Go Blu-Ray, Go!
I'm finally happy to see that Blu-Ray is finally starting to pull ahead in the contest for what will be the next HD media for movies and to a lesser extent video games and data.
For a year now Blu-Ray (Sony) and HD-DVD (Toshiba) have been fighting like VHS and Beta of old. The video industry was split down the middle with major studios committing to only one version or the other. It was a suck fest because no one would buy machines for fear of picking the "beta" and wasting money.... so studios have been slow to release titles, etc.
Things have changed. All but one major studio (Universal I think) will offer their films in Blu-ray and HD-DVD. There are 4 majors (I think Buena Vista/Disney, Fox, New Line, and someone else) are only making discs in the Blu-Ray format. Microsoft is still backing HD-DVD, but that's because they're trying to hurt Sony's game market and they can't push into the "total home entertainment solution" race if Sony's Blu-ray PS3 because a standard platform.
The nail in the coffin has to with the recent announcement by Blockbuster that they are only going to stock Blu-ray discs. They ran both in 250 test stores, but over the next year are expanding the HD films to all stores and only Blu-ray discs will be used. They made the determination based on the fact that test rentals of blu-ray vs HD-dvd were 75% to 25% in favor of the blu-ray. Starz made a similar announcement today.
I'm really stoked about the impending death of HD-DVD. With one format that the world can get behind, prices drops will happen and HD video will be everywhere.
The video upgrade from DVD to Blu-ray (or HD-DVD) is ok, but not awe inspiring. There are some mid-range DVD players that do an up-convert and look nice. The real win is that the sound is using an uncompressed, lossless format. DVD, which has great 6.1 sound via DTS or Dolby is compressed. Some times moreso than others. With the new massive disc space available, the blu-ray format is allowing for individual channel, uncompressed audio. A guy who works for THX labs apparently wept on hearing the difference. Now all of that tweaking and positioning and such can produce even greater results with the new scenario.
Neat