I hate format wars… they’re so pointless. It seems that the battle for the next gen format is hotting up with some (most?) camps predicting the end of HD-DVD. I’m not going to do that, but Warner putting its weight behind Blu-Ray is interesting. Obviously, BD has the edge in a technological sense, being that it has greater capacity, I’m just not sure we need it. You can already get a full movie and uncompressed multi-channel audio on a HD-DVD with half the capacity so what’s the extra space going to be used for? Extras that very few people watch? Picture in Picture (PIP) is interesting, but HD-DVD does that anyway and a large number of the early adopters of BD have “old” systems that can’t be upgraded to this anyway.

It all reminds me of that “other” format battle, VHS Vs Betamax. Back then, Sony supported Betamax which was the superior quality, but more expensive product which lost out to VHS, primarily because VHS was cheaper. Of course, back then Sony didn’t have a games console to push its technology onto the market.

I don’t know why the market seems to have rejected HD-DVD despite its obvious cost benefit. I guess its probably to do with the fact that most people are happy with their current red laser DVD’s and can’t be bothered to upgrade again so the sales are being pushed by the Playstation 3. The biggest problem I can see at the moment for both next gen formats is the relative expense of the media. Until it is just as cheap to buy on HD/BD as it is on standard DV, I don’t think we’ll be seeing a large take up of hi-def formats. I know that I won’t be buying into it until either a format has won or there are low cost multi-format players/recorders, and you can get Star Wars/Indiana Jones/Back To The Future in HD. Those are films worth upgrading for!