this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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If you have a BluRay player most will read BluRay content burned to a DVD (a.k.a. BD5), and others will do AVCHD (a related but more simple format). You'll be much more limited in terms of space obviously, but you can still put video on there at far better than DVD quality.
Also if you're like me and have a rotating set of games you install and uninstall, you can copy installation backups to a series of DVDs. Steam even has a built-in option to break installation backup files into 4.3 gig files specifically for burning to DVD.
Yeah, there were even efforts to make factory-pressed "BD9" BluRay-on-DVD discs a mass produced cheaper alternative when BluRay was being launched, though it never actually went anywhere. They kept the format though just because it made sense to give people a way to make home media without having to spend an arm and a leg on blank discs.
That said, the "requirement" for players to support BD5/BD9 has been dropped as of a few years ago, not that all of them did in the first place. Most players still support it, but you can't count on it.
That's cool, I never heard of this! I remember following the HD-DVD format war at the time.
Funnily enough the format war is why I know about it, since I decided to do a good long look into the pros and cons of each format, especially in terms of backwards compatibility and format support. HD DVD actually had an advantage in that regard: Blu-Ray only supports 480p and up, whereas HD DVD mandated support for damn near every resolution used by an existing disc-based format (VCD, SVCD) from 240p up. HD DVD players were also supposed to support content burned to CDs as well, meaning you could fit a fair chunk of lower resolution highly compressed HD DVD content on a CD and have it play in any HD DVD player, with subtitles and the like even.
Not really that relevant now obviously, but at the time I was kinda bummed that HD DVD didn't win the format war.
I thought Blu-ray was technically superior? Due to having higher capacity and more features.
I don't see supporting 240p as a big advantage, and I doubt you could fit much HD content on a CD.
HD DVD was 15/30 gig versus Blu-Ray being 25/50 gig storage, yeah. For mainstream use that was far more important, so that played a large part in why it won, though a lot of it was also Sony making the PS3 Blu-Ray-based and giving adoption rates a huge boost as a result. In terms of actual video codec support though the two were identical: H.262 MPEG-2, H.264 AVC, and VC-1.
As for how much content you could store on a CD, there were a lot of video resolutions supported in between 240p and HD, and H.264 can compress video quite a bit while still looking decent. For the die-hard video enthusiast, not much of a draw. For someone wanting to distribute stuff on the cheap, especially in poorer areas and "emerging markets" where SVCD players were (at the time) still commonly sold? Huge draw.
EDIT: Also of minor note was that the video (but not audio) formats from previous CD-based formats were completely compatible with the HD DVD standard, meaning in a pinch someone could just take the existing video from an SVCD/CVD release and drop it into a HD DVD. Of course why one would do that is a valid question, but nonetheless the standard was set up to allow it. For whatever reason.
Both great suggestions. I didn't know about either.