When the 21st century’s Format War started a few years back over who’s bluish laser beam was more awesome, it was a matter of reading the specifications to know who I would be backing.
HD-DVD:
- Based on current DVDs
- Stores 15 GB single layer, or 30 GB dual layer
- Cheaper of the two
Blu-ray:
- From what I could tell, created because Sony et al didn’t want to pay the DVD Forum any licensing fees (laff)
- Stores 25 GB single layer, or 50 GB dual layer
- layer scaling = capability to continuously add layers as technology improves
Obviously, Blu-ray was a no-brainer. I still can’t understand the arguments that HD-DVD backers would throw against me. All they had was the better price, for an inferior technology. Well of course HD-DVD is going to cost less; it’s not as good as Blu-ray, I would scoff. Of course that’s not the real reason (that being the cost of manufacturing is lower), but I enjoyed watching their eyes bulge with rage. But seriously, why on earth would anyone even consider HD-DVD without its lower cost?
Over the past couple days, Reuters has been reporting that Toshiba considering finally gutting the gasping fish that is HD-DVD, in light of Best Buy, Netflix, and Walmart (the big Kahuna) switching to exclusively stock Blu-Ray. Toshiba, who is the primary member of the DVD Alliance/Forum (whatever) that’s backing HD-DVD has been watching their exclusive studio counts dropping as well. I recall that it was big news this summer that “Transformers” was going to be released only on HD-DVD and the HD-DVD folks crowed like they had discovered penicillin. A few months from now, they’ll be lucky to get Paris Hilton’s “The Simple Life” box set released in their format.
However, I think I know what the main reason was that the dominoes started falling against HD-DVD: studios dropping out because of copy protection issues and Blu-ray’s more-secure encryption methods. Now, if you’re the kind of person who takes in interest in illegality, you’d have been backing HD-DVD because it uses the AACS (Content Scramble System) encryption method that DVDs use – which has been completely broken (Dumb idea, but DVD and HD-DVD are made by the same people after all). But Blu-ray, however, uses a new scalable dynamic encryption that will (should? heh) really slow down decryption/pirating of content. Here’s the link to my source, check out pages 2 and 4 under “Security” for what I’ve spoken about. Good for studios, bad for pirates = just one more reason why Blu-ray was the favored child.
So that’s pretty much it. Although Toshiba hasn’t released a formal statement yet, it’s almost assured that they will be soon. Amusingly, Microsoft backed HD-DVD early for some reason, and released a now-useless HD-DVD add-on drive for their Xbox 360 console system. Whoops! Hopefully everyone who bought those can get a refund/exchange when Microsoft quietly releases the Blu-ray drive.
In closing, I leave you with a hilarious video that a friend showed me (It’s from the German film Der Untergang). See? I made it all the way to the end of the article before allowing you to invoke Godwin’s Law.
The video clip alludes to this briefly, but one of the factors certainly tipping the balance towards Blu-ray was Sony’s clever inclusion of that technology in their PS3.
I wrote a really long comment about your smug comments about HD-DVD proponents are really irritating. But it failed to submit.