Transitioning to a Blu-ray-Only World [or] HD?s Painful Transition to BD [or] Singing the Blu-ray Transitional BluesThe war between Blu-ray and HD-DVD is over. A truce was called in February–well, it was more like a surrender. But in any case, hostilities have ceased and a warm wave of peaceful bliss has washed over the industry, sweeping away the rancor and squabbling and jockeying for position. An era of peace, love and understanding has dawned over the disc business, a veritable Age of Aquarius.
Wait a minute. Sorry, I was dreaming. The truth of the matter is that although the war is over, change doesn?t come without cost. And sometimes in solving old problems you inadvertently create new ones.
SADNESS-TINGED RELIEF
For many disc developers and producers who had been working in the trenches to produce HD disc projects, the transition to a Blu-ray-only world has been painful but manageable. Most disc development houses had been hedging their bets by producing HD discs in both formats, so it?s not like hundreds of authors, producers, and programmers were all suddenly rendered jobless after Toshiba?s strategic withdrawal/surrender last February. As in the general business world (as with General Motors, for example), companies in the DVD/HD industry have adapted by downsizing and retooling. They?ve responded to the news of HD-DVD?s demise with a mixture of sadness and relief.
As vice president of the DVD Association Chris Brown has gotten a broad view of the transition to a Blu-ray-only world, but as CEO and president of Metabeam, he?s also viewed it up close and personal. ?Well, half my market disappeared,? he says, speaking of the impact it has had on his company, which sells a unique software system called Metamenu that uses indexed metadata to generate viewer interfaces. ?This was not an unexpected event for any of us, but it has had unintended consequences,? he says. ?And Blu-ray favors big media. Now, I don?t subscribe to conspiracy theories, but it hit the independents pretty hard.?
One small company particularly hard hit by HD-DVD?s demise was Rivergate Software Inc. The company is the vendor of DVDAfterEdit, a nifty tool that allows developers to go into an already-authored app to augment and expand its capabilities. Sometimes called a ?post-build editor,? it is also useful for debugging. When the truce/surrender announcement came, Rivergate president and owner Larry Applegate was working on an HD DVD version of his AfterEdit tool. He had bet on the wrong horse. Virtually none of the code he?s written can be reused or adapted for Blu-ray. ?About two man-years went down the tube,? says Applegate.
Of course, postwar format consolidation has also had its upside. ?It?s definitely added focus to the industry where we didn?t have focus before. Everybody?s on the same page, everybody?s working toward the same goals,? says Jess Bowers, director of technical services for 1K Studios, of Burbank, CA. ?But it seems like there?s a little less fire in the industry,? he adds.Of course, there are die-hard HD DVD lovers who will never utter a nice word about Blu-ray and who will go to their graves condemning Toshiba and Microsoft for their cowardly surrender and Sony for being a bully. And they will insist that just as Betamax was a better format than VHS and unfairly driven from the market, HD DVD was the better technology, the superior underdog that should have been the winner. And they will regale their grandchildren with mythical stories set in the Camelot-like good old days of HD DVD. But for the most part, most of the HD disc developers and producers who had cast their lot (at least partially) with HD DVD have taken the news with calm resignation.
?We were always working in both formats but predominantly on the HD DVD side, mainly because of client demand. So we had to scramble a bit,? says Duncan Wain, president of Scope Seven LLC of El Segundo, CA. ?To be quite frank, I think everybody from a development perspective would agree that it would have been easier to continue to work in HD DVD. It?s just a simpler format – though BD gives you a lot more options down the road.?
BLU-RAY?S INTERACTIVE EDGE
Indeed, for a long time most people have given Blu-ray the edge when it comes to potential for powerful interactivity. It was Blu-ray?s tradeoff to HD DVD?s ease and simplicity. The main thing that made HD DVD development easier than Blu-ray development was the easier programming/scripting languages (HDi and JavaScript) used by HD DVD?s Advanced Content interactive mode. In contrast, Blu-ray?s interactive mode uses Blu-ray Disc Java (BD-J), a version of the more complex Java programming language.
?From a programming perspective, having a full-fledged Object Oriented language [Java] to use for interactivity goes far beyond the scripting that HD DVD did,? says Applegate.
?Yes, there are more things that you can potentially do in BD-J than you could potentially do in HD-i, but no one has reached that level yet. No one has taken full advantage of it yet,? says Wain. ?Profile 2.0 of BD-J is just kicking off; we?ll see how it goes. It is a Java Virtual Machine, which, in itself, means there?s a lot more that you can do. You can do more sophisticated things in Java than you could do in JavaScript. Java is a more advanced language than JavaScript, so you can do more complex interactions.?
Bruce Nazarian agrees with Wain that Blu-ray?s potential for creating complex interactive apps has not yet been fully tapped, and like Brown, he has seen this from two perspectives – one as president of the DVD Association and one from his perspective as CEO of Digital Media Consulting Group Inc. (dmcgi). However, while Blu-ray developers haven?t pushed the interactive envelope much, HD DVD developers have, Nazarian believes. ?HD-i was easier to program and create things. It was interactive with the internet from day one,? says Nazarian. ?In many respects, Blu-ray developers now have to play catch up.?
And yet Blu-ray?s version of Java has a lot of room for improvement, according to Applegate. ?Java?s open-endedness makes it more powerful, but at the same time Blu-ray?s Java is poorly implemented. It is based on two revisions-old Java. So the people who are using Java for web design are way ahead of the capabilities of people who are using Java for Blu-ray.?
CONFUSING, CUMBERSOME, HARD
Nazarian says that Blu-ray continues to suffer from non-standard standards, and he calls the Blu-ray spec a moving target. ?It is a standard that has been modified over the years. The continuing upgrade to the spec means that every time a new spec is introduced (the latest is Profile 2.0), there are new technological possibilities which now breed new technological challenges which now require time, effort and money to solve,? says Nazarian, adding that this shifting-spec problem, ?won?t be resolved overnight.?
Another challenge to developers who have switched to Blu-ray, according to Wain, is that ?The BD development and production process is a little more cumbersome. For one thing, you don?t have an emulator, though some are cropping up. But when there is one player from one company ?Toshiba ? and the emulator is actually the player itself, the development process is easier because you can debug and fix things fairly quickly. And that?s not the case with Blu-ray. So it?s a little harder," he concludes, "but we are adjusting.?
Larry Applegate sums up the feeling most former HD DVD developers have toward Blu-ray: ?Blu-ray is more capable but much harder to build that HD DVD,? says Applegate. ?It?s harder to write software for, harder to use, more expensive. It makes things harder all around.?
PERSONNEL ADJUSTMENTS
In the HD DVD disc development houses, the switch to Blu-ray has created problems for both management and for production teams. Everyone has had to do some gear shifting.
The transition has been particularly tough for programmers, because the underlying languages (Java vs. JavaScript) are so different. ?You really could not leverage specific code that you had created for HDi,? says Nazarian. ?It is an entirely different approach to coding. The code is very different. So you?d be throwing out all the hard work?the whole code base. You?d be starting again from coding scratch.?
?Anything that was being developed in HD DVD/HDi has now had to turn on a dime and redirect itself to BD-J, which is a very different language and requires a learning curve to bring programmers up to speed,? says Nazarian.
Wain agrees: ?JavaScript (or ECMAScript) is a lot easier than Java, and the talents that are required to do that work [BD Java work] are much greater.?
For management, this talent gap has necessitated some layoffs. ?Yeah, unfortunately, we had to scale back our staff,? says 1K?s Jess Bowers. ?The skill sets are in some ways similar, but in other ways they are not. Primarily we were hiring from the web for HD DVD because HDi had a lot of the same basic internet technologies; it had Java script and XML. So a lot of the guys that were doing front-end web stuff could transition into doing HDi. But then they weren?t necessarily Java programmers. But we had some guys who could go both ways and are still with us.?
For management one alternative to layoffs has been re-training. Fortunately, re-training an HD DVD programmer is not too difficult, according to Wain. ?If you are a good software engineer you can switch gears pretty easily. Some will pick it up faster than others. But they can figure it out; it?s not like you have to switch from speaking Greek to speaking Russian.?
While programmers face the biggest challenge, there are transitional problems that authors and producers face, as well. Fortunately, users of the industry?s primary high-end DVD authoring tool, Sonic Solutions? Scenarist, will have little trouble adapting to the Blu-ray version of Scenarist, says Wain, whose shop is a Scenarist one. ?Are there SD people who can sort of elevate and migrate to BD? Absolutely. I have folks here who have done that quite seamlessly.?
An upside of industry consolidation is that Scenarist-using developers will get a cost savings, says Nazarian. In the old days those who wanted to develop in both formats had to buy four different versions of the Scenarist authoring tool: one for HD DVD regular mode, one for HD DVD interactive mode (HDi), one for Blu-ray regular mode, and one for Blu-ray interactive mode (BD-J). Sonic Solutions too is probably celebrating consolidation; they have fewer tools to support in a young and shaky market. ?Sonic must be happy to stop bleeding,? says Nazarian.
At Wain?s Scope Seven the re-training has gone rather smoothly, after some brief initial stress. ?We did initially have to bring in some independent contractors, some Java rock stars, to assist,? says Wain. ?But this is a very incestuous, tight-knit industry; it?s not hard for me to reach out to people I know for help.? Wain says the contracting of Java rock stars gave his staff time to catch up. ?It gave us a quick jump start and allowed internal people to hone new skills.?
Nevertheless, the switch from HD DVD to an exclusively Blu-ray world has not been without victims. Some programmers have been displaced. ?Some have made the transition, and others have gone back to doing internet stuff,? says Bowers. Bowers’ advice to anyone who wishes to continue working in the HD disc industry: ?To stay in business you?ve got to be flexible.?
VM/PLAYER INCOMPATABILITIES
Another problem that has confronted newly-baptized Blu-ray developers is the lack of standardized hardware. As hard as this is to believe, even at this late date, each Blu-ray player from each manufacturer is slightly different. ?Conformity in the players in the real world is something that is a moving target,? says Metabeam?s Brown.
?Blu-ray players are light years apart,? says Wain. ?Each of these boxes may have different JVMs in them–Java Virtual Machines–depending on the manufacturer and which JVM they?ve licensed into their box. So they act quite differently, and one of the things we?ve discovered about working in BD-J is that you can fix one BD-J problem on one player and introduce another problem on another player.?
But isn?t a standard a standard and a spec a spec? ?There?s a spec that is handed to all the producers, and there?s a mirror of that spec that?s handed to the player manufacturers, but there are different interpretations of that spec,? says Wain.
?The BD-J spec has an interesting history,? says Bowers. ?It pulls from all these other different overlapping specs. It pulls from specs designed for cable set top Java, for example. That Java is sort of the godfather of BD-J. But then there?s overlapping versions of that that got boiled down into BD-J. And so you have different implementations of the spec. The spec describes what we have to do on the content side to create something, but the spec doesn?t describe exactly how to create a player,? says Bowers, who sums up: ?The problem is that there is a lot of interpretation possible with the spec. It?s not black and white.?
So what?s a poor struggling production house new to Blu to do? ?Lots and lots of testing,? according to Bowers. ?We have a variety of different players here in the house, so we?ll burn a lot of BD-Rs and pop them in the different players and test them out, and if we see something where it doesn?t work the same way on different players, we?ll adjust. Our Java programmers might spend a week or two weeks hammering on that. Eventually, we may have to sort of split the difference. I?m talking vaguely because it is kind of a black art. But it is similar to what we all had to do in the early days of DVD with the player incompatibility that existed then.?
?To try to get something that will play equally well on all Blu-ray players is very difficult,? says Applegate. ?That will change in time as old players drop by the wayside.?
While some people, such as Applegate, feel certain that electronics manufacturers will work toward solving the player incompatibilities, Bowers isn?t so sure. He worries that in their rush to cut prices and increase sales, manufacturers will skimp. ?Players will continue to get faster on the high end, but as price comes down, performance may actually decrease. The manufacturers may want to cut costs. Performance problems may not necessarily go away.?
GRAPPLING WITH GRAPHICS
Some former HD DVD developers report that the forced switch to Blu-ray has forced them to grapple with graphics. It seems the two formats differ in the way they handle graphics.
?In HD DVD the graphics architecture was such that the graphics were decoded on the fly, as you used them,? says Bowers. ?So with a big page of graphics, it would take a split second to decode that page and display those graphics. That happens as you go along and you might have a slight pause here and there. But in Blu-ray all the graphics need to be loaded into a buffer in the beginning, so you take that hit, that pause, in the very, very beginning. Now, on a high-performing player like a PS3, the pre-loading of graphics might take only a few seconds, but on a low-performing player, it takes a long, long time, maybe even minutes, until you can get to what you want to see,? says Bowers. ?Now that?s been hard for a developer to get used to. It?s been a pain.?
Bowers isn?t thrilled about some of the tradeoffs he?s had to make in transitioning from HD-DVD graphics to Blu-ray graphics. ?Because these [Blu-ray] graphics have to be decoded into memory before they can be used, it sometimes means we have to make changes in our graphics. So we might have to take a design and maybe use less graphics in that design–not dramatically less, but more optimization is required.? This means that developers have had to learn to think differently about how they use graphics, says Bowers, who seems to miss the old days a bit. ?In HD DVD you could be more liberal in your use of graphics,? he recalls.
MORE TOOLS NEEDED
A dearth of Blu-ray authoring tools is another industry problem, according to many developers. ?In Blu-ray, what is missing is decent prosumer-level tools. There is a huge gap for that,? says Applegate.
?Java is so flexible that the typical author can?t cope with it. My clientele for DVDAfterEdit are the one, two, or three-man shops,? says Applegate. ?They are producers and maybe authors, not programmers. To succeed with Blu-ray everyone has to be a programmer, which is totally nuts,? he says. Owners of small shops don?t have the skills to be programmers and can?t afford to hire programmers, which puts them at a competitive disadvantage. ?The big studios are hiring rafts of programmers, and there?s no way the little guy can compete with that.?
Applegate believes that if the Blu-ray disc industry is to thrive, there must be small, inexpensive tools for the small shops, not just big tools that only the big studios can afford.
?One of the problems is that current BD-J development tools are very rudimentary,? says Wain. ?The BD Java being written is being written by hand; it?s not in a nice slick GUI-based tool, although there are GUI-based tools being developed and being tested.?
Nazarian too has noticed new tools appearing on the horizon. ?What you?re now seeing is tools that can do authoring, and you?re seeing helper tools that provide GUIs for creating BD-J code elements,? he says. He gives as examples of promising new GUI-based authoring tools for Blu-ray applications: Sofatronic?s kaleidoscope and NetBlender?s DoStudio.
Nazarian is encouraged by all the new tools that are cropping up. So is 1K?s Jess Bowers. ?Some of these new tools are not completely mature at this point,? he says, ?but this is the kind of thing we have to look forward to in the next year or so that will make creating a BD-J application a lot easier.?
Mark Fritz (markfritz at intergrafix.net) is a freelance writer based in Bloomsburg, Pa. and a contributing editor to Streaming Media.
