Clashing Formats Obstruct HD Video

In what has become a depressingly common ritual, three major Hollywood studios -- Viacom Inc.’s Paramount, General Electric Co.’s Universal and Time Warner Inc.’s Warner Bros. -- recently committed themselves to issuing movies for home viewing in a new high-definition video format known as HD-DVD.

What’s depressing about that?

Namely that three other studios (Walt Disney Co., Columbia/Tri-Star and Metro-Goldwyn Mayer Inc.) have thrown in their lot with a different format known as Blu-Ray.

Both systems use blue-light lasers to record the increased resolution and fidelity of high-definition video on discs and play them back. But their similarities end there; each will be incompatible with players made for the other.

As Jerry Seinfeld might say, “Here we go.”

Consumers will be faced, at least initially, with choosing either a Blu-Ray or an HD-DVD player, and therefore with being deprived of a full catalog of videos from the opposing camp’s studios. (That is, unless they spring for two machines.) This is sure to delay the market’s wholehearted embrace of the new technology until many Yuletides from now.

Nevertheless, both camps are dug in, shunning compromise. The Blu-Ray Disc Assn., led by Sony Corp. (owner of Columbia/Tri-Star and, in short order, MGM), says its discs will have greater capacity than the competition -- five times as much as today’s conventional DVDs and about 66% more than HD-DVD. The latter’s supporters, led by Toshiba Corp., say HD-DVDs will be cheaper to produce and will reach the market as early as 2005, as much as a year ahead of Blu-Ray.

The home video field seems to be ridiculously vulnerable to such costly format wars.

The classic case was the clash between Betamax videotape technology, which was developed by Sony, and VHS. Despite being arguably superior, Betamax lost the marketing joust and was reduced to a historical footnote, resurrected periodically by technology reporters for cautionary paragraphs like this one.

But the industry keeps marching over the same cliff.

Consider recordable DVDs. Early on, recording formats split into what are known as DVD+R/RW and DVD-R/RW formats, each backed by different manufacturers and each incompatible with a sizable subset of consumer DVD players and computer drives (and with each other).

Not long ago, when my wife and I contemplated buying my in-laws a DVD player so that they could watch recorded DVDs featuring their grandchildren, our plan crashed on this shoal: We couldn’t figure out whether any given player we’d buy them would play the DVDs recorded on any equipment we bought for ourselves.

Electronics retailers deserve a share of the blame, too. This week’s sale circular from Best Buy Co. offers a Sony camcorder that records directly onto DVDs, which, it assures us, “play in most players.”

In fact, the camcorder requires DVD-R/RW blanks, which may or may not work in your home player, and it won’t record on DVD+R/RW discs. I wonder what the reaction will be of a customer who buys the camcorder, hastily grabs a spool of DVD+ blanks on his way to the cashier station and discovers on Christmas morning, just as he focuses his lens on the kids spotting presents under the tree, that the combination is useless?

Technology types love to argue that in an innovative world this sort of confusion is (A) inevitable and (B) beneficial.

I recall hearing Nathan Myhrvold, the one-time philosopher-king-in-residence at Microsoft Corp., tell a computer engineering conference that the relentless parade of glitches, bugs and crashes in Windows software proved that his company was on the cutting edge -- as though any competitor whose operating system worked flawlessly would be simply coasting. Microsoft must still be a paragon of innovation: My Windows XP machine can barely run for an hour without throwing out some inexplicable error message or grinding to a halt.

Does it really have to be so? The most advanced technology in my house, a wireless network that reliably connects three computers and a video-game console to a single broadband account, is based on an industry standard known familiarly as Wi-Fi and technically (in its latest version) as 802.11g.

Wi-Fi was created in 1999 by a working group of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which exists largely to promulgate industrywide standards. Any Wi-Fi unit is designed to work with equipment from any manufacturer in the business; you can build a single home network without using the same brand twice. By contrast, some televisions made as recently as five years ago won’t work at all with the latest generation of DVD players.

Wi-Fi’s interoperability is one reason the technology has taken off, with wireless hotspots now available in coffeehouses, airport waiting lounges, public parks, hotels -- even churches. You’re surer of being able to wirelessly download an entire movie to your laptop in a Starbucks than of popping any random home-recorded DVD into the same laptop and getting it to work.

Ironically, the popularity of the original DVD standard itself arose from a competitive compromise. One format had been developed by Sony and Philips Electronics, another by Toshiba and its partners. Hollywood refused to commit itself to movies on DVD unless they got together. Thanks to the resulting hybrid, DVD players became the fastest-selling consumer electronics product in history following their introduction in 1997.

But memories must be short in Hollywood and high-tech. This time, it will be up to wise consumers to keep their hands in their pockets until these industries get their act together.

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Golden State appears every Monday and Thursday. You can reach Michael Hiltzik at golden.state@latimes.com and read his previous columns at latimes.com/hiltzik.