here we go again

Well, with major hollywood studios lining up behind both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray it looks like we´ll have another betamax vs. VHS battle in the near future. Or how about minidisc vs. DCC, anyone even remember DCC?(or betmax for that matter)...

And now we´ll be getting next-gen. dvds, with so different licensing and technologies that we can´t expect players that will support both formats in quite a while, or even ever.

So what´s the story?

Well, there really isn´t one. The quality of sound and video coming off the disc is bound to be... identical. Most likely they will use the exact same encoders and decoders, some version of H.264 me hopes. And lets send mpeg2 to the historic garbagebin it belongs in. Only the actual hardware will be different, meaning early adopters and pòssibly everyone will be forced to have two different players. A boon for the hardware industry ofcourse, maybe this is the plan... but lets not get into conspiracies.

The PS3 will be blu-ray, and I suppose there´ll be healthy market for selling blu-ray burners for the pc and HD video recorders for TV. The blu-ray is also a fact of life already, as it has been on sale in japan for awhile. So it won´t go away as easily as betamax and it won´t become such a niche as minidisc, it will be in the center of hardware events for quite some time.

HD-DVD on the other hand is supported by... hollywood alone, and is not yet on the market. Initially, it will cheaper to produce HD-DVD discs because the actual factories will need to upgrade their assembly-lines to produce blu-ray discs, this is however, a one-time expense and will have no significant impact in the longer run. Beccause of ps3 there will be demand for blu-ray discs and the factories will surely upgrade to make them.

Question is -will the savings involved in making hd-dvds be passed on to the consumers, and will this convince the consumer to buy hd-dvd instead of blu-ray?

Also, blu-ray is more suited to computer back-up applications than hd-dvd, and will be popular with people who large data-sets(like me).



So I guess, I like blu-ray better but will have to bite the bullet and buy both systems anyway, fortunately, dvd-players now cost $30 and I don´t expect neither blu-ray nor hd-dvd to cost more once the dust has settled(there is no technological reason for this once the taiwanese assembly starts going full-throttle).
The only possible stumbling block is a socio-economic one called licensing, both of the formats themselves and the decoding chip, for not to mention the fact hollywood will want to charge more for the "premium" content, all that aside -I´m hoping to have a player at least by next xmas, maybe sooner...

b