Foo - HD-DVD vs. Blue-Ray

Unless you've been living under a rock or you're technophobic, you've heard of the new video format war coming up that will rival the days of Betamax vs. VHS until VHS won out.
This May Toshiba is coming up with HD-DVD, the next medium succeeding DVD.
Projected to come out in fall 2006 (hopefully) will be Sony's development Blue-Ray.
Both were developed independently by the two giants and employ a BLUE LASER capable to creating discs with vast memory capable of TRUE high defintion quality, interactive features, and more video time than ever before. Your $5000 HD TVs will finally serve a purpose now.
The formats are NOT intercompatible. There will be separate players for both machines.
Sony's Playstation 3 (postponed till 2007) WILL be a Blue-Ray player.
Major studios are already tied to both formats, and they are stable. There is no predicting which will win.
HD-DVD has almost a year long head start, but Blue-Ray is the better disc as it holds more data.
But this is not a gurantee for either format.
Betamax was technically better quality than VHS in the 80s, but VHS still won.
HD-DVD players will be around $500 when they are released this May.
The Blue-Ray players will sell for around the same amount, the Playstation 3 will be around $800.

Who will win?

vhs may have won for consumers but betamax won where it counts-->studios, and betamax is still actively in use

one of the manufacturers has already made plans to build players/burners for both formats

if your a windows user, get ready to deal with DRM issues over the new formats, may need some beefier hardware too, vista is gonna be taxing.......eye candy costs processor cycles and memory

using another format like xvid or mpeg4, hdtv movies will still fit on a dvd5 no problem and definitely on dvd9's no problem

Don't worry, I use a Mac. :D
iMac G5 = best computer out there
OS X 10.4 Tiger = best OS out there, even after Vista comes out

I think neither.

Both are designed in a way that makes life harder for the legitimate buyers, while the thieves have it just as easy. Right now they claim to not use their "anti-piracy" measures on most of their soon to be released stuff, but that's pretty much a similar tactic to "the first rock's free kid".

IMO DVD will go on for some time, unless axed by the distributors....in which case it all falls under which is cheaper.

Problem is the displays for these technologies are still far too pricey, and selecion is very low. Then we have the whole problem of buying the wrong technology in event one of them leaves the mainstream market (like betamax). Only win I can see here is if they come out with a dual-mode player, but how likely is that?

Don't worry, I use a Mac. :D
iMac G5 = best computer out there
OS X 10.4 Tiger = best OS out there, even after Vista comes out

not hardly, and apple will undoubtedly saddle you with DRM issues too, just like it has with itunes

The best techonology rarely ever dominates the market, there's other factors involved such as cost. Sony messed up with Beta by not licensing it out and making it cheaper, the exact same mistake Apple made (a 50% profit-margin on a $3000 computer is too #$%!@ greedy!).

My bet's on Blue-Ray because its standards have more potential and larger capacity. HD-DVD's just an extension on the old DVD standard and has some limitations. Such as HD-DVD-RW format not being compatible with HD-DVD-ROM/R formats (your disc burnt from PC won't play on DVD-player). Also once more HD content becomes available, the storage-capacity limits of HD-DVD will become very apparent.

One interesting possibility is a hybrid DVD9/Blue-Ray disc with both a standard DVD movie along with a HD version as well. :) Interesting comparison of DVD vs. HD formats here: Fellowship of the Ring - HD vs DVD (http://www.cornbread.org/FOTRCompare/index.html) (mouse-over for HD). Upsizing DVD and downsampling HD would show the difference in quality you would see on playing both on a digital HDTV. On an old analog NTSC set, I doubt you'd be able to see the difference.

Cool site.