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Bummer, Blu-Ray wins

Well, the format war between HD DVD and Blu-Ray DVD for HD format dominance was basically over when Warner Brothers announced that they would stop producing HD DVD versions of their movies as of the summer of 2008.  Considering that Warner Brothers makes up a ton of DVD sales this is pretty much the death blow for HD DVD.

Of course the speculation becomes a moot point now that Netflix has announced that it will only carry Blu-Ray discs as their Hi-Def format of choice.  Might as well side with the winner on this one.  Netflix hasn’t gotten where they are by making stupid decisions.

And then the next day, Best Buy announces that its stores will still carry some HD-DVD but they will be focusing on the sales of Blu-Ray equipment and discs from now on.  Their sales staff will be trained to push the Sony format over HD-DVD as the future of Hi-Def.

So what if Paramount and Dreamworks have sided with HD DVD at this point.  Their sales numbers are nothing compared to Warner Brothers and with Netflix’s dominant user base and Best Buy’s saturation of retail stores globally it’s pretty clear that this format war is over.

Which sucks.

I was really hoping for HD DVD to win this war because it’s much better for the consumers.  HD and Blu-Ray picture and audio quality are basically identical so no big deal there.  Blu-Ray has more top-end capactiy per disc so that’s good except movies and all their special features and soundtracks and languages don’t take up all that much space on either format.  So again no real advantage.

However, there are two features that made HD DVD stand out to me.
One was that since HD DVD is more similar to current generation DVD discs, you had many movies coming out with HD versions of the movie on one side of the disc and the standard defintion version on the other side of the same disc.  Why is this important?  Say you have a beautiful Hi-Def home theater in your home to play your HD DVD in.  Then you want to go to the mall in your SUV or Minivan and take the movie with you.  Well you could do that because you just flip the disc over and the conventional DVD player in your vehicle can read it no problem.  Blu-Ray can’t do that.

The other reason is that while Blu-Ray followed the tried and true and much reviled region coding that standard DVDs started so many years ago, HD DVD movies are completely region-free.  This means that if you want to order a movie from the United Kingdom or Japan, you can and you don’t have to worry about your USA HD DVD player not being able to play them.  Perhaps that’s not a big deal to you, but I guarantee its a huge deal to collectors and people living overseas like me.  Or perhaps you live in Europe and Hi-Def moviescost twice as much as they do in the States. They have the option of ordering from the States and shipping back for half the price and not having to worry about being able to watch their new movie.  Blu-Ray was designed to keep this from happening and I think that is one of the major reasons that Blu-Ray was always going to win the fight.  Aside from profit, there is nothing in the world that the movie companies like more than total control over who can and can’t watch their movies.

So I’m a little upset about this.  It means that it will probably be a long time before I get into the Hi-Def market myself.  Blu-Ray equipment costs more as do the movies in general compared to HD DVD.  And with the death of HD DVD, there will be little incentive for Blu-Ray prices to come down at all.  And there is no way in hell I’m buying a Sony PS3 just to play movies on.  Which considering there’s still not a single must-have game for the PS3 is all it’s good for in my opinion.