Miss Mango

I was considering posting something like this because I\'m quite happy about it, if only because from the start I was backing Blu-ray and I predicted that it would win out. I only haven\'t because it\'s not completely certain news yet, but all signs point towards HD-DVD being dropped by the end of the year.

There was an interesting stat I read in about March 2007 which convinced me that my original prediction was correct: it was an Amazon.com stat saying that in the previous month or so, HD-DVD players had outsold Blu-ray players two to one; but Blu-ray films had outsold HD-DVD films by the same factor. What does that mean? I took it like this: when making an upgrade to the next generation, casual movie viewers who aren\'t very tech-savvy see the title Blu-ray and see an alien, odd name, whereas HD-DVD has DVD in the title, and seems to make sense. So to them it\'s a safe name implying a safe upgrade. But people more interested in films and technology, the people who will buy more films in HD formats, bought Blu-ray players as it had increasing support from the studios (already more studios supported it than HD-DVD) and, being included in the PS3, was seen as a very strong contender (look at what the PS2 did for DVD - although there was no strong competitor format then). They\'re also more likely to think that buying new technology straight away is foolish because prices will come down before you know it, accounting partially for the sales of players.

Anyway, that was what convinced me that Blu-ray would become the victor. I\'m also very happy because I bought a PS3 and it\'s all but certain now that Blu-ray will become the dominant format.

It seems to have all come together rather quickly - some studios gradually asserted their allegiance to Blu-ray by moving to it and leaving HD-DVD, notably and influentially Warner Brothers, and when the likes of Wal-Mart and Netflix announced that they were going Blu-ray exclusive it was pretty much the death knell. The HD-DVD camp also effectively pulled out of CES from what I read; their stand was virtually empty and they cancelled their press briefings in light of the Warner announcement.

Nielsen VideoScan High-Def market share for week ending February 10th, 2008

At the end of the day, format wars can be seen as stupid and a waste of time and resources, but sometimes they do push technology forward and/or reveal interesting, useful data about the market and consumers. I can\'t say that this format war has been particularly healthy for anyone though. One thing they always do is create confusion amongst the general public (generalising the general public as mass consumers who have little specific knowledge about the products) and that\'s not beneficial to anyone. It\'s interesting to note that DVD was almost a contender in a format war - I believe that it was between proprietary formats belonging to Philips/Sony and Toshiba/bunch of other companies, and Philips/Sony threw in their lot in about 1994 to work on a single format (don\'t quote me on the firms involved, but it\'s something like that). What happened in the end? DVD became the single most successful consumer electronics product in history.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari...l_disc_formats

My understanding is that the two have fundamentally very, very little difference. Blu-ray discs have greater capacity than HD-DVDs (50GB to 30GB in dual-layer format), support more frame rates and have greater data transfer rates. While both formats can use the same video and audio codecs, more of them are mandatory on HD-DVDs, which can be seen as a good thing or bad thing (more choice for the consumer vs shoddy transfers if the company is required to include a certain codec).

There are a couple of things seen as weaknesses for Blu-ray. Blu-ray discs have greater copy protection (while the original HD formats have been cracked, my understanding is that BD+ has proved quite resistant so far) - and everyone hates Digital Rights Management (everyone who doesn\'t make money from it anyway). HD-DVD is region free, while Blu-Ray discs have three regions (though expect region free players to become available if they aren\'t already, as with DVD).

So as far as I can see, getting down to a comparison of them technically, they support the same codecs, and Blu-ray has greater capacity and transfer rates (and a cooler name) - Blu-ray appears to be technically superior.