News Hardware News HD DVD vs Blu-ray: The End Of The War?
| HD DVD vs Blu-ray: The End Of The War? |
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| Written by Starfox | ||
| Monday, 18 February 2008 16:05 | ||
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It has been the big ongoing commercial event for at least a year, the war raging between the HD-DVD format promoted by Toshiba and the Blu-ray one touted by Sony -- both formats pretending to be the successor of the DVD -- and although this war was mainly led on the Hollywood studios front line, it will also decide what will be our next computer equipment when it comes to drives and backup or games medium.
Well, it was kind of expected after the announcement early January 2008 by one of the biggest Hollywood studios -- Warner -- that they would side with Blu-ray only (until then they released their HD movies on both formats). Warner was then followed by other smaller companies that made similar announcements. The overwhelming Warner catalog combined with the overwhelming Metro Goldwyn Meyer catalog (this last one being by the way owned by Sony -- having already a big foot in the movie industry helps a lot) was more than enough to make the balance shift to the Blu-ray side. During the past few days, several rumors emerged about Toshiba simply throwing the towel and declaring the HD DVD officially dead (at least for the movies). Although the rumors weren't confirmed by Toshiba officials, these last ones weren't reassuring for HD DVD supporters either simply stating: "We're reviewing our options". A lot of consumers have been waiting for the end of this war to make a choice for their future movies support. But will they have the best technology available? This last point is not all that clear. For the movie studios, the Blu-ray always presented one clear advantage over the HD DVD. Not the number of GB you can put on it -- even with HD movies in H.264 there's no way to take up to 50 GB of space (unless you want to put the movie + endless hours worth of crappy bonuses that most people don't even watch on one disc) -- not even the quality of the rendering of the movies but the Blu-ray comes packed with anti-piracy features while the HD DVD just features the basic encryption already present on DVD. Of course, this is a moot point since no anti-piracy feature can be 100% safe in the long run but it was still a point for the movie industry. The size of the disc? Well it's just a bonus so they can release a full season of a TV show on one disc. Some are arguing however that the HD DVD is more mature technically and that the method used to render a movie is improved compared to the Blu-ray giving finally a better picture quality. But hey, who needs that? Certainly not the movie stars who are perfectly happy with technologies that do not render every small imperfection of their skin on a TV screen (it's enough for them to see that in theaters). Plus you need a HDTV to watch movies in real HD whatever the support is and before everyone is able to afford those we'll be probably ready to switch to the next gen of movie medium. Regarding computers however, it is clear that the Blu-ray has the advantage considering the capacity. It's a known fact that we computer enthusiasts always hunger for more GBs to put our stuff on (you know all the crap one can download from the web these days). So I guess that we'll be perfectly happy with the choice although that might mean more and more copy protection related bugs and issues in the future for the games that will be released on Blu-ray. In the gaming department, one question remains for consoles... What will be the next move for Microsoft? The Redmond based company has always been a supporter of the HD DVD since the early days (and maybe the HD DVD would have done better without that support) up to the point that they included a HD DVD drive in the Xbox 360. So what of this console if Toshiba decides to stop everything? Well the Xbox HD DVD games will probably still be supported at least for a time, but at one point the necessity to switch to Blu-ray will appear. Maybe with next console gen? Well Sony doesn't have this problem since the PS3 is (fairly enough) already equipped with a Blu-ray drive. Of course Toshiba could consider to continue the HD DVD for consoles and computers only even if the war is lost with the movie studios but what exactly would be the point? The big drawback regarding HD DVD vs Blu-ray in the computer area is a capacity almost cut in half and the claimed good point (picture quality) would be only interesting for the movie industry. This war was fun nevertheless with some pretty amusing moments like Sony almost begging porn movie producers to come to their format after having initially vigorously stated that porn movies were too devious for their pretty Blu-ray and that they would not allow them to be published on their medium (but of course that was before realizing that HD DVD would benefit from this announcement). But well now that the war is almost over, here's my advice to Sony: Cut off the commercial crap and start working on the real stuff like dropping the price of Blu-ray burners... News Updates: |
