So, is this death-knell, or is BB backing the wrong horse?
They ought to dump Blu-Ray too. I sure don’t want it.
Neither will win. Combo players already exist, and when the price drops enough, they will be the default players that are sold. No need to choose one over the other.
For the most part, the major studios are behind Blu-Ray, exclusively or not. But Universal Studios exclusively supports HD DVD. So does that mean that Universal titles won’t be available at Blockbuster in hi-def? And The Weinstein Company has a deal with Blockbuster giving it exclusive rental rights for the next three years, and The Weinstein Company is also exclusively HD DVD (according to Wikipedia). So how will that work?
Speaking as someone working in the electronics retail industry, I can tell you that our customers aren’t interested in HD or Blu-Ray DVD- many of them can’t get their heads around conventional DVDs as it is.
The problem is that the majority of TVs out there are CRTs- there’s a lot of LCDs floating around at the moment, but Fred and Mary Bloggs are more likely to have an old CRT than a 42" LCD. And with CRTs, there’s not really much to be gained by plugging in a Blu-Ray DVD Player with HDMI (assuming your CRT has HDMI, which is highly unlikely). Conventional DVD is about as good as it’s getting on a CRT, and it’s likely to stay that way until the majority of people out there have LCD TVs, IMHO.
Martini Enfield, that might be the case in Australia, but a lot of people in the US are moving over to HD flatscreens.
I am a bit annoyed that it is taking so long for both formats to show up here in EUROPE.
I want to buy a PS3 and decided to order some cool movies in advance.
To my great dismay all movies I was interested in were only available in HD-DVD !!
And I really don’t like the idea of HD-DVD, as I don’t think it is a big enough improvement over the old DVD format.
And I would have to buy the Xbox360 add-on HD-DVD player, and I hate add-on equipment as it makes my entertainment center
look even more messy than it already is.
I really want to see Blue-Ray become the standard, but the way things are shaping up, both formats will go the way of the dodo.
I don’t think HD is as popular as a lot of people think. It’s slowly being picked up by a few people, but there’s so much investment in new equipment to get the benefits that too many people are holding back for it to make as much of an impact as it needs to really work.
From what I can tell, so far the HD releases do not have enough ‘special features’ (including the higher resolution) to warrant re-buying your movies again, unless you’re a die-hard technophile.
Really, for me the quality level of regular DVD is plenty good enough for me to enjoy it as is. Sure, HD has higher resolution, but that won’t make the story any funnier or the acting any better. All it does is let me count the pores and see bad makeup flaws.
I don’t know if I’m with the majority of consumers, but I really can’t see there’s any need to make the jump. Soon enough it’ll be the default, I suppose, but until then I can wait, and indeed by that time it will probably be superceded by an even more spectacular format.
I don’t think any format is going to win anytime soon.
Everybody is adopting the wait-and-see approach, which is the kiss of death for new technologies.
When people are buying these new XL widescreen sets I think they are willing to get hooked up with HD cable or satellite because the jump in picture improvement is so large. Watching a sporting event go from a standard-def 4:3 square picture to a Hi-Def 16:9 widescreen is quite an improvement. Your getting an extremely improved image in a nice panoramic view.
However, going from a regular DVD to a HD-DVD or Blu-Ray (while still a noticeable improvement) isn’t so great as to warrant the cost. 720p standard DVD still looks damn good on a HD set and will still be in widescreen.
The HD-DVD/BluRay isn’t going to give you a resized picture by any means and picture improvement really depends on what the original source material was. Digital HD computer animation looks excellent going HD but your normal Gladiator/DieHard/E.T. filmed on film movies are hit or miss when it comes to a noticeable improvement on HD.
It’s true in the U.S., too, and Canada. Internet message board regulars are simply not representative of the population at large. Most people do not care about this issue. The costs associated with converting to HD-DVD or Blu-Ray simply don’t merit the cost and convenience benefits of stickiong with ordinary DVDs, which are still excellent products.
Go ahead and do a true random survey of 100 ordinary people and you’ll find the great majority don’t know or care what “Blu-Ray” or “HD-DVD” are, how they differ, or what the implications are.
Nitpick: Aren’t screen resolutions measured by height, not width? Which would make your standard DVD 480i, or occasionally 480p. Or am I missing something?
Personally I would love to have an HDTV and an HD-DVD or Blu-ray player, because I will notice every minor issue with an image’s quality. For now, unfortunately, I’m in the ‘can’t justify the cost’ camp 
Most Blu-Ray players are backwards-compatible with DVD, so you don’t have to replace your library, except for those ones where there’s an obvious benefit. Keep your 1933 King Kong DVD, but it’s probably worthwhile to upgrade the Peter Jackson remake.
I can’t wait for Blu-Ray to proliferate to the point where it makes economic sense for me to get set up – and it will. Just the image resolution alone is enough to sell it for me. The DVD standard is still tied to NTSC – it’s the best you can do with technological standards established in 1940.
Apart from the image-quality improvement (which is long overdue,) I’m also happy to let go of the limitations of the DVD – slide-show menus, etc – they already feel archaic. Hell, yeah - I want a Java-enabled platform. I want alpha-channel functionality for presenting composited clips.
A separate commentary track is fine, but being able to overlay video offers a lot more opportunity for special feature presentations.
“DVD authoring” is a freaking joke. The Blu-Ray standard is so nice and open-ended that you can do practically anything with it.