The HD-VMD story - The format that lost to the format that lost

have you ever noticed that this bug just looks like someone's house well not really it just looks like someone's made minimal effort okay everyone uh please settle down it's the last question of tonight's quiz between 2006 and 2008 there was an hd video disc for that wall that was won by blu-ray but can you name the format that came in last place well that's easy one it's hd dvd yeah are you sure yeah 100 you know this bit would have been better with the puppets i know that's the end of the quiz everyone so pens and pencils down please swap your answer sheet with the team next to you and we'll go through the answers and do the scoring so how am i supposed to get drunk here you should have said if you wanted to go to that real pub right i think you'll agree it's been a fun night but we're down to the very last answer there the question was about the video disc format war and the answer was hd vmd what no you've got that one wrong the the answers hd dvd that's the format that lost to blu-ray no i think you miss her the question because the question was what format came last so blu-ray game first hd dvd second but third and by a long margin was hdvmd i mean if you ask somebody who came last in the london marathon you wouldn't give the name of the person who came second now would you but that's not even a question anyone would ask this is absolute bull crap now before we get too far into this yeah there were other high definition video disc formats i mean i've shown high vision muse on this channel before but over in china there was evd and later there was china blue not a naughty label it was just that's what it was called but china blue is actually based on hd dvd but we're not going into those two now because really that was just something for china the ones we're talking about are the three formats that were in this sort of format wall 2006 to 2008 hd dvd blu-ray and believe it or not hd vmd and the reason you probably have never heard of hd vmd is because it was the floppiest of flops a complete and utter failure it wasn't really kind of almost in the race it was doing so bad i mean previously on the v2000 video i said that was the video format that came third in a two horse race of course the other two being vhs versus beta or betamax but as far as hd vmd goes if i was using the same horse race analogy i'd say this one kind of fell at the first fence but anyway today i'm talking about now i think i'd better do a brief recap of what this whole hd video disc format wall thing was about because bear in mind this really kicked off in 2006. that's 15 years ago at the time i'm recording this there's going to be people watching this video now that weren't even born when all this happened now i'm sorry if that makes anyone feel old but let's just quickly restate what happened well dvd massive success came out towards the end of the 90s but by 2005-ish well there seemed to be a need for an hd version of that now when dvd came out there was only the one format there was no war over this one it was just it came out everyone backed it everyone made loads of money i think people got a little bit greedy after that though because when it came to the hd follow-up people seem to want to control more of it so it's split into two different things so naturally after dvd we have hd dvd but we also have blu-ray and these two formats there were different companies backing each one of these now i'm not reading this off the back of here honestly it's rather obvious that i am because i've got very focal glasses and i can only read it like this but in the hd dvd camp as far as the like companies the hardware companies the electronics companies go toshiba's the main one but nec sanyo microsoft rca and intel so they were behind this one blu-ray um sony hitachi lg panasonic pioneer phillips samsung sharp thompson dell hp and mitsubishi the main one really being sony on there that's the big name so it's really so sony and toshiba that was a really kind of you know main people either side but then we get the movie studios because of course formats no good without some thing to play on it so as far as hd dvd goes bit messy this one but it started off really with universal paramount and warder brothers but then warner's ended up doing both the formats as did paramount then paramount went back to hd dvd only towards the end when they got a big wad of cash out of the hd dvd consortium in a last-ditch attempt to keep this format alive by having some movies coming out on it meanwhile over on the blu-ray side we had sony pictures disney and 20th century fox pretty much all the big names were back in one or the other all both formats okay so that's those two formats but where does hd vmd fit into this story well we need to look at who was behind this one now bear in mind we're going up against the likes of toshiba and sony here the company behind this was called nme nothing to do with the music publication no this was an operation called new medium enterprises and that company well the history goes back to 1999 there was a company created called shop overseas.com and they described themselves as a diversified new age company with a keen focus on vertical b2b internet commerce e-commerce proprietary software solutions and other businesses they've swallowed the buzzword dictionary there aren't there but apparently it was supplying and servicing businesses in the following categories boutique and specialty shops precious and fashion jewelry housewares and home decor caterers and party planners and interior decorators this website was created the company was created but it was never launched they gave up on the idea they pivoted completely in the year 2000 into telecommunications and at that point they changed the name of the company into new media enterprises incorporated now after a few relatively unremarkable years as this telecommunications company nme finally thought they'd found their golden ticket the idea that was going to make them rich they purchased all intellectual property rights to a new high storage optical disk format this format promised that it could hold eight times the data of a standard dvd-9 so eight times eight and a half gigabytes of a dual layer dvd but in the same amount of space and this was done by having up to 20 layers inside that disk that could all be read from one side now this was called the versatile multi-layer disk now this was not one of those multi-million dollar deals looking at the financial records it shows that the amount of money that changed hands well multi-disc and try gm were promised 87 000 each and shares in nme which at the time were effectively worthless and those eighty seven thousand dollar payouts were only a promise on the proviso the enemy will be able to raise a million dollars at the time their total assets were just sixty thousand now in 2004 a dvd that could hold eight times more must have seemed like quite an interesting idea and you might be wondering why this technology didn't cost any more well this explains it from one of the later financial records out of nme's own report it mentions that the vmd technology was in a pre-prototype stage they had no planned production schedule could not yet identify customers for an end product that was not yet producible because it only existed as a computer model yeah they'd basically bought a concept but that didn't stop them going all in on this they closed down all their existing operation over in the us and moved everything over to the uk to concentrate entirely on this vmd format and they bought an office in london or rented it and they named it vmd house now initially the company seems to be concentrating on the vmd as a data storage medium i mean they called it the vmd rather than hd vmd at this point that hd came along later on so talking about it just as a versatile multi-layer disc each layer they said could hold up to five gigabytes you can have up to 20 layers in a disk so a disk the size of a dvd could hold 100 gigabytes of data which is really quite impressive but also they don't seem to completely understand their own technology at this point looking at an annual report they mentioned that these disks would be readable by any normal dvd drive or dvd player well it wouldn't because i mean they're not expecting to see 20 layers in a disk so they're not going to focus on it right so that's not true and they also mentioned a standard definition dvd player with one of these discs with hd video on it will be able to play hd video well of course it wouldn't again because it wouldn't have the necessary decoding circuitry and outputs on the back so it seems like they weren't quite sure exactly what it was they bought this to me this whole acquisition of this vmd thing by nme gives me the same kind of feeling as one of those late night ebay purchases you know the ones you make after you've had a few drinks and you're online and you go and buy something then the next morning you're checking through your emails and you're thinking why the heck did i buy that i mean i've made a job out of it but it's it's one thing by the pachinko machine and having nowhere to store it it's another thing to go and buy a concept of an idea of a product that doesn't yet exist put all your money and backing behind it close down your existing operation move to another country rent an office call it the name of the thing that doesn't yet exist i mean that's taking it to another level isn't it maybe it's you get to a certain point where you can't really admit you did the wrong thing but presumably they had full confidence in this vmd product they just needed to bring it to market and then over the next year or so they seem to move away from the idea of it being more this data storage thing into it being a video delivery system okay now let me give you the official sales pitch for the vmd because of course there's got to be a reason why you'd want to buy this product over the upcoming hd dvd and blu-ray and it goes like this this was supposed to be a cheaper format it was based on the standard dvd yes it had multiple layers more layers than a normal dvd but it meant that it could be pressed in theory by a standard dvd pressing plan with minimal modifications to their process so that should mean that the movies that come out on this format on these discs would cost roughly the same as a normal dvd to produce in addition to that because it's based around a dvd the players themselves use a red laser the same setup as a normal dvd player they don't use the blue laser that was going to be used in the hd dvd and the blu-ray and again that should have made the players cheaper so the whole idea of this format seems to be based around the fact that it would be cheaper to the consumer than the upcoming rivals well i've got to say any company that bases its whole operation its whole reason for being around a slight price advantage is a company that's built on shifting sound because i mean you're going up against sony for example sony have got the economies of scale of a large company a product might come out at an expensive price but it will only be a couple of years or so before that price really drops down i mean my first dvd player i remember cost i think 500 pounds within a couple of years they were down to 300 then they were down to 200 you know within a few years it really dropped down this company was only really promising to be something like 30 cheaper than the alternatives and this all talk about well we're using a cheaper red laser i've got to say that component compared to a blu-ray player's place it's got to be a very small percentage most of the price at the time would have been in the video chip decoding circuitry for the hd side of things i went looking on amazon earlier on and you could get a panasonic blu-ray player there now i mean i know we're years on but still 56 pounds how much do you think out of that 56 pounds was actually allocated towards the price of the blue laser i bet it's pennies but nevertheless they carried on with a brilliant idea which i mean this is like red red flags everywhere to me but they still i think we've already got so far with this now that you just have to carry on and see it through to the end there's no doubt investors that are expecting you to not throw in the towel so in december 2004 they hired a pr firm for a launch in new york on february the 3rd 2005 and in february 2005 they demoed their vmd machines at bafta in london and in march 2005 at cbit in germany and apparently they were showing 20 gigabyte vmds there with the video encoded in mpeg-2 and at this point the plan was to gear up for full production of discs in the fourth quarter of 2005. now remember this is before the launches of both the hd dvd and the blu-ray they came out in 2006 but for some reason the launch date of hd vmd was subsequently put back to the fourth quarter of 2006 which then became the end of 2007. so what was the reason behind all these delays i think there were two things going on first it was a very small company they didn't really have very much money they couldn't gear up to this mass production that you need to be able to properly launch your product also they were having a great deal of difficulty getting any studio to sign on to this format all the big hollywood studios pretty much had backed one or other or both of the rival formats very few of them were interested in backing yet another hd format and in fact quite a few of them had money invested in either one or the other of those two formats so they were interested in helping out a competitor in addition to that though i don't think that enemy were really able to get this multi-layer technology working the way they wanted to at the end of 2006 there were sets sent out to distributors content owners replicators studios production companies in an attempt to generate publicity for vmd now that was a year or so after it was supposed to have launched and the disks that came in those sets were just dual layer dvds now seemingly against all odds right at the end of 2007 some of the hd vmd machines actually made their way to customers hence how i've managed to get hold of this one here but i've got no idea why anyone would have chosen one of these over the competitors any price advantage that this thing's intended to have at launch had been eroded you could get an hd dvd player cheaper than this and you could get plenty of movies for it as well talking movies there weren't that many that came out here the largest name in studios was icon productions which is the mel gibson studio but after that you've got vcl in germany channel nine in australia and perhaps the largest one but unfamiliar to me eros pictures an indian bollywood distributor now in the us the players were originally supposed to be sold through costco and amazon and indeed they did appear on amazon and people put in their orders roundabouts of october time but the company wasn't able to fulfill those orders within the 31 day period that they had to so they all everyone got their money back and then the product disappeared off amazon in the end it was sold directly from nme themselves and they sold the players with a number of different bundles let's just have a look at the titles you could get in those now the bundles vary depending upon the country in which you resided no doubt due to licensing issues there were four different bundles available to india though they seem to be putting quite a bit of emphasis on the bollywood titles but also bear in mind when you look through this the titles are duplicated quite a bit especially across the bollywood ones so there aren't that many there it looks like there are more than there are in addition to these bundles you could buy individual titles for i believe 17.98 each now just to give you an idea as to what hd vmd was up against even when it came to just competing against this second place format hd dvd well back in august 2007 hd dvd was faltering it was losing the war so to boost the product to make more people interested in it they agreed the consortium behind hd dvd to pay a total of 150 million dollars to paramount and dreamworks if they agreed to become exclusive to hd dvd with the exclusion of any spielberg films but yeah 150 million dollars for exclusivity and still that didn't save hd dvd so i think it's unlikely that having lazytown as your exclusive on vmd was really going to do you many favors ultimately this nme company was a very small operation with very little financial backing and no history of ever launching any successful consumer electronics products and yet they decided to go head-to-head against sony looking in their financial records in the year coming up to the product actually making its way to market they were down to their last borrowed million and they'd already burnt their way through most of that now that is hardly a sufficient war chest to go up against one of the biggest consumer electronics and entertainment corporations in the world now the last thing that was heard from nme was in february 2008 when they put out a press statement following toshiba's withdrawal from the market so they stopped making hd dvd players effectively at this point the format war between hd dvd and blu-ray was over and blu-ray was the winner and in their statement nme again reiterated their increasingly irrelevant vmd sales shtick about it being cheaper and also mentioned that following the departure of hd dvd this left the way clear for vmd to be embraced by our industry now that was a statement that was being delivered by an interim ceo the previous chap had seen their writing on the wall and resigned three weeks earlier nme closed down shortly afterwards sometime in early 2008 and by the time google took this picture of their former headquarters in london later that same year all traces of the company ever having been in these offices that were previously known as vmd house had vanished and the most recent picture of that office shows that it is now being used as a gym so at least something's working out there so that's the history taken care of now from one complete failure to another let's have a look at my hd vmd players okay so i'll start off with the earliest now this is that promotional set the one that enemy sent out to various companies at the end of 2006 in an attempt to try and drum up some interest in the format now i don't know whether my set is complete but what i've got here includes two vmd boxes one of those contains a demo that split across two disks and the other one well that's an episode of the icelandic children's television show lazy tone both of these come in vmd's own custom design of case which i think is a bit of a flawed design it lacks rigidity it bends at the edges anyway this whole equipment is from at least a year before the final launch and as such there are a few issues here or there for example the remote has a couple of typos jpeg has a couple of its letters transposed and the word program is either missing an m or has an extra e depending upon which version of the word they intended to use now the model of this machine is shown as being the pet 1000 now that's a different designation to any of the machines that made their way to the market but unlike some of those later machines this pre-production one doesn't have an hdmi socket the only hd video output capability here is via component now the instruction manual that came with the machine that's for a dl-1000 presumably the intended final design as that one shows a very similar machine but with a rear panel that's equipped with hdmi as well as scart i'd imagine that rather being built from scratch this was a modification of an evd player that was made for the chinese market the fact that it comes with a quarter inch mic input and a pop-out volume control for karaoke purposes seems to underline its heritage now also that this machine is being referred to as hd vmd dual layer now remember earlier when nme claimed that in time they'd be able to make vmds that could hold up to 20 layers well it seems that if they had done this vmd player wouldn't have been able to read them on the back of the prototype demo disc it states that the 1080p bitrate could have been up to 40 megabits a second and that the vmds could hold up to 40 gigabytes now remember this disk was sent out a year or so before the launch before the specifications had been finalized now in this manual at the time it also mentioned that hd vmds have a maximum playback time of approximately 110 minutes now they clearly went on to revise those details prior to the final production run as the specs shown on their website in october 2007 are different here there's a slightly higher bitrate of megabits a second and it states that the disk has the capacity to play three hours of 1080p video but then again it also divides the maximum disk capacities into two types there was a commercial solution that could hold up to 20 gigabytes and an industrial one that could hold up to 40 gigs so this means the movie discs the ones being sold to the public the commercial discs those could have been a maximum of 20 gigs it appears there was also a 15 gigabyte variant because of the names at the top there there's a vmd15 and a vmd20 now note at this point the rival formats already on the market for over a year could hold more data an hd dvd up to 30 gigs and a blu-ray up to 50 gigs at this point so getting back to this machine once it's powered on after a short wait you're greeted with this hd vmd logo now this is a different design to the one that was used on the later machines unfortunately the only thing on this machine that doesn't work is its ability to read any disks at all whether it's a cd a dvd or a vmd the disk just spins and spins but never gets read by the machine of course i took a look inside and cleaned the laser but that made no difference and after a couple of days of fiddling around with this thing i had to just give up on it that drive was also proprietary to this machine or at least it's a drive that you can't find a spare for easily i certainly don't have one so i'm afraid that is the end of this one however the reason i bought this machine was just for those discs because a year or so earlier back in 2015 i'd purchased another machine this was an ml777s it didn't come with a remote or any discs it was just the player but it was one of the final production models and it was manufactured in november 2007. i suspect that all the machines that were sold would have been made in one batch around this time being a production model this one does have an hdmi socket on the back and there's no karaoke mic here instead we get a rather generic looking black box that looks very similar to a satellite receiver i once had but once this one's powered on i'm greeted with that finalized gold colored hd vmd logo and a more welcoming option screen that shows icons for usb or an sd card and the sockets for those are concealed under this drop down flap on the front interesting to see this one employs a red digital display that's not something you get to see too often on disk players now when i first turn this one on it transpired the previous owner had left a disk inside the machine and as it was loading up i was assuming this was going to be another hd vmd to add to my collection but those hopes were quickly quashed it just turned out to be a dvd containing the anaglyph 3d version of journey to the center of the earth now of course these machines were capable of playing dvds as well as cds in addition to the vmds and it's more likely that someone would leave a dvd in it than anything else i'd imagine but unfortunately this one has lost its mojo when it comes to vmds this is the best that i could get out of it and that's after playing a disc for a while more often than not you just get this black screen and the broken sound and then over time you might get a bit of video turning up but nothing you can really watch all three of the vmd's produce the exact same results now i open this one up as well just have a look inside see if there was anything i could do turns out this one uses a standard sata dvd drive in fact the model of this is an asus drw 2014 l1t which was a lightscribe dvd burner now the fact that this machine uses a standard off-the-shelf dvd drive does prove that one of the claims about vmd was true remember back to when nme had just acquired the technology and appeared to not fully understand the compatibility side when they stated that vmds would be playable in existing dvd players well they went on to reword that statement in future documents to state that vmds could be read by a standard dvd-r drive once their internal firmware had been updated well they must have been able to get that to work because this dvd burner is in the final production machines and those were supposed to be able to read vmd's of up to 20 gigabytes so that's perhaps the most impressive thing here we've got a dvd burner with custom firmware that can read a 20 gig disk i was pretty sure that that drive was working fine after all it was loading up the dvds but just in case i swapped it out with another one but this produced the exact same results now i did wonder whether or not those vmd's had suffered from some kind of rot or clouding due to this experimental multi-layer process that have been used but it turns out that they're totally readable by my normal blu-ray player it just treats them as a data disk of course it can't play anything on them because of the unfamiliar file types that's a step above what my uhd blu-ray player thought of the discs they just didn't want to know them it didn't recognize them at all however if you put the discs into a computer that one can fully read the disks it shows all the files on there you can even copy the files across onto your computer these early demo disks were on standard dual layer dvds albeit ones containing unusual types of files now of course i tried to play those files in vlc but it just made the program hang and just as an experiment to see how the player reacted i copied the files off a disk and then burnt them onto a new dvd dual layer disc and put them into the player but it just didn't recognize the disc as a vmd video disc and wouldn't auto play it and also the vmd files themselves weren't recognized by the video player feature either all as expected but to sum up it's not the discs i mean all the data on them is intact and it's perfectly readable by a computer they're just vmd files on a dvd now the vmd machine can read normal dvd movie discs just fine so it should be able to read these this just fine it just can't play the hd video files and that means there's a problem with the hdd coding in the player now unfortunately that's where this video had to end with an hd vmd machine unable to play any of these hd vmd demo discs a bit of a disappointing ending to the video but nevertheless it was mostly about the history i got all that part told it was just the practical demonstration at the end that failed still i uploaded the video put it out onto patreon as a preview and then after i'd done that i managed to get hold of these so this end part of the video is now totally different because these are production ready hd bmds yes again unfortunately it's lazy tone but just look what happened when i tried to play one of these yeah they work just fine i mean it looks just like 1080p video there's nothing really to report back there just the fact the machine works was a bit of a surprise i better stop playing this one though so it seems between this disc going out in 2006 as a demo and the machine actually coming to the market at the end of 2007 that they changed the codec somehow and therefore this later machine is unable to play these earlier discs now out of the two demo discs i got of course one of them had lazytown on it anyway so i've covered that now this other one this demo disc i'd be interested to see what was on it but i think mostly it looks like it's going to be public domain footage and stuff from nasa things like that given the fact that the front cover shows the picture out of a space shuttle i'd imagine it's just hd footage that they're able to get hold of at a low price now one thing that's intriguing about these things though is that when you look at the sets there's a total of four episodes in here of lazytown and there's a total of two discs now each episode of tone is 24 minutes so therefore you've got 48 minutes worth of hd 1080p video on each disc now remember hd vmd should be able to hold a heck of a lot more than that so i had a look at these discs and these two are dvds now i'm not saying they never got hd vmds out there are other people on youtube who've picked up hd vmds there was a chat who got saw on hd vmd that's a one hour 43 minute movie so of course that wouldn't fit on one of these because one of these discs i had a look they're just under eight gigabytes and therefore they're pretty much full and they've got 48 minutes worth of hd video on them so to get more video on a disc they're presumably using the proper vmds for those movies i don't know why they went for dvds with these it does raise a question that maybe they did this because this was cheaper and if so that means that the whole reason for vmd existing was negated because it was all supposed to be the cheaper alternative to put out a vmd was supposed to have cost the same as making a dvd well if you're setting this set out on two dvds in a box the only reason you do that well would be two one because it's cheaper or two because you just don't have the production capacity to make these as vmds i don't know which one it was but it just seems unusual that they put out vmd video on dvd discs at the time of production i can understand it pre-production but when these things actually came out this was the stuff you were supposed to buy and it was on dvds and now i test it in a dvd player and of course it doesn't play or in an hd dvd or in a normal blu-ray player or in a uhd blu-ray player no this is vmd footage with a vmd extension on the files that only plays in vmd players now there's just a couple of things i'd like to mention here at the end of the video if we're just to think back to the beginning and the hilarious quiz with the overly pedantic quiz master insisting that hd vmd was really the loser of the hd video disc format war yeah it's a bit of a stretch but he did also have a point i mean hd dvd was on the market for two years it was actively supported with hd dvd new releases all the way up until december 2008 there were over 700 titles released on the format worldwide there were a number of different machines many devices more than this that could play back hd dvds it was supported by a number of different manufacturers and movie studios in pretty much every metric you can think of hd dvd was more successful than hd vmd but yeah i mean they both lost the format war and ultimately i think everyone lost because with the being a format war it just delayed people more they stuck on to having dvd players rather than upgrading to any hd format and by the time it came time to change they got into streaming things instead so i don't think anyone really won although of course officially sony did but i don't think it worked out quite the way they planned and the other thing i'd like to say is that the most impressive thing to me was that the dvd drive in here was just a standard one dvd-r drive and yet could if they did bring them out play hd vmds that could have held up to 20 gigabytes and that is really quite impressive and they perhaps should have stuck with that idea instead of trying to compete in the hd movie space if this nme company had just stuck around the idea of convincing dvd drive manufacturers to employ the firmware that would enable them not only just to play cds and dvds and burn to those but also to play back discs that could hold up to 20 gigabytes then maybe that would have been a more successful idea but anyway that's it for the moment as always thanks for watching [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Techmoan

Views: 569,785

Keywords: Techmoan, 4K, HD-VMD, NME, versatile, multilayer, disc, video disc, format war, hd-dvd vs blu-ray, Blu-ray vs HD-DVD, HD-DVD, Blu-ray, DVD, History, story, video, HD video, HDVMD, HD VMD

Id: 07Z4iL8hy1A

Length: 35min 41sec (2141 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 31 2021