The general consensus when it comes to the whole HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray debate is that one will inevitably conquer the other after a long, drawn-out and expensive battle fought out everywhere from your local Future Shop all the way to whatever they call Future Shop in Sweden.

My take on the whole debate? I don’t think 95 per cent of the population cares, and the mainstream media is starting to notice this.

Two’s a crowd—simple and plain. If you’re going to figure out a new way to package media for the masses, you had better have one standard format and make it cheap and easy for the consumer to use it. It helps considerably when you can just drive off to your local discount retailer, bring one of those puppies home, plug it in and be watching the Wrath of Khan five minutes later.

The upgrade from VHS to DVD took a little longer than expected, but was a relatively smooth transition. It ultimately worked because DVD was a significant upgrade over tapes, based on features alone. Consumers bought DVD players (and thus DVDs) because it made it easier to watch a movie, looked and sounded better, and you could plug it into your existing TV. The companies liked them because it was cheaper and easier to produce a DVD than a VHS. They were smaller and lighter, saving big dollars on shipping and freight costs.

So what do we get with next-generation DVDs? We get…well…pretty much what we’ve got now, except clearer resolution and an excuse to buy a new TV. It just doesn’t seem to be the giant leap that DVDs were, and you can probably bet the farm that Joe and Jane Average have better things to spend a few thousand dollars on than an HD-DVD player and another giant television to go with the one that they bought two years ago. If you're a numbers-type and you enjoy talking about resolutions and display settings, you can get the low-down on the different formats in this article from PC Magazine.

And on top of all this we have two competing formats. This will only confuse and infuriate people when they realize the HD-DVD they just bought isn’t going to work because they have the player that works with the other type. Some tech-industry observers have already written off the whole format as a giant, expensive mistake. Have a gander at this great article from Audioholics for more details on that.

It’s probably safe to say Sony has a leg-up on the situation with their PS3 (which features a built in Blu-Ray drive) and this is why I think that, for the next few years, high-definition DVD will be popular only with gamers, as the massive amounts of storage space available on high-def DVDs means that video games can be deeper, richer and more playable. What else can we possibly include on a DVD movie that we haven’t already thought of, aside from a commentary track by the guy who catered the movie?

None of this seems to concern the companies behind HD-DVD and Blu-Ray.  

Andrew Rideout

Stay Tuned! Part 2 of this blog post will be made available tomorrow.