Sonic Solutions told us at IBC that there will be $199 HD DVD players and $350 Blu-ray DVD players by Christmas. That means that another $100 will come off the price of devices over the next three months.
The numbers came from Simon James, Marketing Manager for the Professional Products Group at Sonic, and he is a person with a vested interest to know. The entire HD professional effort in Hollywood, much of it relying on products from Sonic such as its Authorscript SDK for DVD creation, its Scenarist authoring system and its CineVision compression system, have all been upgraded for both HD DVD and Blu-ray disk development. The major studios have held up spending for the past year or so waiting for HD to take off, and Sonic believes it is that kind of player pricing that will make the studios get wholeheartedly behind HD.
James told us, ‘That was the pricing level when the original DVD took off,’ and optimistically said that he thought the universal players which supported both systems, would also go under $1,000, eliminating some confusion from a market that has been stalled by the insistence of consumer electronics companies pushing two rival technologies.
James also added, ‘In Standard Definition TV it was a market where there was a single workflow going on in order to create a DVD. One system took care of graphics, design, encoding, and authoring, but in HD each of these is going to take a special software component.
‘In our Cinevision encoder there is pre-filtering going on so that people can preview the encoded video and then change the video before it is encoded a final time, to get rid of unwanted visual artefacts. Because HD is so much higher quality there are issues like film grain management, and aperture correction,’ and James said that Sonic has licensed automated restoration tools from Sweden’s Digital Vision to include in the product.
Sonic has announced since the show a multi-year, licensing deal with RealNetworks for its AuthorScript, the company’s media formatting and CD/DVD burning engine. It has previously licensed this to companies like Microsoft, Adobe and Sony. RealNetworks will integrate AuthorScript DVD burn technology into its new RealPlayer so that any video including Adobe Flash video, can be burned into Video CDs which can be viewed on many commercial DVD players.
Customers can upgrade their RealPlayer for a one-time fee of $29.99. The new RealPlayer recognizes DRM video protection systems and does not copy DRM-protected content.
James told us that although the process of how to write a DVD compatible file was based on a standard, Sonic Authorscript produces DVDs which are compatible with a higher number of DVD players, which is why it is the market leader.