Bye bye UMD movies?

DangerousK

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I'm not surprised to hear something like this.

The PSP has been by and far a failure in most regards. Sure there are some games worth picking up on it, but even that is not enough. Trying to turn a handheld game system into a movie/multimedia device is retarded.

I wonder how long before a price drop comes on this. I never bothered getting a PSP because for $250 it's not really worth it. The DS is a much better choice. Kudos to Sony for thinking they could take over the handheld market. It was a much easier idea in theory than in practice.
 

stuffmonger

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DangerousK said:
Kudos to Sony for thinking they could take over the handheld market. It was a much easier idea in theory than in practice.
I miss sega:crying:
 

kobylka68

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DangerousK said:
I'm not surprised to hear something like this.

The PSP has been by and far a failure in most regards. Sure there are some games worth picking up on it, but even that is not enough. Trying to turn a handheld game system into a movie/multimedia device is retarded.

I wonder how long before a price drop comes on this. I never bothered getting a PSP because for $250 it's not really worth it. The DS is a much better choice. Kudos to Sony for thinking they could take over the handheld market. It was a much easier idea in theory than in practice.

I think the success of the playstation brand got to sony's head and they thought they could have any market they want. They thought wrong.
 

GregN

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kobylka68 said:
I think the success of the playstation brand got to sony's head and they thought they could have any market they want. They thought wrong.

Nothing on earth can match the might of the almighty Gameboy/DS.

Hopefully Sony will pull its head out of its ass and give us original games and the good japanese games now that UMDs won't let them float by.
 

ki_atsushi

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If the UMD's weren't so expensive then maybe people would buy them. They were $25 a pop last time I checked. I'd rather buy the DVD and rip it to a memory stick.
 

kobylka68

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ki_atsushi said:
If the UMD's weren't so expensive then maybe people would buy them. They were $25 a pop last time I checked. I'd rather buy the DVD and rip it to a memory stick.

True, by allowing people to play movies off the memory stick they completely removed any hope of success the UMD had. The cost, the limited use, the low resolution all played to its downfall. I don't think anyone honestly expected it to be successful though.
 

aria

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When I was in Japan last spring (just before the US PSP launch), they had already launched a bunch of small UMD players (think smaller portable DVD players).

I'm shocked they didn't try that here (probably to make people buy more PSPs). A shame since they could've probably had a market for the extra-small portable DVD players.
 

RGP

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Pre-recorded mini discs all over again.
 

kobylka68

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RGP said:
Pre-recorded mini discs all over again.

See recordable MD discs became incredibly popular in Japan and thats how they lasted so long. If there were recordable UMD's then the format would have survived a lot longer.
 

Tung Fu ru

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kobylka68 said:
See recordable MD discs became incredibly popular in Japan and thats how they lasted so long. If there were recordable UMD's then the format would have survived a lot longer.

Recordable UMD's, that's a great idea. I like MD disks, but there's pretty much no support for those anymore. Not sure how much more a UMD holds, but I'm sure it's much more. Doing something like that might make UMD's more popular.
 

RAINBOW PONY

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Tung Fu ru said:
Recordable UMD's, that's a great idea. I like MD disks, but there's pretty much no support for those anymore. Not sure how much more a UMD holds, but I'm sure it's much more. Doing something like that might make UMD's more popular.

What do you think sony did with all the left over blank MDs they had laying around. :lol:
 

kobylka68

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Tung Fu ru said:
Recordable UMD's, that's a great idea. I like MD disks, but there's pretty much no support for those anymore. Not sure how much more a UMD holds, but I'm sure it's much more. Doing something like that might make UMD's more popular.

Well if there was a way to be able to play these on your tv set or computer monitor then there would be a huge market for them. Of course sony never really thought of that too well. But if you could take an UMD movie and record it to DVD and the other way around then the UMD market would be way bigger than it is now.
 

RAINBOW PONY

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kobylka68 said:
Well if there was a way to be able to play these on your tv set or computer monitor then there would be a huge market for them. Of course sony never really thought of that too well. But if you could take an UMD movie and record it to DVD and the other way around then the UMD market would be way bigger than it is now.

A umd movie would look like dogshit played on a normal TV, does anyone know how much space it has? it couldn't even come close to holding a DVD movies soundtrack let alone the picture.

they are indeed pre-recorded MDs, I still have a stack of about 8 of those laying around too, stuff like the topgun soundtrack, godzilla usa soundtrack, will smith I even have a jap la'arc en ciel album, they were cool at the time but I was always pissed if I bought it on MD I couldn't play it on anything else, or in my home stereo, so I stopped buying them. hell I rememeber for a short time walmart/bestbuy etc here carried a whole wall of pre recorded MDs, then one day they were all gone.
 

kobylka68

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DashK said:
A umd movie would look like dogshit played on a normal TV, does anyone know how much space it has? it couldn't even come close to holding a DVD movies soundtrack let alone the picture.

they are indeed pre-recorded MDs, I still have a stack of about 8 of those laying around too, stuff like the topgun soundtrack, godzilla usa soundtrack, will smith I even have a jap la'arc en ciel album, they were cool at the time but I was always pissed if I bought it on MD I couldn't play it on anything else, or in my home stereo, so I stopped buying them. hell I rememeber for a short time walmart/bestbuy etc here carried a whole wall of pre recorded MDs, then one day they were all gone.

Ok thats true but if you had the opportuntiy to buy a blank UMD for $2 or so and record your own DVD to it along with menus and all then I think the format would have stayed alive alot longer. It's not a format that the movie industry could live off of but it is one that could have brought DVD quality video to a handheld at a low cost. I do think it was rather irresponsible of them to charge us the same for a UMD as for a DVD.
 

Kiken

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DashK said:
A umd movie would look like dogshit played on a normal TV, does anyone know how much space it has? it couldn't even come close to holding a DVD movies soundtrack let alone the picture.

UMD video is encoded at the same resolution as standard DVD video... they simply use different codecs (DVD uses the rather aged MPEG2 while UMD uses a version of MPEG4).

I can't remember where I read this, but I believe that UMDs hold about a gig (perhaps a bit more).

A buddy showed me a page of a company who was building an A/V output encoder for the PSP and the shots they had of the video being displayed on a regular TV looked decent enough. Really though, until such a device is widely available one can only speculate how UMD movies would look on a standard TV.
 

galfordo

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Never really had much faith in the whole UMD thing, although I will admit that I thought the PSP would fare better against the DS.

It will be interesting to see how this affects movie studio exec's attitudes towards Sony, and whether or not it will make them apprehensive about Blu-Ray.

Anyway, this is a good thing - Sony needs to have its ass kicked around a bit. They're too cocky, and were beginning to think that the public would swallow any pile of shit that Sony was willing to shovel into their mouths. Granted that's not far from reality in Japan, but still.
 

toy_brain

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Kiken said:
I can't remember where I read this, but I believe that UMDs hold about a gig (perhaps a bit more).
.
1.8gig I believe.

Which would make Tung's idea of recordable UMD's a bit pointless really - what with memory sticks being able to hold more (2gig at the moment, with 4gig ones coming soon) and being a lot smaller and therefore easier to carry than a UMD disk.

I'm not supprised by the news, not in the least. Charging more for a UMD than a DVD -when the UMD version has less content - is just plain dumb.
I'm glad to see that consumers are not stupid.

Using a PSP to watch a DVD you ripped onto memory stick = Nice.
Using a PSP to watch a UMD that cost £5 more than the DVD = stupid.
 

The BEAST3

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Can anyone help me find a program that will allow me to rip a dvd movie to a memory stick? Any help would be appreciated.
 

kernow

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galfordo said:
Never really had much faith in the whole UMD thing, although I will admit that I thought the PSP would fare better against the DS.

yeah, but thats because you're a fucking idiot :shame:
 
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