There was an earlier thread about this.

What do we know now? Which format will become the HD standard?

It will be Blu-Ray despite Microsoft just spending $150 million to try to knock it out of the box.

I'm laughing at this format fight as the availabily of decent content pretty much still sucks. Crap is still crap regardless of whether viewed on HDDVD, BluRay, or VHS. Too bad some of the money isn't being spent on creating compelling content. I tire of bells and whistles when most titles compare with watching the pdxradio troll. Who wants to see the troll troll on BluRay? Not me.

I'll certainly agree with you that Hollywood is a vast wasteland of bad movies, though every once in awhile something good comes along.

I have over 1700 titles in house and watch something on the big screen every night. We never got started watching the HBO stuff, so out of desperation for some content, purchased the Sopranos, West Wing and Deadwood. I suspect they look a little different on a 7 foot screen than they did on TV. Haven't started Deadwood yet, but the other two are pretty interesting.

No Blu-ray player yet, but picked up a couple of Blu-Rays that were on sale. Also just ordered about a half dozen Paramount and Dreamworks Blu-rays since they're being pulled from the market thanks to the jerks at Microsoft paying Paramount to get out of the Blu-ray business.

I'll never buy anything on HD-DVD as I refuse to be bullied into it by Microsoft.

The West Wing is actually NBC, but there is some decent TV programming released on DVD these days, many from HBO. Still, one has to wade through muck to find it.

My beef is with the $100 million dollar hollywood blockbuster -- if one divies that up into ten $10 million chunks and spend it on making 10 movies instead of one blockbuster, we'd have better odds of more decent content to watch and buy. But, noooooo, we're sepending $300-400 million now on ONE film! And it almost HAS to be committee-produced crap to earn back the investment!

Hollywood rant\off

One of the reason movies are so expensive is all of the special effects, some of which must cost zillions to create. If there were some excellent dramas or suspense scripts, they would be less costly to film. When is the last time you saw a new John Grisham novel on the screen?

I suppose the trouble is that the young and foolish who populate the theaters these days only want to see sex, violence and explosions, then they wanted those timed out so they have time for cell phone calls in between.

There is a lot of difference in what type films are enjoyable in theaters and what is enjoyable in the comfort of a home theater.

"There is a lot of difference in what type films are enjoyable in theaters and what is enjoyable in the comfort of a home theater."

Man, that is SO true.

Just as soon as a high-density DVD format (like BR or HDDVD) computer drive comes down to the <$200 level, then and only then will I consider buying one. (Backing up a full 80-gig HDD on DVD+R can be a bit time consuming, not to mention use a LOT of discs...)

See, these discs reportedly hold 30-50GB of data, which means I could back up my hard drive on a coupla discs and still have room left over on one of them.

But for video playback? I rarely even use my regular $100 JVC DVD-Video player for anything other than listening to CDs, so I don't seem to be too affected by Blue Ray (or even HDDVD, for that matter) taking over the video market, also when taking my meagre selection of regular DVD-Video discs into account (only 20 titles, and they are mostly documentaries and motocross films.)

This whole DVD/HDDVD/Blue Ray thing sure seems rather interesting to watch tho, kinda' like VHS versus Beta in the 80s. (And you know, when VHS-C came of age Sony ended up having the last laugh anyways when they introduced Video-8, which is basically Beta in a way smaller form factor! ;o)

Just my ¢1 worth......

As Andrew said sometime ago, the best and most convenient way to back up a hard drive, bar none, is to get an external USB hard drive. There is no swapping of discs or wasting non-reusable media. Just set it to copy overnight the first time, and subsequent back-ups can be done in a much shorter time because the system then only updates the previous back-up for files that are new, modified, or deleted from the internal HD.. A drive larger than your internal drive can be had for under $100. However, issues may arise in using a drive larger than 137 GB with an older operating system. XP will supposedly work with service pack updates, but older OSs can potentially lose data in the area beyond 137 GB.

I followed Andrew's advice and it's the only way to go.

Someday, when Blu-Ray burners are more reasonably priced I'll make permanent backups of some of my photo files.

Best Buy sells a combination HD DVD/Blue Ray player.

Maybe a combination player will be the standard.

Not at it's current $1000 price tag.

Not at it's current $1000 price tag.

I was just at a Best Buy a coupla weekends ago--

I saw what I thought was one of those same machines!

Turns out it was merely a mock-up of it, i.e. an empty chassis with no electronics inside, so you can at least see what it looks like on the outside. (A neighbour of ours a *very* long time ago used to work as a "sales manager" at a Silo store, when they still did that with some of their smaller products, i.e. cameras and portable tape players. Whenever a product would be discontinued or updated, he sometimes used to bring the old mock-ups home for the kids to play with!!)

But at $1500 I wouldn't buy one especially considering how little I even use regular DVD-video as it is...............

Hopefully tho, combination players will be the standard. Makes sense, especially if someone this early in the systems' developments decides to be an adopter of one of the technologies. That way if/when one format goes bust and the other continues to boom, the user won't be stuck with a single-format machine that is obsolete.

'Course, one would need to have a pretty good disposable income for it to be financially practical!

But I am sincerely hoping the prices will go down eventually. I remember a time when a CD recorder drive for the computer cost upwards of $800 (and was the size of a stereo system!) and the blank CDs sometimes $20 or more (each.) CD recorder now, not DVD recorder. Now it seems a decent-quality combo CDR/RW DVD+R/RW recorder drive can be had for sometimes well under $50!! (And the blanks--if you buy them in a big cyllindre--for literally pennies each, unit price.)

Here's hoping whichever high-density DVD format wins out, that it does the same!!

VHS and Betamax cassettes both have a different design and shape. A VHS cassette couldn't fit in a Betamax player and vice versa. But a Blue Ray and a HD DVD disc both can fit in either player.

The question is: can a combination player, in the near future, be sold at a reasonable price? Also, how much more electronic components are there in a combination player?

The discs are the same size physically.

They would have different codecs and the laser would focus differently.

There is a new combo coming out next month at $999 MSRP.

I should think it will have to come down to about $499 to become attractive.

I won't buy one until they are down to about $350. I remember buying a Toshiba progressive scan DVD player a few years back for close to $600. I saw one the other day in the grocery store for $39.95.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Never heard of Blu Ray. Then again I haven't jumped into the HD world at all. Not sure I'm missing out on anything. Our 13 inch color UHF TV with ears seems to be okay. (it's only 12 years old) But it's rarely on so no need for the new stuff.

But it's interesting to see what people are willing to spend for entertainment.

On February 2009, your TV won't work.

Yippie!!!

careful once you get hooked on HBOs Deadwood you may never watch any other show. acting ,writing all way over anything else you can watch on the tube

HD will change your life.

Thedude we don't have cable TV either. Yippie!!

I get a little taste of HD while working out at the gym. I'm just not drawn to watching TV at all. It's a lifestyle choice.

I'd rather spend money on my own studio or musical instruments for myself or the kids. I just don't have the stamina anymore to watch TV past 10 minutes.

NTSC forever man.

Just not feeling the HD joy...

"HD will change your life."

I saw. I'm not impressed. Humans are vertical in form. HD is a horizional creature. Makes it a bit more difficult to creat compelling content.

No school like the old school.

I'm LOVING our Playstation 3 with Blue-Ray. And it's hooked up in the playroom on a 50' Sony HDTV with a Onkyo surround sound system 5.1. LOVE playing MLB 07' "The Show". And watching movies..... OMG! Crisp and clean.... Best picture I've ever seen in 38 years hands down.
Never seen HD DVD but I'm NOT going to plunk down one dime for a player until the war is over. I have the Blue Ray DVD player in the Playstation and it works for me......

@chris You know it!

Actually folks, your regular NTSC set *will* still work post 2-17-2009, but you will need a convertor box of some sort, like the tuner built in to my Panasonic DMR-EZ27.

#EDIT: length.

Missing mentioned something along the lines of "NTSC forever, man." Dude, you know it!! I even have my VCR connected to one of the outputs on the Panasonic, so I can tape off the digital channels that are available OTA here.

Just FYI, for receiving digital TV signals over the air, forget about using regular indoor rabbit-ear antennae. An anplified antenna is a bit of an improvement over a regular one, but in the long run an outside aerial is an absolute must-have, I think.

Even if you live in a condo or an apartment like I do, you shouldn't have too much trouble.......I live on the third floor of an apartment complex in Vancouver and have a south-facing balcony outside. I am currently using a 20-element UHF yagi [looks kind of like an arrow] mounted on 3 feet of fencepost set in a bucket of concrete and I have yet to hear the manager complaining about it. Kinda improv'd, yes, but is a HUGE improvement over the amplified rabbit ears I was using before!

At FMeyer last week, I overheard 2 employees discussing the fact that one of the major studios (Universal?) had just decided to cease support for BluRay.

#EDIT: changing content.

And as if Blue Ray OR HDDVD weren't enough by themselves--let's combine the two together!~

"Hybrid discs

"On the media disc side, Warner Bros. officially announced Total Hi Def (THD) at CES 2007. Total Hi Def (Total HD) hybrid discs supports both HD DVD and Blu-ray, HD DVD on one side (up to two layers) and Blu-ray on the other side (up to two layers). Despite initially announcing that Total HD would be ready by the second half of 2007, on June 27, Warner Bros. issued a press release stating that they would be delaying the launch of Total HD discs until early 2008. As of now, no specific titles have yet been announced."

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDDVD (about half-way down the bage)

Kinda' looks to me like Toshiba is trying to throw gas on the fire!!

So, tech questions: If this hybrid disc is produced, will it be like two standard-thickness discs sandwiched on top of each other (like the construction of a Laserdisc compared to a music CD) or will it be two half-thickness discs sandwiched (like the two layers of a DVD, or a Dual Disc)?

And if they are half-thickness, wouldn't they cause problems with some machines like the audio side of a Dual Disc does to some older CD players?

The employees were confused, as is often the case.

Universal has never supported Blu-ray, but is suspected of doing so in the not terribly distant future, perhaps next year.

Paramount supported both Blu-ray and HD-DVD, but was recently bribed by Toshiba to drop Blu-ray, presumedly for 18 months. Reports are that it was a $1.5 million bribe. Toshiba says it wasn't that much. The bribe included their distribution of Dreamworks titles, but Steven Speilberg insisted his titles be kept out of the deal. He wants them on both, or at least Blu-ray.

Looks like Deane responded to my old post before I posted my edit, above.

My original post is as follows:
-----------------------------------------------

Huh?!?!?

I thought U-Nye-Vursal only supported HDDVD, deprecating Blue Ray.....

Maybe I am mistaken..................

I don't know anything about the hybrid disc except it is a Warner Bros. development and IMO, will be a bomb. Why $5 extra for the additional format? Why not just buy the format you have in the first place?

"Why $5 extra for the additional format? Why not just buy the format you have in the first place?"

Indeed. I could probably see a couple of titles being released, then promptly moved to the "2 for $10" bin a couple months later because nobody's buying them.

This is a little off-topic but (I think) is worthy of mention here~

That's even the stance I usually take when I am standing in the CD area of Border's Books being confronted with the question of whether to buy this certain CD title in standard Redbook or Dualdisc format. Why do I want to pay $7 more for a disc that likely won't play correctly on half of my machines, for a noncompliant CD with a DVD side full of meaningless content I will likely never use to begin with?

The record labels look at it as some huge "value add" of sorts but as far as I am concerned, it is a technical flop!!

See, if really want a DVD of additional content (God forbid) I will just buy it as a seperate DVD disc packed in with the regular CD and spare myself the technical frustration.