Blu-Ray or HD - which way you gone ?

[666joe]

With the war hotting up it's looking all betamax for one format - as they say in Highlander "There can be only one".

http://img300.imageshack.us/img300/4852/hdcu4.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

So which way have you gone - integrated Blu-ray in your PS3 or a standalone - or have you gone for the ultra cheap HD drive for ther Xbox360....

High definition video is the way forward - which path if any have you taken and why ?

Battle info -
Videobusiness is reporting that Blu-ray Disc set-top players, within the last 12 weeks, have begun out-selling HD DVD set-top players, according to recent NPD Group research cited by Sony Electronics at CEDIA.
http://img297.imageshack.us/img297/1674/bd2xm0.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

[dmitri]

HD-DVD, it's a dirt cheap upgrade for Xbox 360 owners. Practically free after factoring in all of the bundled movies (8 free Amazon).

Having said that, I sorta wish I sat on the fence a bit more. Sure they look great. 16 Blocks looks stunning in HD.. But I wish I waited for downloadable content to mature a bit more.

An HD download is around 3GB on Xbox Live, which takes quite awhile (hours) on a standard high speed connection. Whereas a standard DVD quality starts buffering and playing instantly. Now if my connection was 3x faster, I wouldn't hesitate to strictly order all movies online.

Great for couch potatoes! :icon_pidu:

[VodaMatt]

I'm HD-DVD only because my PC came with one in it already. Having said that, I have yet to find a store nearby that sells decent movies on HD-DVD so I've not seen what it's like yet.

[Jose_R.A.M]

I'm in the "waiting for HD disks to become mainstream as DVD's kinda alright at the moment" camp.

Blu-ray was available for the model of lappy I ordered but came to ordering time that was not an option.

Maybe Blu-Ray with PS3 at Christmas, if I can get myself back into console gaming.

[666joe]

Wow - was expecting a Blu-Ray ladnslide with PS3 bundling it in the package....suppose with the unmissable 360 HD offer though doesn't suprise me...

[markuserectus]

Im going to go HD-DVD but for now I'd rather buy a couple of extra games for my 360 than anything else.

[ishaanranderia]

Waiting for the winner.
Apart from movies and games and stuff, I think it will be so useful for back ups, like i can take a back up of all my music on just a couple of discs:love5:

[phoney]

i am going to wait for the winner as well why invest when it could become the next betamax. (whats that i wonder!)

[666joe]

Allot of on the fence action here - hoping that is the trend allot of people are taking so production houses are forced into dual formats !!

[ishaanranderia]

yeah i guess dual formats wont be so bad, it could work, but its so much nicer to have just one, so as to avoid duplication.

[robbii]

I figured that since they cracked the copy protection on HD-DVD that Hollywood would opt for Bluray to discourage piracy. I've never purchased a movie DVD for myself so I have no opinion at the moment.

[Diji1]

Blu-Ray will be cracked soon I think... it being the case that another "unbreakable" copy protection has come along and all previously "unbreakable" CP's have turned out to not be unbreakable.

Myself I'm not an early adopter of technology in general for many reasons, the main ones being price, bugs and potential improvements (sometimes) in the first (and beyond) manufactuering runs - especially anything involving processing which implies that somewhere code of some sort is being used which equals possiblities for bugs. And the absolutely massive reason for me waiting is CONTENT. Until much more content starts getting released ontop either format I'll be putting a DVD5 or 9 into my player. I can't help feeling (without knowing for sure) that console based solutions aren't going to be as good as dedicated players.

I'm waiting to see who wins, content to be available and for the price to drop significantly before I trash my DVD.

I'm actually hoping that the 2 formats do go side-by-side and neither wins out in the end. Whilst it means that one will need 2 players (I can't see all content going to both formats) it also means price pressures will remain. Something that can't be said for DVD.

I'm totally against armed men boarding ships uninvited and all that of course.

[edit]: I read at www.doom9.org (*the* site for anybody interested in anything to do with digital video :) ) that a triple layer HD-DVD option has just been approved. This would give a disk with a capacity of ~50 GB !

I recall reading that if one takes a 90 minute source from the cinema (or whatever they use when compressing mpeg2 for DVD) and compressed it using huffYUV (which is a lossless compression format, unlike MPEG2) that the resulting file is 40 - 120 GB or so in the end (vs. 3 - 7 GB or so if one compresses using MPEG2)...

... so you could store a movie at "cinema screen" quality on 1 - 3 of these new DVD's when they come out!! That's roughly 10 or 11x (can't be bothered doing the sums) the size of a current DVD+-R!