Blu-Ray: The future of High Definition mind melting.

Are yall ready for the Betamax - VHS war again? How about Minidisc - CD war? Yep, that time has come again. Well at least in part. Sony (yes, im a sony salesman so im partial) has released the future of high definition viewing pleasure. A conglomerate called the Blu-Ray Disc Association (BDA) [http://www.blu-ray.com/info] which includes the founders, Sony, as well as support from your favorites like apple, HP, and a number of big hitters in the audio/video as well as computer foundations. Where the problem comes in, and reason we have not seen this on shelf's already (its been out in japan for about a year or so) is because of Toshiba, the founders of another format called HD-DVD refuse to let it be the big market. Both sides of the battle, as to spare consumers another huge battle (only us geeks have to deal with it) are trying to come to terms as to which one to release and in force. My preferences come to Blu-Ray like many geeks because of its greater advantage on the tech side. HD-DVDs main support is its "cheaper". If your interested in seeing the tech side, and a nice little graph showing some of the differences go here. If you know anything about media in this nature, you can see very quickly its advantages. I have personally seen a DVD playing off a Blu-Ray player on an HD tv, and I was just floored. It was like being in a 3D theatre. I worry about the movie theatre industry with the release of this on the mass market because of how simply amazing it is. Now, you start wondering, ok, well im not a geek so all those numbers dont mean anything to me. Well there is a lovely link provided here that will take you to a forum discussing the differences, and to save you the net account cost, here is a condensed version:

Blu-ray

Backed by: Sony, Dell, Apple(as of today), Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, LG Electronics, Matsushita Electric Industrial (Panasonic), Mitsubishi Electric, Philips Electronics, Pioneer Electronics, Samsung Electronics, Sharp, TDK, and Thomson Multimedia.

Advantages: Getting the early start, Blu-ray has enjoyed more mindshare than HD-DVD, as well as a conglomerate of powerful backers that rivals President Bush's "coalition of the willing" in size and scope. Technologically, the biggest edge Blu-ray appears to have over HD-DVD is that it offers 30 percent more capacity and is designed for recording high-def video. Rewritable BD-RW discs, with similar features to Panasonic's current DVD-RAM discs, can play back content while recording to the disc at the same time. Also, Sony owns Columbia Pictures and recently bought MGM, which gives it a leg up on releasing content. And PlayStation 3 certainly will carry a huge chunk of clout in the marketplace.

Disadvantages: Real or not, the biggest knock against Blu-ray is that the discs--initially, at least--will be more costly to produce than HD-DVD media (Sony claims otherwise). Until recently, the other knock was that unlike DVD-HD, the Blu-ray spec did not include support for more advanced video compression codecs such as MPEG-4 AVC and Microsoft's VC-1, in addition to the MPEG-2 codec. But the Blu-ray Group recently announced support for those codecs, so they're now on even ground on that front.



HD-DVD

Backed by: Toshiba, NEC, Sanyo, and Memory-Tech. Microsoft is also supporting HD-DVD in its next version of Windows (support for Blu-ray is on the table).

Advantages: The name itself, HD-DVD, is far more consumer-friendly than Blu-ray. HD-DVDs carry the same basic structure as current DVDs, so converting existing DVD manufacturing lines into HD-DVD lines is supposedly simple and cost effective. Memory-Tech, a leading Japanese manufacturer of optical media, stated that producing HD-DVD discs would initially cost only 10 percent more than for existing DVDs and
that it could quickly bring the cost down to match that of standard DVD.

Disadvantages: HD-DVD simply can't boast the same storage capacity as Blu-ray. It's confusing, but it appears that the rewritable HD-DVD-RW will go up 32GB, while the recordable HD DVD-R discs will only be single layer (15GB). The other downside is that with Sony holding the rights to Columbia Pictures and MGM movie and television libraries, there will probably be a hole in HD-DVD's content offering--don't expect to see MGM/UA's James Bond movies on HD-DVD, for example.

Now to follow the last point on this, notice how it talks about movie holdings and how HD-DVD wont have many top movies, thats another downfall as pretty much every major film industry company has backed Blu-Ray. In a war on formats, thats huge. Here are two articles talking about Hollywood (PC WORLD Click Here) and Fox Studios (Reuters.co.uk Click Here) backing the stronger format. After that, I hate say anymore so leave it into your hands to figure out which format you think is better.


Happy hunting.
Spivey

Google Search on Blu-Ray

References: All of the above linked. I also gained much of my expierence with Blu-Ray and HD-DVD in company training at Sony (yes, much of this info was unbiased coming straight from toshiba) so could not provide a reference or link to it, sorry!