HD DVD Officially Dead

[Bev]

i pretty sure blue ray just won the war because it has a cooler name. HD DVD had alot of good movie studios, it was cheaper, and it was the samequality picture as blue ray. i cant think of any other reason why it lost.. HD is HD both were 1080p

The only reason I could think of was the PS3 - as GSZX1337 stated before regardless of Blu-ray you still need one to play games with. Although that hardly seems like the defining factor it was all I could come up with.

[Niode]

Bleugh. I hate the fact that Sony won the war. I'm not a fanboy-hate of Sony, I just dislike their business practices, their ethics and lack of moral judgement with the way they treat consumers and customers. I never buy Sony. The last piece of Sony stuff I bought was the PSP, and that was so that I could hack it and never have to pay Sony for games (not that there was any decent games to buy for the system. TBH I couldn't be bothered to pirate the games due to them being pretty much universally poor).

My friends and I think that Blu-way will fade out eventually anyway, nobody wants it, nobody wants to pay for the same films they already own at 200-400% markup (Alarmingly on most titles here in the UK) for what is essentially about 125% increase in quality (compared to 480i/p SD DVD). For me that's just not a good enough increase for the money. It just doesn't make financial sense for such a small increase (relative to cost of adoption) in quality. I'd much rather just use my 1080p upscaling DVD player on my 1080p Panasonic Plasma. After upscaling the quality increase is negligable at best!

Like LordofDuct said before, until consumer AV equipment increases substantially in quality over previous generations I can see the format being relegated to being used for data storage and thats it.

At least until TV broadcast is in full 1080p. Which isn't likely to happen for at least another 5-10 years. (especially in the UK, we haven't even switched off the old analogue signal completely yet, thats not supposed to happen until next year. To give you some scope for what the BBC and our goverment are like, they announced this in 1999...) I'm ignoring Sky/Virgin subscription services as not everyone in the UK has access to these (there are places in the UK that don't even have access to a Digital signal) Plus the HD channels on these are very limited (about five, 3 of those are sports channels...)

[aaron]

i pretty sure blue ray just won the war because it has a cooler name. HD DVD had alot of good movie studios, it was cheaper, and it was the samequality picture as blue ray. i cant think of any other reason why it lost.. HD is HD both were 1080p

The only reason I could think of was the PS3 - as GSZX1337 stated before regardless of Blu-ray you still need one to play games with. Although that hardly seems like the defining factor it was all I could come up with.

warner backed out of their agreement with toshiba to support HD-DVD. this left only universal and paramount as the only major film studios supporting the format, with paramount having a specific clause in their contract that said they could back out if warner defected.

it's kind of sega-like of toshiba in a way, cut their losses now when they know they're eventually going to lose.

[fastbilly1]

Shows how much I keep up with this. Thanks GSZX. Looks like I am sticking to those DVDs and Laserdisc a while more.

[Ramatut4001]

The thing is, you all will need massive screens to be able to enjoy anything much better.
Do you all have projectors or 50+ inch plasmas in your homes?

I have a 46" Samsung LCD and there is a huge difference. Upscaled DVDs look good, but not like BD. I also have the 360 add-on, but never bought too many HD-DVDs because the outcome was sort of obvious as of late.

[racketboy]

The thing is, you all will need massive screens to be able to enjoy anything much better.
Do you all have projectors or 50+ inch plasmas in your homes?

I have a 46" Samsung LCD and there is a huge difference. Upscaled DVDs look good, but not like BD. I also have the 360 add-on, but never bought too many HD-DVDs because the outcome was sort of obvious as of late.

I meant when people were talking about something that was a large upgrade from DVD -- larger than Blu Ray

[Niode]

Yeah, thats what I feel. The jump from VHS to DVD was incredible. That was the sort of jump from cassette to CD in terms of clarity, 'hi-fidelity' and quality.

BD strikes me as another Mini-Disk. They tauted that as the next successor to CD. Offering all improvements over the original (such as more audio on one disk, smaller size, increased protection) but that flopped at the end of the day. The UMD-Movie format for PSP also flopped.

After Sony have failed 3 times now in the AV market in trying to launch a new format I just can't put my money behind it. What happens when BD fails in a few years? I'd be in the same situation as if I was an early adopter of HD-DVD

[Droid party]

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ywWfmRdOmJ0

"Blades of Glory, are you fucking kidding me"?