Who Cares

At the end of the day as a consumer, I am only willing to pay about 10 quid for a newish DVD film - anything more than that and its a waste of money as well as over priced. I ceertainly will not bother buying a new format player for it "enhanced" features which most people would not really notice anyways. DVD with 5.1 surround sound within a home lounge is ample quality - its a rip off waiting to happen and most people know it

Wrong choice?

I have supported HD-DVD since launch and bought the flagship EX1. I'm now beginning to wish I had waited as this is a huge blow for the format. Toshiba have not help themselves with a severe lack of advertising and poor film choice (better over the last 6 months). I'm now debating whether I should look at going Blu. I never thought I would say that as I hate Sony for their DRM crap and region coding! it's looking like the HD-DVD ship is sinking. Can it be sasved?

Universals Exclusivity is almost up.

Another 30 days apparently..

Also I would discredit anything from AVS Forums, as it's full of rabid HD DVD fanbots.

As if the Warner announcement was not enough to sink HD DVD already, the Paramount switch would simply fire another missile into the already dead format.

Half true

Pararmount most likly would go dual as they have just stated they intend to keep support for HD DVD. however they did not say exclusive, which frankly was the time to say that.

Universal have issued a NO Comment, which i think means thay also are under massive pressure now to support Blu Ray.
The Warner move really is a killer move TBH.
Also the massive CE support at CES for Blu Ray was impressive, while HDDVD had barly got a mention.
Even Bill Gates didnt want to really talk HDDVD and there lies the problem, it looks like MS have kicked HDDVD to the curb. (no surprise really)

Oh well.

Well, the studios got the format they wanted, at the expense of regular folks. Here's what HDDVD has that Bluray does not:
* Mandatory TrueHD support for lossless compressed audio
* Mandatory AVC/VC-1 MPEG4 compression (many early Bluray discs had artifacty and slovenly MPEG-2 encodes)
* Mandatory Managed Copy (to store HDDVDs on a media PC hard disk) on every disc
* No region coding (this is probably what pissed the studios off MOST, and offered the most value especially to European consumers)
* Mandatory networking and local storage hardware (but NOT mandatory network hookup, you can play all HDDVDs fully disconnected if you choose)

The overall-superior tech lost again. But wtf do I know, I was a big fan of Atari Lynx and Jaguar...

HD-DVD superior what?

@Dr. Kenneth Noisewater: Are you either a Microsoft or Toshiba employee, perhaps ?

- Mandatory TrueHD support means nothing. Many titles don't get lossless audio tracks due to the lack of available space on a 30GB HD-DVD disc. So, what is your point ? 50GB Blu-Ray discs provide enough space for high bitrate video and lossless PCM audio.

- Mandatory what ? AVC/VC-1 compression? First of all, VC-1 is Microsoft own WMV9Pro which turned into VC-1 when the specifications became public and revised by the ISO/ITU-T organizations for approval, but it's still an hack of pretty old MPEG-4 ASP. It's absolutely inferior to MPEG-4 Part 10 AVC H.264 which is the real replacement for MPEG-2. Many early MPEG-2 Blu-Ray releases thanks to the higher bitrate allowed by the format looked better than early HD-DVD VC-1 15GB releases anyway... so, what is your point?

- Mandatory Managed Copy ...? What? Do you know that Cyberlink had to disable the PowerDVD feature that allowed it to read HD-DVD and Blu-Ray decrypted disc structures off of the HDU as per request of the MPAA,DVD-Forum and such ? So, what are you talking about ? No DRM driven Managed Copy has ever been used by any HD-DVD user, it never worked. That's your "mandatory" thing point...

- No region coding ... what ? You should document yourself better before going around spreading lies. The DVD-Forum already approved Region Coding for HD-DVD, it was planned to start enabling it in the next few months as per studios request.

- Mandatory networking and some flash memory storage .. then what ? Less than 10% of customers ever watch special features on movies discs, even on DVDs. So, what is your point ?

HD-DVD is not a superior technology. Blu-Ray is a superior technology, it allows for more available space and upcoming 4-layer 100GB an 6-layer 200GB BD discs will be even better.

Pfft

...the whole time this "hi-def" war has been going on, I sit in front of my 55" Mitsubishi Diamond-series TV with my Pioneer Elite DVD changer and Pioneer Elite 7.1 reciever with Klipsch Audio 7.1 speaker setup, watching regular DVDs in such mind-blowing quality that it occurs to me that my movie-watching experience simply CAN NOT get any better. So WTF do I care about HD DVD and Blu-Ray? I can see no possible reason to start buying either one of them...they can both toss off for all I care and never come back.

article (perhaps) wrong

This website http://www.gamesection.dk/nyheder.asp?nid=3739 states that Paramount has denied the rumours, that they are leaving HD-DVD.
So there is hope still :)

WOW

Yep, sony can really throw there money around if they are "signing" all these studios for exclusive rights to bluray instead of hddve. They must be proud!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

They could have won

Companies can command whatever they want, meaning Studios chose BlueRay over HD because of Region coding, which makes sense. Regular DVD's have it.

However in my opinion TOshiba should have subsidized the inclusion of an HD-DVD in the XBOX360 for no cost. Reason being the xbox had all the cpu power to play HD, all they needed is the internal HD player which hardware wise is not that expensive maybe 20,30 dollars its a simple dvd drive with a different frequency laser.

This way they would have been 20, 30 maybe 60 million in the whole, however they would have had 1 year first to market plus 10 million user base by now for all the xbox users. and most importantly with 1 year advance, there would have been a lot of demand by now, and so Consumer would have decided who wins the war instead of Movie studios

They could have even split the cost of the internal HD-DVD between microsoft , Toshiba and Buyer
1/3 each if it cost 30 dollars
microsoft would eat 10, toshiba 10 , and the buyer would pay 10 dollars extra to have an HD -DVD in their xbox 360

anyone agrees?

surround sound ... is ample quality

Actually I'm still quite happy with plain old stereo.
Unfortunately, ever since the old "640k will be all we ever need", the inexorable march of technology has proven that more is always better - in the long run.
So, although I heartily agree with you that DSS is more than enough, experience proves that it simply won't stay that way, like it or not.
Bot nobody can force YOU to go out and buy it.
Or me, for that matter.

THey could have won

Companies can command whatever they want, meaning Studios chose BlueRay over HD because of Region coding, which makes sense. Regular DVD's have it.

However in my opinion TOshiba should have subsidized the inclusion of an HD-DVD in the XBOX360 for no cost. Reason being the xbox had all the cpu power to play HD, all they needed is the internal HD player which hardware wise is not that expensive maybe 20,30 dollars its a simple dvd drive with a different frequency laser.

This way they would have been 20, 30 maybe 60 million in the whole, however they would have had 1 year first to market plus 10 million user base by now for all the xbox users. and most importantly with 1 year advance, there would have been a lot of demand by now, and so Consumer would have decided who wins the war instead of Movie studios

They could have even split the cost of the internal HD-DVD between microsoft , Toshiba and Buyer
1/3 each if it cost 30 dollars
microsoft would eat 10, toshiba 10 , and the buyer would pay 10 dollars extra to have an HD -DVD in their xbox 360

anyone agrees?

Atari

Well I loved the Lynx and Jaguar too but they failed for the same reason
HD-DVD failed. Shit software and crappy adverts. If you need proof look at where Atari is now. Too many cooks.

re: Oh well

HD DVD is inferior to Blu-ray in many ways,

1. disc space (50GB on Blu, 30GB on HD DVD)

2. bandwidth (54Mbit/sec on Blu, 32Mbit/sec on HD DVD)

3. BD+ / Optional region coding. Yes, it's superior, as it means studios want to support your format, and ultimately the reason your format will get movies.

Even if you look at the Bonus View and BD Live functionality, it's considrably more advanced than the basic scriping support than HD DVD offered, whilst it's more compliacated to code for, it means now there is only one format, studios can devote more time to the extra features.

Cheering for HD-DVD but eh.

I was routing for HD-DVD to win out, which maybe it will. It is still to soon to tell. I mostly was cheering for HD-DVD because I really can't stand Sony (DRM, spyware, exploding batteries, PS3 arrogance, etc) and want to see them knocked down a couple notches.

The HD-DVD manufacturers really have been horrible about advertising HD-DVD. Blue-Ray has had a massive barrage of advertising for a long time.

However I actually am format ignostic. Blue Ray does seem to be superior technology although blu-ray disks are apparently more expensive than hd-dvd.

My two cents

@Kenneth

You wrote "Here's what HDDVD has that Bluray does not:" and I want to comment on that:

"* Mandatory TrueHD support for lossless compressed audio"
That might be true - although the lossless linear PCM is mandatory for Blu-ray. BUT here is the problem: TrueHD is more often found on Blu-ray than on HD-DVD, although the format is only optional for Blu-ray, because HD-DVD is sometimes to small. That's why you sometimes get an additional TrueHD-track on Blu-ray, which is missing on HD-DVD. Mandatory does only mean, the the players MUST support it. Most players should support all optional codecs as well.

"* Mandatory AVC/VC-1 MPEG4 compression (many early Bluray discs had artifacty and slovenly MPEG-2 encodes)"
Again. "Mandatory" means mandatory for the players, not the discs. Besides, what you wrote is wrong (besides mixing two different terms). H.264 (MPEG-4 AVC) and VC-1 are mandatory codecs for both formats.
The MPEG-2 problem is true, though. And sad. Although there is enough space on a BD for an MPEG-2 movie, they really messed a lot of the first discs up and the picture quality on HD-DVD was far superior. But that was not a technical problem of the Blu-ray disc, rather than a big mistake by the movie companies. The issue is solved by now and most movies which come out on both formats have the same video stream and are thus equal in picture quality.

"* No region coding (this is probably what pissed the studios off MOST, and offered the most value especially to European consumers)"
Sure the studios like the region coding and don't like that either, though being a supporter of Blu-ray since the first days. This is really a big advantage the HD DVD has, at least for the consumers. But how do we know that region codes would have never been added to the spec at a later state? I was always aware of that possibility to add region codes after the format war would have been over.

"* Mandatory networking and local storage hardware (but NOT mandatory network hookup, you can play all HDDVDs fully disconnected if you choose)"
Yes. Changing the Blu-ray specs (to 1.1 and 2.0) was big mess-up. I don't know what they were thinking, although it is better to change specs now than in a few years, when it is more than a niche product.
But on the other hand: Why do we need mandatory network at all? What the hell is this feature with content over the internet? Why don't they just burn that content to the disc? Even on a HD-DVD there would be enough space for that! Maybe, in a few years, the whole movie will streamed and we just pay for an empty disc with a license code on it? Talk about copy-protection-system. You can't copy what is not there.

"The overall-superior tech lost again. But wtf do I know, I was a big fan of Atari Lynx and Jaguar..."
Ehm... this is one of the few times where the technically superior format did not loose, although the other format was/is easier to produce. The Blu-ray discs are bigger, better for long-time archiving and a lot easier to burn (they really messed that up with the HD DVD). So, you might think HD DVD is "overall-superior", but you seem to be confused a bit:
The codecs which are mandatory etc. have something to do with the specs for VIDEO DISCS, not with the HD DVD-discs itself (as a data disc). BD might have some bad screw-ups with there specs, but the discs are FAR more superior concerning their technology that HD DVD. Although the war could have been gone either way.