How anyone ever thought that a propreitory movie format tied to a console, a handheld console at that, would be a success god only knows. I mean with digitally encoded movies rising in popularity in wonderfully compressed file sizes, coupled with portable media players and ever increasing PPC power. Then throw in the dominating DVD market that has recently come down in price quite a bit both on the hard and soft 'ware end your left with such a small portion of society its laughably unworkable. Your somehow aiming at the 20-something affluent, employed, single male crowd and then hoping that they dont have a good home DVD setup already and probably even a movie-capable handheld, it just could never work.

 

i could never understand it tbh and they was such a rip off £20 for most having a laugh!

 

I read somewhere - completely forgotten where that they are going to bundle them with dvds in future.

 

What a shocker, a movie that costs more in a format that only works on a single device, isn't doing well compared to a format that is cheaper and works in thousands of devices. Shocker!

Next up, BluRay

 

they where always supposed to Jaffa and if they did and it was priced right i would buy that version.
TBH it was always going to be a bit iffy if it sold due to the fact the PSP could play movies from memory sticks.

And Blue ray is nowhere near the same as umd

 

You failed to mention that they have no extra's too.

 

Yea umd movies are a big joke, never seen the point of them, if it was Standard deff and you have a video out on the psp then they might have done better.

 

It was on IGN, Sony are on about selling Blu-Rays with the DVD and UMD all in the same bundle.

I'll dig out the link.

Edit : its only a short story

 

Yet go in Game and the flippin things take up nearly as much space as the DS!

Could never see the point in them tbh maybe linking them with DVD should have been the original idea but I expect the film companies thought they could screw £15 out of punters twice for the same film.

 

personaly i like umd movies, i think it's a good idea for psp owners

but as said above the price is totally rediculous and is obviously killing them

i think the bundles are a good idea, but as before, will probably be ruined by being overpriced

ah well, will just have to convert more divx movies to play off the mem stick

 

ah genius thats the exact thing i read!

 

I don't think UMD's will really ever take off. Propritetry formats rarely suceed and seeing as UMD is so limited in its uses it is doomed to failure. If Sony can come up with some cheap portable UMD players they might have a chance but seeing as it is well below standard definition it's not ideal for outputting to a big screen.

It'll probably dissapear within a year or so, a bit like those pre recorded mini discs. At least those were writable.

 

Nice idea, but if the format limitations don't kill UMD, the ludicrious pricing will.

 

Sony missed the boat big style by pushing UMD rather than offering a memory stick based solution. The PSP is always going to be a niche market for films, but some form of decent legitimate ripping/conversion program to allow people to watch their dvds on the PSP with approval would have worked seriously well in the PSP's favour.

The big problem is Sony's media division is all DRM happy, and wants to make customers pay as many times as possible for the same content (much like other content providers)....

 

After Minidiscs, I thought they would have learnt their lesson.

 

Prehaps the plans of launching lots of porn UMD will help the format?

 

Who would watch porn on the train? I mean....really?

 

There is a slight problem with that in america that is illegal.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (1998) made it a federal offense to sell or distribute software to rip dvd's.
One of the big reasons itunes doesnt do it. And ripping dvd's is a taboo subject on these here forums, also making it dubious as to the legality of that in the UK. Although these forums dont like talk of it, the official PSP ones do lol