See, now that's where I think Blu-ray has an issue. You are not alone in buying an HD DVD player and using it for upscaling regular DVDs. So, even if HD DVD dies as a format, you still have a player that can upscale DVD. And when the fire sale begins and the HD DVD players drop even more in price, even more people will be tempted to buy them as upscaling DVD players. So now Blu-ray has to compete with that. They will be compelled to lower prices further, not just on machines, but, on the movies themselves in order to get people off of DVD and onto Blu-ray. This is of course simply my personal opinion and I have absolutely NOTHING to back this up, but, I can see this scenario playing out. So we'll see.

Going by hardware sales means also blu ray. You forget the ps3.
Now some would say not fair to count it. But even the HD-DVD forum counted ps3's a long when it comes to the attach rate and with hardly good games arround at this time and people wanting to use it for something; it ends up as a blu ray player for now.
So when it comes to hardware it's blu ray. When it comes to software it's blu ray.

The only positive spin HD DVD could pull out were the higher attach rate sales for a couple of movies which did show the potential and that there customers were more interested in buying stuff. Which should be interesting for the long run.

About a dual format player prices comming down.
The cheapest PC blu ray burners/rom drives are the LG combo drives who also read HD-DVD. That is if you can get them. They seem to be selling very well. (Less then 270 euro's for the burner shipped home !)
Also the aldi pc's with the LG combo drive sold faster as the average aldi pc.


About blu ray pricing comming down.
There are 2 reasons to drop prices on blu ray players.
1 is DVD like some people allready said

The other is sony's format saviour the ps3. While the PS3 looks to have saved blu ray. It still has a third place in the console war.
The other consoles have a lower price and can lower there prices more easily. Now if sony reacts by lowering there ps3's again. Then pricing on all the other blu ray players looks screwed again.
In other words to sell the other blu ray players they have to be cheaper or much better (which will be hard !) because it will be hard to make them as future proof as the PS3 when it comes to blu ray. So the only real option here is making them cheaper.
While sony might be happy that it looks that they might have won this war with the help of the ps3,but I do wonder what they think of the actuall sales of there other blu ray drives, which simpley do not sell ! Even if stores throw in 16 free blu ray movies !!
Also the PS3 looks to be not making sony's targets when it comes to all the games stuff. Number of sold consoles for this fiscal year, Attach rate of games, numbers of sold games and more. The only thing it did do was help sony's blu ray sales.

Also HD-DVD screwed up europe. Terrible advertising and terrible market placement. You are doing something wrong if quite some stores decide only to stock blu ray because they think your format will fail in the end and by not stocking HD-DVD they are doing customers a favour to make it easier to decide. The same decision warner now made.So why is this decision allways in favour of blu ray ??

Oh, I didn't forget the PS3, believe me. I own one. Bought it for Blu-ray playback back in July when the 60 gig model's price dropped. I'm currently staring at a box to send it back to Sony because it broke. sigh. Nonetheless, I would have thought HD DVD players over the holiday season would have been strong. Perhaps I'm mistaken. If Blu-ray players truly sold more than HD DVD players over the holidays, then that is indeed another reason for the Warner switch.

I've got the new LG read only drive. It's freaking awesome. Now I don't have to rely on my consoles for HD playback anymore. When we say dual format players, however, we're talking about stand alone players. Currently those sit around 700 USD. My theory, until a few days ago, was that when those prices dropped to below 300 USD then the format war would become pointless for consumers as they'd simply buy a combo player and buy whatever discs they wanted. However, with the new Warner decision, it seems the market isn't going to wait for combo player prices to drop. That's fine with me as I just want mainstream to start buying HD so that (hopefully) movie prices will drop a bit.

The PS3 plays games?!?! Holy crap! Ok, I did buy 2 games off the PSN and got a third one for Xmas(the day my PS3 died, mind you), but, this was not for MONTHS after I bought it. They're saying 2008 will be the year of the PS3. We'll see. I agree that prices need to drop a bit more to compete with the 360. MS has a huge lead right now. Anyway, on to Blu-ray player sales. I think you have a valid point. The lower the PS3 gets, the lower the Blu-ray players have to get. However, this is not a bad thing, IMO. Let's say they take a loss on the players and sell them for 200 USD and less. If over the life of Blu-ray the average consumer buys 10 movies or more, then the "loss leader" on the player can be made up. The idea, however, is to get players into the hands of consumers, no matter what the cost. That's because without a player, the consumer is buying 0 discs. No money on either side of the equation then. And with DVD sales dropping rapidly, the studios badly need to get HD discs out there into consumer's hands. So, take a hit on the players to get movie sales. I think it's a fair trade.

HD DVD advertising in the US hasn't been all that great, either. We've had some. Shrek 3 certainly kicked the marketing into gear, but, obviously that was too little too late at this point. Disney is backing Blu-ray, which as I've said before, you really can't discount. They have marketing muscle beyond anything I've seen. They're currently doing a Blu-ray tour touting the abilities of Blu-ray. That's huge. Anyone with kids will tell you that they are NOT supporting the format that doesn't have Disney. HD DVD has Transformers and Shrek. Ok, that's well and good, but, Blu-ray now has 70% of the studios, including Disney. And look at the quality of Disney releases so far. Pirates movies, Cars, Ratatouille. And this year we're going to start getting some of the others with profile 1.1 support. I think most people are sitting there thinking "well, there's a greater likelihood of Transformers and Shrek making it onto Blu-ray than Disney, Fox, MGM, Sony, etc switching sides." And they're not wrong. Especially now. Universal, if I'm right, will switch within 6 months. If that happens, this war comes to a close, HD DVD goes away, and consumers can finally start investing in HD safely.

No arguments there but for those of us who paid between $180 and $200 on our HD Players (more in some cases) then we can't justify taking that kind of a loss on a format that definitely looks like it will probably be dead within the next year. Keep in mind that the Paramount/Dreamworks contract for being HD-DVD exclusive only runs for another year or so and who knows what sort of obligations Universal is under to HD-DVD.

And so much for the Blu-ray camp lowering prices, at least on one item from Marantz (news, front page)--it's going to be ~ $2100. I'm concerned that if Blu-ray has really won that Sony and co. will try to stick it to the consumer in higher prices w/o them having to be concerned about HD-DVD now.

Huh? Definitely probably?

All this BS over Warner sounds like a whining contest at the Chicken Little convention.

Nothing has changed. Insiders have been predicting this move for months. It's not like Warner was stuffing the shelves with HD movies in the first place. The Toshiba A3 players are essentially free with the included movies/rebates, and they are easily one of the best DVD upscalers you can buy. Even without the free movies, they are often cheaper than an Oppo player.

Even if HD-DVD does eventually go away, there's no assurance that BD won't do the same. Assuming continued development of encoding, editing and authoring tools over the next year, the ability to move content from one format to another can only become easier, so it's not like content from one format is lost if the format dies.

Sony sold (sold = sold to end customer !) in the december month more then 1 Million PS3's. That doesn't include the ones given away free with sony TV's. From the HD-DVD group own numbers it is clear that there is no way that Toshiba actually sold 1 million HD-DVD drives. So that makes blu ray the winner when it comes to hardware sales.
That was what I thought but it seems that quite some of the customers have decided to hook there PC up for now and just use it to play both formats on there home tv's.

That's what TOshiba did with those 100 USD players. BUt sony decided to first put there money on there december free PS3 with HD-TV deal, because it scores on both fields.

Transformers can easilly be released on blu ray allready there is one of the smaller distributers that backs up blu ray that has the rights for a release in a country (Korea or was it finland) now all they need is just forget the region encoding for some extra sales.

Ohh that brings me to one thing. Guess who distributes HD-DVD Universal movies in South Korea ??



Marantz has allways been a high end expensive consumer brand.
So your looking at the wrong brand. They even have DVD players costing allmost $2000 see http://shopping.yahoo.com/p:Marantz%...,pdid:59,pos:4
Hmm the blu ray drive suddenly looks cheap compared to that.
Trust me if Marantz would made a HD-DVD player then it wouldn't have been that much cheaper.

Fascinating. I hadn't seen any numbers yet. Just from talking to people I know I thought HD DVD did much better.

Yea, like me. Cause my PS3 died. So, I decided to say screw it and finish building my combo format HTPC. But, I suspect only the real enthusiasts are doing that kind of thing. Average Joe Consumer isn't about to build an HTPC to watch HD movies. However, my thought was that they WOULD buy a combo player if the price was right. At that point it wouldn't matter which format movies came on. They'd just simply buy them. Now, it doesn't seem like it's going to matter. Buy Blu-ray and you're likely good to go.

There is that. That's certainly one way of getting people to "buy" into your format. Although it does make sense. People who buy an HDTV will indeed want HD content to go with it. What better way to indoctrinate new consumers than to give them your player for free.

ANY of the content released on HD DVD could easily be moved to Blu-ray. The codecs are mostly the same (well, on video, audo would have to be reencoded most likely) and the menus would have to be rebuilt. But it'd be less expensive than remastering the whole thing from scratch. That'd certainly be a way to please your customers with some quick releases of HD DVD content on Blu-ray. Matrix Trilogy, Transformers, Shrek 3, Bourne Trilogy...the Blu-ray camp would go nuts for all those.

Very intersting discussions here, expanding the positive and negative of the hardware (players, burners and media) and the software (copy protections).

It's not DRM but AACS. The new copy protection from BD is called BD+ which is still not 100% defeated in the sense that it can be ripped to hard drive and playable with PowerDVD 3119a but burning the BD+ titles on DVD/BD media will make it useless (skipped every few seconds). But time will tell.

zevia, Slysoft says their full BD+ crack is coming. It's just been delayed a bit. No word on a release date but they're working on it. That will be nice.

Nice news SamuriHL.

The thing that's irritating about this is that the morons at Sony will continue to invest millions in developing "hacker-proof" technology that lasts a few weeks, and of course they find lovely ways of passing these costs on to the consumer. One of the big reasons why I was such a huge proponent of the HD-DVD format. I still love what happened to Sony when they released the Arccos "hacker-proof" copy protection on DVDs. They were boasting about it until 3 weeks later a nifty little freeware program known as DVD Decrypter released an update that bypassed it.

Yeah, that's why I'm not to worry about not being able to backup my movie collection. If I can't do it now, I will wait. I like to rip it to my HTPC though for faster viewing to my HDTV. If I can't do it at all (maybe Blu-ray BD+++), well I will pop in the disc into the player.

Even if Slysoft come-up program with overcoming copy protection, still very few people do have the BR recorder to take advantage of the Slysoft function.

Who needs a BR recorder to take advantage of it? zevia wants to reencode his videos(maybe for streaming, zevia? I like the idea, actually...I still need to get back into looking at that. I've been distracted by the PS3 dying). I want to make ISOs out of mine. No need to burn if you have a large hard drive. The nice thing about having it fully cracked, though, is that we can use later versions of PowerDVD without having to worry about it. I hear PowerDVD 8 is coming soon. Maybe, just maybe, they'll finally get it right this time. PowerDVD Ultra has been a royal disaster IMO. It works, yes, but, it's not without issues. Anyway, a full BD+ crack will be welcome by a great many people. Including the Slysoft employees who are now crying because of the HD DVD situation. (I join them in that, actually. Had things gone the way they were supposed to, we'd be looking at Fox and Warner exclusive HD DVD's which would have rattled Disney enough to consider the switch, as well. This could have gone a MUCH different direction. And it would have been better for everyone in the end.)

Then it is AACS and I stand corrected. I know one thing, though: that if Slysoft gurus have trouble with cracking it, that it's very nasty stuff. However, supposing it can be 100% defeated and then also assuming it doesn't end up having much competition, would that not keep the prices inflated, so that not as many people might shy away from it just because of cost? Unless there's a way to completely defeat the protection to make backups as easy as backing up standard DVDs, I don't know how many average people that aren't techies would feel up to taking multiple steps to get around the protection (assuming not a full decryption possible) and also have to end up buying more technology (HTPC) just to be able to store it.

Here is an interesting read on HD-DVD which essentially backs up the points that I made in the other thread:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.htm...144891#thecase

Unfortunately the only way that HD-DVD can win now is if Microsoft uses a few billion of that $12.3 billion floating cash in order to subsidize costs on the A3 and they drop it down to $50-$60 and then start doing the blu-ray thing and flood the market with BOGOs. I don't think that even the most die hard blu-ray fanboy could resist at least going dual format at that point. *NOTE* I don't actually believe that would happen, I was just throwing a crazy scenario out there.

I wonder how many average joe care about Blu-ray/ HD DVD copy protection or making copy/backup?