Toshiba has “called it quits” and Sony’s Blu-ray format has become the undisputed “winner” of the high definition wars. Quite frankly, I’m glad the war has ended.
I decided that I was going to wait until Christmas season this year to decide on which format that I wanted to support/own and now I don’t have to make that decision. As an owner of an XBOX 360, the temptation was there to buy the HD-DVD player but, looking through my “future goggles”, I thought that the format might have a problem “catching on” with the public for various reasons.
The one sticking point that I always came back to with regard to the specificities of the formats was that Blu-ray, from the outset, could hold 20GB of more data that the HD-DVD for its dual layer type media and the theoretical limit for Blu-Ray is 200GB and HD-DVD is only 60GB. This is a major consideration when you consider how fast we are “chewing up” data allocations with our media storage needs. Although, I’ve never worked with authoring a Blu-Ray menu system, my understanding is that the process is/was much harder than the HD-DVD format. I hope that this gets easier now that all efforts can be concentrated on one format. Especially, because it will not be long before we start to attempt to edit our own HD videos and store them on Blu-ray discs in the near future.
Another big move for the Blu-Ray machine was Sony’s decision to include it with the PS3 (Albeit at the $300 price tag for inclusion). This coupled with Blu-Ray’s major Movie studio support of 20th Century Fox, Buena Vista, Hollywood Pictures, Lions Gate, Miramax, MGM, New Line Cinema, Sony, TouchStone, Walt Disney, and Warner Brothers vs. HD DVD movie studio support of only Dreamworks, Paramount, and Universal gave Blu-ray the edge to it needed to best HD-DVD
In the end this victory for Blu-ray makes the shopping decision totally painless for the average user now: Go forth and buy Blu-ray -it’s now the only HD Media disc format in town.
If you are one of those that bought a HD-DVD player the good news is that you will be able to get any HD-DVD title that was created dirt-cheap in the coming weeks and months (until they’re all gone!).
More about the Blu-ray format from Wikipedia -Click it!
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About 2 months ago I almost made the mistake of purchasing an HD-DVD player for the 360 however I changed my mind at the last minute because I found a cheap 60 GB PS3. I got very lucky.