I hope that both formats survive, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray DVD, it will give us a choice. I think at this point most people are playing the " wait and see" game. I love the HD-DVD but I have not tried the Blu-Ray as of yet, so its hard to make a comparison without spending a fortune.

As long as you're giving opinions on format survival, Alan, I'll chime in and say that I hope BluRay dies a HORRIFYING death. Sony should not be rewarded for their practices by having control over the next gen format in ANY way. I'd rather see HD-DVD survive by itself than see BluRay have any success in the market place.

HD-DVD is better for movies and Blu-Ray is better for storing data.

I won't argue that. I know BluRay has many technical merits. That doesn't change my position on it. I hope it dies a horrible death. Sony has become FAR too arrogant lately and needs to take it on the chin a few times to come back to reality.

I am sure many will agree with your accessment SamuriHL, but until I have a chance to experience the format I cannot give an opinion. Sony has lost many of these battles in the past and the death of Blu-Ray while very premature at this state would not surprise me at all.

What worries me is the statistics I've read in the last few weeks about BluRay outselling HD-DVD's by 2:1. If that's true, BluRay will not only catch up to HD-DVD soon but will surpass it. If that happens, you can expect to see studios that are HD-DVD only either switch entirely or release on both formats. That will only serve to strengthen BluRay in the market and increase Sony's profits. And if the other rumors are even partially true and Sony does indeed drop the price of the PS3, then more consumers might end up with BluRay players and end up buying more movies on BluRay. As I said on the Slysoft forum, what *I'D* like to see is AnyDVD HD come out to support both HD-DVD and BluRay and a CloneDVD HD type program allow us to burn BluRay ripped movies onto HD-DVD's. Imagine having the functionality that we currently have in CloneDVD on HD formats where you can eliminate trailers, extras, etc and then burn it on the format of your choice. That puts the power back into the consumer's hands rather than Sony and/or the studios. Hey, a guy can dream can't he?

I totally agree with you but those staticics you quoted could have come from any source, if someone prints it it does not necessarily mean its true. I am not doubting that you have read this but I have read many things that contradict the reality. Sony could be behind those statistics and we would never know, and at this point I don't see a price drop for the PS3 console in the near future, they cannot even produce enough to sell at the retail price yet. LOL.

I would not be surprised if Sony and/or Sony friendly sources were behind the reports, but, I also tend to believe they could be true because of the amount of PS3's being sold around the world. In my neck of the woods if I wanted a PS3 I'd only have to look for maybe an hour or two to find one. People I know have been looking for the Wii for months and haven't been able to get one. (Preordering rules! ) As for the PS3 price cut, you may want to check this out:

Uh oh

Last time I went to Meijer, I saw 4 PS3s. People want the Wii over the PS3 because of price. I am a proud Wii owner myself.

Great article SamuriHL, thanks, I always like to stay on top of these things, my son is dying for a PS3 but where I live you can't find any for sale at Retail prices, they are all on Ebay selling at above retail.

That's pretty whacked. We can find them in my area with no problem. It was great just before and after Xmas because people that were trying to sell them on eBay ended up pulling them and returning them to the stores cause they couldn't make a profit on them. The stores freaked out cause they didn't want all that inventory(they still had ps3's sitting around unsold!!). It's pretty sad that we have a situation where if you want a PS3 you just have to look and can find one but if you want a Wii, um, good luck with that. I love the Wii, personally, and have absolutely no interest in the PS3 other than for the Tekken series of games...and I'm not spending 500-600 bucks on a game machine just for one game. Sony's biggest mistake was not making BluRay optional as MS did with HD-DVD. An add-on drive would have done wonders for keeping the price down and allowing them to compete head to head with MS. But their arrogance and stubbornness has put them in the position they're in now. They don't have a lot of good games out, they're losing exclusives, people aren't overly interested in BluRay on a game machine, and they're losing money by not selling all their inventory and because the machine costs so much to mfg in the first place. The risks that Sony took could have been mitigated by logical strategies, but, instead they botched the entire console release and tied their corporate success to a flawed strategy. Now they have to consider the possibility of reducing the price and widening the loss on each console sold just to get any kind of market share going. This is not a position I'd want my company to be in. As for BluRay movie success, it completely depends on whether they can get players out there(other than the PS3) for a decent price and keep studios tied to BluRay long enough to kill off HD-DVD. That's also a difficult position to be in. I don't think the majority of consumers are ready for either technology just yet. A lot of people don't have HDTV's currently and until they do there's no benefit to buying HD-DVD or BluRay. Can Sony afford to wait another year for either format to REALLY take off and hit mainstream? That remains to be seen...

Sony isn't the only company behind it, though. I wont disagree that Sony deserves to take a financial pounding for a lot of their recent (and not so recent) actions... personally, I hope the ridiculous PS3 kills off SCE for good.

However, dislike for Sony isn't going to make me ignore the benefits of Blu-Ray. The only advantages HD-DVD really has over Blu-Ray is better user-friendliness as far as home video releases go. However, Blu-Ray could easily widen the range of standards they support and match HD-DVD in this category in a fairly short time.

Personally, I'm not all that interested in who wins out in the HD home video market (at least not until flat-panel HDTVs provide actual good-quality images), but I would prefer Blu-Ray for use on my computer (either that, or a good hybrid HD-DVD/Blu-ray computer burner... although how likely is that in the near future?).

I think they already announced hybrid media and players, not sure about a burner.

You make some valid points. One of the things I like about HD-DVD is the fact that it's cheaper to make the discs than BluRay. This should theoretically be passed on to consumers. (Stop laughing!!!! ) However, from a technical stand point, I do agree that BluRay is superior. And for computer storage, I'd be willing to admit that it's probably the best option. Nonetheless, I don't want to live with another generation of split formats. DVD + vs - was annoying enough. Now we have an even deeper split. Yes, we'll get hybrid stuff eventually, but, it's still a pain for the consumer. And if a format has to die, I'd rather it be BluRay. However, I'll let you keep it for storage. LOL!

I have to agree. Unfortunately Sony is pushing Blu-ray quite strongly with the PS3, so their business model might work out (if they don't run out of money, because they subsidize the PS3).
However, one strong point for movies on HD DVD is - they are region free. For example people in the US can soon buy Terminator 2 on HD DVD in Europe (it is a Blu-Ray exclusive in the US). Some great movies like Roman Polanski's "The Pianist" are available in the UK on HD DVD, or "Running Scared" is available on HD DVD in Germany.

AnyHD-DVD wouldn't be far off from working on Blu-Ray since the main difference is BD+. It wouldn't be too hard to then make a program for Blu-Ray if needed.

Yeah, HD-DVD does have this benefit... but I'd imagine that even this early in the game that advantage is already mostly used up. The "decreased cost" of HD-DVD was always little more than a short-term benefit that only applied to initial plant-conversion and early production runs of the first titles released. At this point, considering "The Digital Bits" recently reported that Blu-Ray has been outselling HD-DVD by 2:1, I'd bet that most of the higher initial conversion costs have been covered. There doesn't seem to be any price difference at all between HD-DVD and Blu-ray movies; and there's certainly no price in the rental fee at the various places around me that rent them out.

True, though name of Slysoft's new product seems to be "AnyDVD HD", not "AnyHD-DVD". That would imply they're covering their bases in the future if it becomes necessary to add BD+ functionality... the latter implies it only works with HD-DVD while the former can mean it works with any type of HD format.

Yeah, although Blu-Ray does improve upon DVD's region coding. The only thing I never really liked about the coding of DVDs was that Japan wasn't in North America's region... we should really keep all the NTSC users together... not to mention that makes it so much easier to import anime, lol.

I suppose there are a few titles that may only come out in Europe, but I tend to stay away from PAL transfers, personally... the speedup annoys me, and too few transfers use 2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:3 pulldown. And it's even worse when the transfer is a NTSC -> PAL conversion as opposed to Film -> PAL.

At first they called it AnyHD-DVD, now it's being called AnyDVD-HD. AnyHD-DVD makes WAY more sense. What is a DVD-HD?

There doesn't seem to be a dash between AnyDVD and HD. The name "AnyDVD HD" simply implies it's an HD version of AnyDVD... the name "AnyHD-DVD" wouldn't make much sense if, in the future, Slysoft had to add Blu-Ray functionality to it as well.

The marketing folks (Tom) decided this. Just think of AnyDVD "High Definition". I have to agree, because the functionality AnyDVD "classic" is included, the name AnyHD-DVD would be misleading. And the name AnyDVD HD leaves a backdoor to add Blu-ray support at a later time, if desired.

Slysoft might make a new program or could then rename it.

No, because HD-DVD includes DVD, so it would still make sense for HD-DVD and normal DVDs.

Here are the good news: All european HD DVD transfers I have seen are encoded 23.97 fps progressive 1980x1080. So there won't be any "PAL Speedup" (unless there is a mastering error as on some Studio Canal titles) or other conversion problems, only the usual 3:2 pulldown judder on the 60Hz display all NTSC users are already used to.

We could name it AnyDVD "pro", or "gold" or "überpro" or "platinum"...
I hope you get the point.