Format War Gripes: HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray

August 21st, 2007

I figure I’ll toss my two cents in regarding the format war between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, which should be no surprise to anybody: It sucks.

For those unfamiliar, basically HD-DVD or Blu-Ray is the next generation disc media format that has high definition content — perfect for your brand spanking new high definition television. And yes, this format is designed to make you replace all your DVDs — another reason to be annoyed.

But even if you’re okay with that prospect, the next wrinkle is that there are two competing formats. HD-DVD was developed by Toshiba / NEC and Blu-Ray by Sony. As far as I can tell, both formats are pretty much on par with each other, with slight, annoying differences. Blu-Ray has larger capacity while HD-DVD is cheaper. Because of the larger capacity of Blu-Ray, it sure would be nice to have an entire season of television shows on one disc. Blockbuster recently stopped stocking HD-DVDs. Studios are being paid off to promote HD-DVD while Sony obviously has their own movies plus other studios. It sucks.

It’s even spreading to the gaming consoles, as Paris Lemon points out. Sony’s PlayStation 3 has a Blu-Ray drive while the cheapest HD-DVD player around is sold as a peripheral to the XBOX 360.

So there really is no clear cut “winner” although I keep reading the Blu-Ray is ahead. Right now, I’m not siding with either. But ultimately, a couple of things will get me off the fence:

• When a player is $200 or less.
• When a disc costs $20 or less.
• When one of these formats actually releases movies I really want to own and see in HD (Star Wars, PIXAR, 2001). Who cares about seeing The Nutty Professor in high definition — seriously!
• Which format appears on the Mac platform.

Wake me when this is over in a year. Maybe by that time Apple will have HD downloads in iTunes and we can just forget this whole disc-thing.