someone could easily (playstation / XBOX, etal) create a hardware platform for that.

Eric Pautsch1 wrote:

Also I personally dont know anyone with a HD Set who purposely goes out and buys an SD DVD Player.

Every major title and TV show is produced and sold on BD so to say BD hasnt caught on is a rather tired statement 5 years on

BD has been and is very profitable.....isnt that the point? I do agree though that BD greatly underpreformed what "they" projected but you know "them"? Always over optimistic haha!

The problem has been that consumers have gone out and replaced their SD TVs with HDTVs... and kept their DVD players. Eventually when those DVD players break down they might go out and buy a Blu-Ray player.

Every major title and TV show produced is indeed sold on BD. And everytime there is a simultaneous release of DVD and Blu-Ray of that title, the DVD version outsells the BD version. When DVDs finally outsold the VHS version of the same title, that was the point when DVDs caught on with consumers. Blu-Ray still have not reached the point where they outsell DVDs, i.e., they still have not caught on with consumers.

The provided links do not seem to be working, Apple appears to have added discussion.apple.com to the beginning of the link. If you strip that out the links work. I suggest you read them.

Any time a fact confronts your pervieved reality you immediately say it couldn't possibly be true and just ignore the facts. Its interesting to look back at Gary Scotland and Nick Holmes comments and of course your response that they couldn't possibly be seeing what they indeed were seeing. Talk about being in denial.

"The article on streaming viewings" was actully an article on online sales. Again, I strongly suggest you actually read the article. The Windows 8 article also mentions online sales vs combined DVD and Blu-Ray sales.

The analogy of DVD Audio players to Blu-Ray players was not a discussion of unit sales. Sorry that went over your head. It was an analogy to how a supperior quality product ultimately lost out to convinence with consumers. Convenience beating out quality isn't a matter of pride. Its just a simple statement of fact. Living in denial of that isn't going to make consumers suddenly start choosing quality over convenince.

WTFF are you talking about?

Of course its caught on....BD is a multi billion dollar money making format. What do you have againts BD? As a Video Pro, Id like to hope you rent or buy the BD version instead of the DVD? Its a niche format and was always meant to be just that. Youre acting like it was designed to overtake and bury DVD like DVD did to VHS.....why?

Again...it was never meant to overtake DVD....that would be impossible and youre comparing apple and oranges. Personally Id had wished HD DVD had won but I love the format.....the audio choices available is beautiful.