BluRay Alternatives to iDVD and DVD Studio Pro

You can make simple auto play BR discs with Compressor 3.5 and higher.

You can make BR with simple preset menus using the Pro versions of Toast 10 or 11.

You can make BR with your own interactive menus or templates with Adobe Encore.

>Wouldn’t it be nice if Apple would simply add a “Burn to BluRay” button to iDVD or DVDStudio Pro?

Yes ... but haven't you heard? In their infinite wisdom, Apple has declared that DVD and Blu-ray are dead. They have deemed that all video should be file/web based delivery.

If you're not an Apple fan-boy, I'd recommend switching to a Windows system running Adobe Productrion Premium Pro CS5.5.

-DH

If you want HD video on a Blu-Ray disc, Apple does support that through FCPX and Compressor. There is also Toast. If you want DVD style menus with HD video, there is Encore (which has its share of problems). Encore runs just as bad on Windows as it does on the Mac, so there is no reason to switch hardware. If you want Blu-Ray programming and features with HD video, then you need Sony's BluPrint or equivalent software. There are a couple of programs that came out a few years ago (I forget their names) that are supposed to be fully Blu-Ray compliant, and only cost thousands of dollars as opposed to the hunderd thousand that BluPrint costs.

Its 2012 and DVDs still out sell the same title in Blu-Ray. Blu-Ray just never really caught on. Sales of DVDs and Blu-Ray are actually declining.

So lets put the hating aside for a moment and look at the facts. You have 4 basic choices for HD video delivery.

1. You just need HD video on a Blu-Ray. Apple supports that.

2. You need HD video with only DVD level programming. Encore (for the Mac) supports that.

3. You need HD video with Blu-Ray level programming. Prepared to spend a lot of money on a industry in decline.

4. You need to distribute HD video. Web delivery via Vimeo, Netflix, etc are turning out to be the better option now, and this will only increase in the future. There is not going to be a sudden Blu-Ray revival.

Really? Star Wars Blu-ray box set sold over a million copies in its first week of release in September '11, and as by the end of September '11 its had generated over a $84 million in sales. That is larger than the box office of some theatrically released films right now. Don't believe everything Steve Jobs said.

Most of the major movie studios only started releasing Blu-ray movies titles around 2008, people are notoriously reluctant to adopt new formats. Remember how long before more consumers had DVD players than VHS? Blu-ray sales have consistently risen. Blu-ray Sales rose 35% in '11, and I believe Blu-ray and DVD sales are about 50/50 now. Blu-ray is expected to surpass DVD within a year or two. If anything is eroding physical media sales it is piracy, just like what happened to CDs.

Will downloadable content (or piracy) replace physical media? Yes, or course, but that will not be for sometime. Vimeo, Netflix, and iTunes are not better HD content providers, because they can not provide the high quaility Blu-ray can. What they call HD is at the most 720p with inferior sound, while Blu-ray's provide 1080p with lossless doby digital sound; as massive difference to any cinephile. Maybe you are not one, so you don't notice, but I do.

When these web delivery providers can consistently supply 1080p with lossless sound, then I will consider them legitimate HD options, but as of now I can barely stream 720p from Netflix without having to worry about bandwidth issues. Besides, when I buy something I like to actually own it, and not be told where and how I can use it.

" I believe Blu-ray and DVD sales are about 50/50 now "

Perhaps in your local shop customers are charging through the doors like mad things but in world, European and far east sales Blu-ray is in depression.

The owners of the Blu-ray format estimate blu-ray will be obsolete in two years, they have stated many times the format is a temporay medium.

In the UK if you want to watch so called Hidef video, you buy an HD ready TV and plug in an HD Sky box and watch video on demand using Pay per View. Rumaging around for a plastic disc under the table is long gone,

Consumers are not so much interested in sound or picture quality: they want instantanious delivery, kids going to school on the bus watch TV and video with down loads on iPhones iPads and laptops.

My professional customers dont want the best picture quality the best sound they want interactivity, immediate controll and immediate viewing on there personal computer screen, not on a 50 inch LED screen.

My preference is to sit in a comfy seat at the cinema watching film projected on a big screen with Dolby sound.

Where I live (Germany) Blu-Ray is on permanent fire sale at big electro retaillers for anything that's been out on disc for more than 4-6 months. They cost less than or are around the same price as the DVD in some cases. Blu-Ray was easily double the price of a DVD two years ago.

Actually Europe is the largest market for Blu-rays currently, so I am not sure where those figures are coming from. Maybe you mean DVDs, whose sales continue to drop year after year. Besides, sales can fluctuate quarter to quarter. Half way through 2011 they were saying Blu-ray sale were down, and then by the end of 2011 Blu-rays finished 35% above 2010 in the USA. Pretty good for a "dying media."

Like I said, downloadable content will be the dominant force of the future,for better or worse, but Blu-ray will not be going anywhere anytime soon. Did you know that downloadable music only surpassed physical CDs for the first time in 2011? And how many years has it been around? Digital music sales took 50.3% of the market in 2011. Not the whopping figures you probably thought they were, and digital movie sales are only a fraction of digital music sales. It will be several years before digital movies surpass the physical, and even then people will continue to use physical media for several years after that before it completely goes the way of VHS and cassette tape; much in the way that, yes, digital music leads the market, but there is still 49.7% of it left. In the mean time, Apple users could have had at least a decades worth of Blu-ray drive use; a life time in the technology world.

Instantaniously access to products is very appealing, but it is not currently an overwhelming threat to physical media. Piracy is. Music sales, including digital, are weak overall compared to what they used to be. The best selling album of 2011, Adele's "21", is the first album to sell over 5 million copies (that figure includes digital sales like iTunes) since 2004, and an album selling 10 million copies might never happen again.

Don't believe the hype just yet.

To add to my above posts:

Perhaps you know consumers who prize instant gratification over quality, as I am sure there are plenty, but with digital movie downloads they are getting an inferior product for around the same price.

For example, Boardwalk Empire’s complete first season is selling for $46.99 on iTunes, but it’s on sale at my local Wal-Mart, 10 minutes from my house, for $44.96. I could be home watching it in true 1080p HD with high quality dolby digital sound within 20 to 25 minutes—probably faster than the amount of time it would take for me to download the complete season from iTunes. It is also currently on sale on Amazon for $34.99, and with my account I can get free 2-day shipping. Not only are you paying more, but you are paying more for a inferior product. Many blu-ray's come with free digital copies that you can upload to your computer, covering all options for the same price. I happen to like these “fumbling” discs, as you call them. I can play them at my girlfriend's, I can let a friend borrow them, and they will always be there; unlike a music video I bought from iTunes that mysteriously disappeared from my purchases when I upgraded computers. When I buy something, I like to own it, not virtually own it.

Heck, I know where to find intant streaming movies for free, but I'd rather have a quality product.

No one said that streaming video on the web was as good of quality as Blu-Ray. That is beside the point. The point being that Blu-Ray as a format never did catch on, and there is not going to be a sudden revival of the format. DVD sales continue to outsell the same title in Blu-Ray format. Your listing of Star Wars isn't even compariable. If Star Wars had never been released as a DVD or Blu-Ray, and then if it was released in both formats simultaneously, the DVD format would have outsold the Blu-Ray format. This is what is still happening with new releases.

History repeats itself. I don't know is you remember but shortly after the DVD Video format came out there was DVD Audio. It was an audio only format, meant to replace CDs. Much higher quality, far surpasing anything you could hear on CD. But you couldn't play these disc on your video DVD player, you needed special new hardware to play the discs, and the discs costs more than CDs. So what happened? At the same time that DVD Audio came out, MP3s appeared. Now the quality of MP3s isn't even as good as CDs, much less than DVD Audio, but consumers didn't care. MP3s offered convenience. You could download just the songs you wanted (you were not forced to buy an entire album just for one song), and it was simpler than going to a store (you could get the songs at home.) Now you are going to say its all about piracy, but it wasn't. Years after MP3s appeared, Apple opened the iTunes Music Store. You could download a free pirated song off the web, but you were never sure it was going to be of good quality, and it could be a trojan horse. The iTunes Music Store offered the best quality MP3s and there was no malware, but there was a small fee. The result was people were willing to pay for that. The iTunes Music Store was successful beyond Apple's wildest dreams.

Consumers bought DVDs like crazy over the past few years. Now, however they are looking at that pile of DVDs and are asking themselves, "Of all those discs, how many have I actually watched a second time?" So sales of DVDs and Blu-Ray discs are in decline. The consumer wants to watch a movie, but they don't want to pay the full price of owning anymore, nor do they want the disc, nor do they want to fill their hard drive with movies they will only watch once. So rentals should be at a all time high, but they are not. Blockbuster went bankrupt. That is because consumers are streaming their rentals. Netflix put Blockbuster out of business. Streaming isn't something that is going to be popular in the future. It is already the dominate force right now. Consumers are streaming their rentals through Cable "Movies On Demand" or Netflix or a number of other alternatives. And then there is also piracy, because no one has hit that "sweet spot" price point yet, although Netflix is the closest. And its becuase Netflix has come the closest that the Studios will only give Netflix certain movies for streaming. The big hits get released on cable streaming (for now). Blu-Ray is not going to have a sudden revival in the face of this. You might as well be arguing for the merits of DVD Audio discs.

"The point being that Blu-Ray as a format never did catch on."

Wow, you really couldn't be further from the truth. Here is some market research conducted and released this past June '11.

"Two new reports out this month from FutureSource Consulting and the NPD Group confirm what we knew all along: Blu-ray discs are replacing DVDs as the new standard for optical media. What’s surprising is that the experts predict that sales of Blu-ray discs will overtake DVDs within the next year.

The report from FutureSource Consulting primarily consists of forecasted figures for the next few years. The company says that Blu-ray will overtake DVD sales in 2012, and may command up to 41% of home entertainment spending by 2014. By then, DVD sales will account for just 26% of the market. Other means of entertainment such as television-based Video-on-Demand (VOD) (18%) and online video services (15%) will account for the remaining sales."

As you can see, blu-ray is taking over (35% increase in 2011), and online services is not even close to being "the dominate force right now." Heck, it is estimated that DVDs will still have a larger market share than online video services 2 years from now. Comparing blu-ray to dvd audio is absolutely ridiculous, as blu-ray started out selling dvd audio years ago. You keep commenting that "blu-rays will not have a sudden revival" as if their sales have gone down at some point. They haven't. Their sales have continued to rise year after year.

You point about consumers asking "how many home video will they watch a second time" has been valid for every home video format and is nothing new. Netflix (and Redbox) is putting Blockbuster out of business, but it wasn't their streaming. Netflix put Blockbuster against the fence years ago with their cheap subscriptions and home delivery service. Blockbuster was charging $5 to rent a movie when Netflix first came out. Netflix's currently doesn't offer even half of their titles on streaming. How are people renting the rest of the films? Physical discs. Remember when Netflix tried to split the company and eveyone went crazy? That was only last year. So many people complained and drop their subscriptions that Netflix ended up scrapping the whole idea. Besides, this doesn't really effect home video purchases; there as always been rental services and I see Netflix as just replacing the old.

There is no "sweet spot" price point that will slow down piracy. Free is always more appealing. Take the music industry for example: as of October 4, 2011, the iTunes has sold 16 billionth songs. The RIAA estimates that from 2004 through 2009 alone, approximately 30 billion songs were illegally downloaded. In the decade plus since Napster emerged in 1999, music sales in the U.S. have dropped 47 percent, from $14.6 billion to $7.7 billion. The "sweet spot" would finding technology to make it harder to pirate. There is no price point that beats free.

Like I said, don't believe all the hype you hear. It will be a while.

Hmm, a report from a consulting group that they think 2012 will be the year that Blu-Ray finally starts to outsell DVDs (by admission DVDs continue to outsell Blu-Ray). That's wishful thinking, again from a consulting group. Actual sales number from DEG show that DVDs and Blu-Ray both had a 18% drop in sales in 2011. So we see that Blu-Ray is already in decline, and there isn't going to be a sudden revival. Stop buying into the wishful thinking of consultants.

Netflix has been around since the '90's, It's only when they introduced streaming media that Blockbuster went bankrupt. Studios are very frightened that Netflix will become for the movie industry what iTunes Music Store has become for the record industry, so they specifically limit what Netflix can stream. Studios do allow streaming of their top hits to rental services like cable on-demand and iTunes, which continue to grow (as opposed to Blu-Ray which, again, is already in decline.) Netflix's move to split their company was a bad move, and people moved to other streaming services, like Amazon Instant Video. They didn't drop streaming and switch to renting physical media.

Don't believe all the hype you hear about Blu-Ray. Especially when they are not talking about actual facts and figures, but estimates and projections. The actual numbers shows it never surpassed DVD sales, and it's already in decline. The sun is already in the process of setting on Blu-Ray.

Geez. Get a room you two.

Come on Nick. What with the slowdown in the forum after people started to get over Apple cutting the heart of the FCS package, we have been severely lackiing in this kind of stuff.

At least it's entertaining.

fwiw - my local video store carries no Blu-Ray disks for rent and I don't know anyone who has a B-R player anyway. Everyone is either staying with DVD or going to home/business video servers to deliver content.

x

LOL, not once did I state that blu-rays were out selling DVDs. I guess you just skim through my posts. I said they are pojected to in the next year or so, e.g. their sales continue to rise.

NPD and FSC are both industry respected market research firms who analyze various consumer markets. DEG? Are you talking about the Digital Entertainment Group? Because their 2011 figures haven't even been released yet, so once again your basis is unfounded. According to DEG's 2010 figures, blu-ray Disc sales increased by 68%, players 62%. Their 2011 figures probably will be released this weekend at CES.

The 18% drop you quote from DEG was referring to all home media sales, and was a report released during the summer on the first 6 months of 2011 as compared to 2010 only:

a) we are coming out of a recession and the sales in all markets are suffering

b) those figures were published for the first 6 months of 2011, sales bounced back during the 2nd half of 2011 to top 2010's sales

c) DEG stated in the same report that blu-ray sales continue an upward trend

Ron Sanders, president of DEG, himself stated blu-ray sales continue to show strong growth. I can't seem to find this setting sun you speak of.

As far as Blockbuster vs. Netflix: a billion dollar company does not go bankrupt over night. Blockbuster's decline was on going for several years, and streaming still makes up a smaller percentage of Netflix's services.

I'm done posting on this topic after this, because I think we have pretty much taken over the thread and have gone wildy off topic from the original post.