Ew ... I hate bluray.

Oh well, its not like I had any interest in HDDVD or Bluray.

My DvDs suit me just fine and by the time they don't make them anymore I'll be buying my movies on the internet.

As for storage, who the hell wants to mess with optical media when solid state is 10 times easier, faster, and more reliable.

Who do I send my BetaMax to? :)

Actually, PIP and ≥ 256mb local storage are mandatory in profile 1.1, which has been out for a couple months. 2.0 has internet connectivity and ≥ 1gig local.

So. buy a PS3.

I liked HD-DVD better but whatever. I didn't buy a player yet. I will get a BluRay 2.0 player when they are released though. Glad I waited.

This is just a minor setback. HD-DVD will rise from the dead and take down Blu-Ray!

Damn, I spent a little over a 100 on a player and got Heroes season 1 for free. Its the only HD DVD I own and probably won't buy anymore unless I find them on clearance or something.

I'm gonna go on the record as saying standard DVD is perfectly good enough and I have no intention of switching.
[I sound like an old, old man.]

I'm so far out of the loop on this that I never even had a chance to pick a side. I haven't had much time for movies lately.

I sure am glad I told my parents to invest in the Betamax of DVD players. They were cheaper at the time. And really, when was the last time Sony won a format war?

@B: I guess they were due.

Who needs a dvd player anyways? Isn't everyone just downloading movies anyways?

@humphrmi:
I think Sony should accept your Betamax in exchange for a Blu-ray player. Would make for a good promotion, you think?

@BayStateDarren:
Your not an old man, I still watch VHS tapes, they are cheap and can be found at yard sales for 25 cents or 50 cents! I only have a handful of DVD's but a load of VHS.

@SaraAB87: Thanks for the reassurance. I swear I'm not laughing at you at all right now! [covers mouth, tries to hold back]

Gah, this story is so annoying.
Who gives a crap what a "Toshiba insider" claims?

Wasn't it not too long ago that a "Warner insider" claimed they were going HD DVD exclusive?
We all see how that one turned out.

Even if this is true then it just means cheap HD DVDs and players for me.
Oh and good job consumers, you just let Sony, a company known for its anti-consumer policies, win a format war.
You might as well bend over now and accept your fate for the next few years. At least I'll be happy with cheap HD DVD player that's upconverting my standard DVDs.

    I'm right with all of you old folk! I've still got the old 13-inch, black and white G.E. television I was given for Christmas back in 1970. Father time couldn't kill it, but now the damned government is trying to make it stop working next year!

    DVDs are as fragile as all get-out. I'd expect a Sony product to be even worse. Any movies you expect to keep forever need to be ripped and backed up on the family server, on at least RAID-5!

thats what a multi-terabyte media server is for....i can rip dvds/blueray/and hd-dvd and stream them via gigabit ether net to my htpc, and then to my tv. not waisting money on any unneeded hardware....

however sony finally got something right how many failed propriatary formats have they had, betamax, umd....

@AcidReign: 13-inch, black and white television from 1970 but you have a RAID-5? ;)

Despite preferring the HDDVD format verus BluRay, I'm glad I never bought one.

My laserdisc player that's shoved away in the basement is going to have to sit all by itself for a few more years until I (assuredly) get stung on something else that quickly goes obsolete.

@vr4z06gt: There's a reason they failed. They were anti-consumer.

Woot, cheap HD-DVDs! Now to buy more!

@penarestel: the ideas were nice, execution poor...

What're you all using to rip your DVDs to your media servers? I'd like to watch mine in Quicktime, but for some reason I can't find a program that'll spit out the movies in a reasonable quality compared to the original DVD! Any help would be appreciated :)

People are posting about movie downloads because that's what the press want them to say.

@Aeroracere: for dvds rip the vobs and ifo files, most reasonable players will play them back as if they were a dvd, by simply selecting the ifo files, full menus, extras, and if you want other languages....

@BayStateDarren: Ditto. Who cares?

@penarestel:

That statement is laughable at best considering regardless of what HD-DVDs infractions were, Sony is the king with a long history of being anti-consumer.

@Aeroracere: Handbrake

@penarestel: WB never, ever tended toward HD-DVD. The studio was always format neutral. Regardless of the long-standing and substantial financial interest in HD-DVD arising from days when WB was instrumental in the development of SD-DVD, there was always a perception that BD would win.

@BayStateDarren: Yes. You are an old man.... LOL

I still think the name "Blu-ray" is too hokey, with its lack of proper vowels and all, and deserves defeat for that reason alone.

@brent_w: I sure hope downloads don't become a reality - unless a way is found to add subtitles for the hearing impaired/deaf to all movies. VHS and DVD had closed captions. DVD and HD/BluRay have subtitles. Downloadable has ... nothing. itunes' "closed captions" feature does nothing except for a list smaller than three dozen movies.

And what happens when your hard drive dies? I'd rather stick to optical media. If my PS3 dies I can get it fixed or buy a new one. If one individual disk won't play I can get another. And I can go to the store and back in a few minutes or get a mail order in a few days. 50 gigs would take forever to download.

Downloads? Take forever, missing a vital feature, and too vulnerable to a single point of failure. No thanks.

@Hawk07: Microsoft, king of being customer-friendly? HA. If you expected a customer-friendly company to win this, you were out of luck from the start.

@BayStateDarren: On smaller/CRT sets, yes. On larger sets that can actually show the difference, it's night and day.

    @capstinence: Why, yes! I turned the remnants of an old Zeos 486, early 90s era PC into a FreeNAS machine with a RAID-5 card and a pair of 500 gig Seagate Barracudas. It's got an AMD K-6 300 mhz processor and budget PII motherboard. Recycle, and re-use.

    DVD Shrink works OK, for ripping. You'll notice a little quality loss, but it's nothing compared to aged VHS tapes.

@cashmerewhore: Yeah, that's the good side to it. Now I can get some of the movies I already have on DVD on HD DVD cheap. It stings less that way.

As for Blu Ray, well, I'll wait to see if MS releases an add-on for the 360. That way I can share it between PC and 360...

@PeteyNice: I, for one, welcome our undead HD-DVD overlords...

Whoever was asking about DVD ripping, I highly recomend a program named HandBrake [sorry, no link here.]

@Buran: So if I spend $3,000 for a big TV, which takes up as much of my field of vision as other screens, then the need for spending $400 or whatever a bluray player costs would be justified? Not to mention buying all the titles in the new format?

Huge HD-DVD sale at Amazon!!

Hmmm... 33-1/3 rpm LPs, reel-to-reel tape, 8-track tape, cassette tape, CDs, BetaMax, VHS, DVDs, HD-DVDs, Blu-Ray 1.0 DVDs, Blu-Ray 2.0 DVDs... howcome I need to keep upgrading my audio and video hardware when my eyes and ears can only be degrading over time?

(I remember when I was the only one I knew who owned a McIntosh, and it was a stereo amplifier!)

@BayStateDarren: I'm saying that it's not true, under many cases, that standard DVD is just as good picturewise as hi-def. My HDTV is only 32", not that big as HDTVs go, and I can definitely tell the difference between upscaling and real HD. The "there's no difference" thing is a myth.

If it's good enough for you, by all means stick with standard DVD. I did for a long time and am only slowly planning to pick up movies I already have since I'm not sure either if it's worth spending the money to duplicate stuff either. But HD definitely looks better much of the time.

@Buran: Ya I can tell the difference on my 52 inch HDTV as well. DVD's look like crap compared to HDTV, even broadcast HDTV which is a lower bit rate than what you get on Blu-ray or HD-DVD.

@B: Sony won the format war on CDs. I'm not sure who won DVD, but they also kicked the crap out of Nintendo on game format.

I have not bought a next gen DVD player. I will resist purchase until they are down low and I feel the need to own movies rather than rent them. Think on this: How often do you actually go back and look at a movie that you own on DVD (bluray/HDDVD/LaserDisc/whatever)? How often do you actually access the extras beyond deleted scenes. I do this math now. If I can rent it three times for the same cost or less of ownership, then there is no need to own it. There are very few movies that I have seen that I want to see more than thrice. Short list: The good james bond movies, Lawrence of Arabia, Blade Runner, the Fifth Element, Spinal Tap, Tampopo, Brazil, a few other comedies, and that's about it. And I already own most of that.

Ah, but can it play my wax cylinders?

@CharlieSeattle: @Buran: In the early days there were several studies: 42" is the point at which the difference can be seen by most viewers. Anything smaller that 42", 99% could not tell the difference. The larger the screen beyond 42" (i.e., 52", 65", etc.), the more apparent the difference becomes.

That said, the current players have much better up-conversion and I find it difficult to tell the difference between SD and BD on a 46" screen using a PS3 with the latest OS. I am told the PS3 beta OS has even better up-conversion.

Talking pictures are just a fad anyway...

@Carey and everyone else who is interested: There is a consensus that if you must make the jump to BD before BD Live (profile 2.0) is on the market, the PS3 is the best choice because it is upgradeable. It's already networked and the profile 2.0 software upgrade for PS3 is already in development. The PS3 is also a pretty good deal (starting at $375). And, you can play games on it. BTW: The legacy models are backward compatible to PS2 games but the current models coming out right now in Japan are not.

One warning: Some BD mastering software does not produce consumer recordable BD-Rs that play properly on PS3s. But, that is a problem with the mastering software - not the PS3.

You know, with everything going digital and non-physical - from money to music to movies - a 'Fight Club' climax scene would now be pulled off with a massive virus, rather than explosives at the base of all financial buildings. "Re-set the debt record to zero." Ouch. "Your head will collapse if there's nothing in it, and you'll ask yourself, 'Where is my mind?' "

+ Watch video

Congrats to Blu-Ray for winning the format war, but I think I'm going to download my HD movies.

@PotKettleBlack: Interesting that Sony and Phillips together won the format war on CDs (what format war? What was in competition as a new, emerging technology?). Not too long ago, Phillips sued Sony BMI, and other music publishers to remove the Compact Disc logo from their releases, because of embedded DRM...

@cronick: Seems to me like those studies are no longer holding true. I've seen HD/SD on sets other than mine and I don't know what equipment those studies used but perhaps they used 720p sets (ED) or connections other than DVI/HDMI or some otherwise fundamentally-different-from-today equipment.

Plus I forgot to mention that there's no way around the NTSC color gamut being much smaller than that available to ATSC (CSI Miami is a good example of how vibrant and vivid color can look along with the sharpness of 1080 lines of resolution).

@AcidReign:

With a mentality like that I'm surprised you're even "with it" enough to use the computer. >_>;

That being said, I was hoping HD-DVD would win, because I hate Sony. All the same, standard DVDs are fine by me for now, and I expect they will be for a long time. Especially at Blu-Ray's -ridiculous- prices.

@PotKettleBlack:

There might be more PS2 and PS3s out there than N64 (wow, that's going wayyy back) Gamecube and Wii's, but Sony continually loses money in the "console war".

Nintendo has found a niche market (younger kids) and is the format of choice for many parents. That's not even talking about their domination in the hand-held ga