At 5 PM tokyo time , Toshiba will announce they will drop HD-DVD all together.

Have fun with your expensive paper weights ;)

*Now that Toshiba is dumping players at $99 to $129, no one else is going to enter the market at a loss so another reason Hd is dead.

Other Bluray manufacturers must be kicking themselves in the butt for supporting that format since majority of the people are buying PS3’s as their Bluray players… way to go Sony–good tact, we all know who’s making the real money here! As Bluray players are lowering in price, PS3’s are as well…

Anyway, don’t be to caught up w/ the cost of the players and whether or not they are being sold bellow cost. Trust me, it’s all accounted for and they’re not going to go out of business. We (the consumers) should care about purchasing it the cheapest. Also, who cares if the HD or BD group paid off some studios for alliance, it’s part of the game.

And HD quality from downloading? Sure, fanboys will care, will the average person? No, until very recently 50% of people who bought HD bought ZERO HD programming … they jsut assumed that if it said HD in the corner of their show, they were good. Or that people watch DVD’s in their car – it’s not about quality for the average person, it’s convenience at the right price …

So, HD is dead as a retail movie format – it doesn’t help the only company supporting Toshiba* is MS and linked to the red button of death gaming console. Can HD hang around as a backup format – sure but beyond that? No. It’s like tape drives. It’s a choice that is still being sold but the averge person could care less.

*Now that Toshiba is dumping players at $99 to $129, no one lse is going to enter the market at a loss so another reason Hd is dead.

I really did love this format, it’s just a shame that quality alone wasn’t enough to win this war. But who knows, maybe Toshiba will pull a win out of nowhere? (Not likely)

For now, at least HD-DVD will remain a cheap and convenient gateway into HD for some time:
http://www.devindra.org/tech/2008/02/02/hd-dvd-may-be-dead-but-its-still-a-good-deal/

What the hell are you talking about? They both use the same compression codecs, and Blu-ray has the higher bitrate (40 versus 29 Mbit/s for video). There’s no way HD could have a better picture with its lower bitrate.

I happened to own one of those $99-firesale@Walmart Toshiba player. Even though its 1080i … it looks incredible via my 1080p projector. It has worked flawlessly since day 1 (perhaps the prompt firmware update had something to do with it).

Last week, I walked into Costco and noticed a blu-ray player that was playing a movie. I had one of the younger employees put another blu-ray disc. The thing just hung up for a long time after he inserted the disk … making the guy turn around and announce that the disk was defective. But it was just the slow loading time of the $400 machine. Shocking. I would be very upset with the sluggish performance if I plunked that kind of money.

Like I said, I don’t care which side wins … but if Sony wants to deliver a knockout punch … they need to price their players at $99 and offer the same feature set that HD-DVD offers (like TrueHD, ethernet jack, etc.). Heck, I could care less if its 1080i either. I would not shed a tear if HD-DVD losses that battle. What about my movie collection you ask ? I rent.

Blu-ray is selling more movies but is also selling blu-ray disks in the form of PS3 games. When you add in computer recordable disks as well (blu-ray is beating the pants off of HD-DVD in PCs) the results should be interesting.

The Blu-ray firms that back the format made a wise choice. They are posting great sales without relying solely on movies.

My area of expertise is in computing. The reason Blu-ray is winning in this field is very simple – higher capacity, higher read/write speeds, and scratch resistance. Unfortunately, you can only find 1x HD-DVD recorders and disks which is killing the format for PCs (1x or 36 Mbps is over 4 times as slow as a 16x or 176 Mbps DVD player). Meanwhile Blu-ray is selling 4x disks (144 Mbps) and 6x (216 Mbps) recorders already.

Your HD-DVD player is destined to be a doorstop in the coming 12-24 months or less.

ANd as a Dad myself I can tell you am I going to throw away $150 on a player that will never see content released for it by 80% of the movie publishing industry? NOPE… I’ll happily spend the $250 more to get the player that will play the movies I want and my kids want (Disney is BD guys) and get a game system with it. THat’s the same as I’d spend on a Wii and an HD-DVD and I won’t be left with a doorstop HD-DVD player.

Warner decided to go Blu back in September. They informed the HD DVD camp about this some time between late October and mid November. This resulted in a flurry of activity from Toshiba and Microsoft, offering Warner VERY large incentives to stay neutral. The latest offer I know about for sure was $300M offered to Warner in December. This was rejected by Warner. I am not sure where the $500M number comes from, it may be pure fiction, but it seems more probable that it was the price of the incentive package offered to Warner during the last days of negotiation before Warner announced.

The payout to Warner from the Blu-Ray is pure fantasy. Warner made the only reasonable business decision they could make. They needed to end the war, and the only way they could do that was to go Blu. If they had stayed neutral or gone HD DVD, the war would have gone on for another 3 years at least. Now the war is over.

On the other hand, since Blu-Ray has significantly more storage space and a 33% higher bandwidth, it is possible to get the same result using MPEG-2 on Blu-Ray that you can get on HD DVD using H.264 or VC-1. That is not to say that Blu-Ray disks are primarily MPEG-2, they are primarily VC-1 and H.264.

HD is about quality not about cost.

bluray is higher quality least from my view and side by side comparisons.

hd-dvd is cheaper but theres a reason that it is so.