HD-DVD is dead

MarkBarbieri

Semi-retired
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Aug 20, 2006
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In case you didn't already hear, HD-DVD is officially dead. Toshiba has pulled the plug on it. It looks like it's Blu-Ray or nothing now. It's hard to believe, but it looks like Sony final won a consumer format war.
 
WEE!!! I knew blu ray would pull out all along. I work at Best Buy and it has been pretty fun to see the change from having half BD and half HD to a whole wall of BD and 2 4ft sections of HD... Gotta love it! I'm glad we bought the BD Player before they started jacking the prices back up just because they knew they were about to win the "war of the formats" hehe:rotfl2:
 
R.I.P. Xbox 360 HD-DVD addon.. you served me well.
 

I saw this earlier today...and to think I almost bought a HD-DVD player this week. Hopefully the studios will have a quick and easy conversion to Blue-ray......I cant wait to watch Battlestar Galactica in FULL HD!!!!
 
Stupid Blu Ray.............


Can't wait for the fire sale on HD-DVD's though :)
 
I was very, very happy to hear this news today... and I didn't mind reading the articles from a couple days ago about how it was imminent that Toshiba pulled the plug. :)

Look - Toshiba had to pay Paramount $150m in a last-ditch effort to garner support and sell the players for cheaper, and they still couldn't survive. One single format benefits everybody (except the poor sods who bought an HD-DVD player, which is now only marginally more useful than a DVHS HD player), and I'm glad BluRay won - 25% more storage than HD-DVD is nothing to scoff at, folks. That means higher bitrate transfers, more extras, etc.

Now, to see how long it takes for BluRay PC drives to get down to $100... they were $180 last I checked... my HTPC is all upgraded and ready other than that. :)
 
I'm glad I didn't pay any more than $100 for our HD-DVD player a few months ago!! We also purchased a PS3 recently so we have a combination of HD and Blu-Ray movies (most of the HD movies were free with the purchase of the player so I don't have too much invested).

What I like about the HD-DVD player is that it upconverts so we can play our standard DVD's in it and get an HD quality picture so I'm not disappointed about the purchase even though Toshiba has since pulled the plug.
 
I wouldn't mind purchasing a blu-ray player at $400. I just don't want to do it until I see that some of the big movies that were released in HD actually will be released in blu-ray.
 
In case you didn't already hear, HD-DVD is officially dead. Toshiba has pulled the plug on it. It looks like it's Blu-Ray or nothing now. It's hard to believe, but it looks like Sony final won a consumer format war.

Didn't they win out with Trinitron, Beta, and Digital Audio Tapes (DAT)? :rotfl2:
 
Yippee!! I'm so glad I waited to see who would win the war before jumping in to the fray. Now I just have to wait for the price to come down on the Blu-ray players and I'm all over it!
 
I was so happy to hear this finally happened. I certainly think blue-ray is the better of the two technologies. However, I recently got an AppleTV and I am loving having having all my DVDs, music, tv shows, and photos on demand. The picture isn't bad either.
 
Thank goodness!!! I've been waiting for this to be decided.
 
I'm glad I didn't pay any more than $100 for our HD-DVD player a few months ago!! We also purchased a PS3 recently so we have a combination of HD and Blu-Ray movies (most of the HD movies were free with the purchase of the player so I don't have too much invested).

What I like about the HD-DVD player is that it upconverts so we can play our standard DVD's in it and get an HD quality picture so I'm not disappointed about the purchase even though Toshiba has since pulled the plug.
The whole "upsampling" thing is kind of bogus marketing IMHO. Your basic HDTV has one single native resolution, and everything that is shown on that TV is displayed at that resolution. If your TV is 1080p (or even 1080i), then your resolution is almost certainly 1920x1080, and everything is shown at 1920x1080, including 1280x720 high-def content, 720x480 DVDs, 480x480 satellite/cable television, etc. Everything.

The theoretical advantage of an "upsampling" DVD player is that it can upscale the picture better than your TV can. Maybe it can, maybe it can't - that all depends on which has the better scaler. (Faroudja (probably misspelled ;) ) is the usual "good one".) There may also be a slight advantage if you use a DVI or HDMI connection to your TV in that the picture stays in digital format, but I'm not sure that that's going to make a really big deal compared to a good component connection (or even S-video) for DVD-level video.

That being said, I'm pretty sure that BluRay players do the same upsampling.

Didn't they win out with Trinitron, Beta, and Digital Audio Tapes (DAT)? :rotfl2:
Trinitron wasn't a format therefore wasn't in a format way. Beta got killed by VHS due to VHS's 6-hour capacity vs 4.5 for Beta (although Beta lived on in professional markets like television due to its higher quality). I don't think DAT really competed against anything, but it was certainly never a big success in the consumer field.

On the failure side, there's Minidiscs (though again, I can't think of anything they specifically competed with, but consumers never got interested), and SACD (which did compete with DVD-Audio but in this case, consumers don't care about either one, just like they didn't care about DTS CDs.)

But I don't think it's fair to paint Sony as big losers. Look at the success of the Walkman, their A/V equipment, and the Playstation and Playstation 2 just destroyed all competition. The PS3 is off to a slow start but it appears to be picking up a lot of steam, and I've heard some talk that this is really going to be the year of the PS3, and that was before BluRay won the battle - which will only help it.

Boomhauer, most big movies were released in BluRay already. Universal and Paramount were the big hold-outs, and Universal has already stated that they'll be switching to BluRay soon. Paramount recently accepted $150 million to be HD-DVD exclusive for a period of time, but my understanding is that Toshiba's announcement frees them from this contract and they'll have to be supporting BluRay very soon. I'd say that there's little danger of any current HD-DVD exclusives not being released for BluRay in the near future.
 













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