Monday, January 7, 2008

The HD format war is over

So while I was away for a few days Warner Bros Studios announced that they would stop releasing their catalog of movies on HD-DVD and fully support Blu-ray. I know, it seems underwhelming but it is nothing less than the death blow for HD-DVD as a viable format.

I feel bad about this on many levels. First, I chose my side in the format war and my side lost. I was tempting by the tumbling prices on HD-DVD and my ingrained mistrust of Sony. Lets face it the last few format revolutions that Sony championed have been total cluster fucks (MiniDisc, ATRAC, UMD) and I bought into MiniDisc big time. So now based on the strength of PS3 sales Blu-ray has won the war, the PS3 fanboys will be intolerable.

Also, the Blu-ray standard is STILL evolving this late in the game. If you go and buy a new player today then you won't be able to play the latest "1.1" Blu-ray titles that are expected to come out later this year. Way to piss on your early adopters by making all their hardware useless. Your best bet is to buy a PS3 which is firmware upgradable and has plenty of CPU power to spare. That aside I always thought the technology behind Blu-ray was superior to that of HD-DVD.

Oh well. It will be interesting to see how Microsoft spins this since they were big supporters of HD-DVD.

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