First and foremost, keep the PS3 - X360 arguement out of here. Say nothing of the PS3 being a bluray player, we're all aware of that.

Anyway...couple questions.

1. What's the size increase from a regular DVD to HDDVD and Blu Ray?
2. What's the price of each, compared to regular DVDs? How about players (No PS3 or 360 addon)?
3. Sony owns the rights to Blu Ray, who owns the rights to HDDVD?
4. And are players currently on the market? I've seen blu ray/HDDVD commercials for movies, but are the players widely available?

And just debate which you expect to come out on top, ignoring the console war along with it.

bluray

bluface

I was at best buy last weekend and saw a Bluray DVD player for $999..

Players cost about 1000$ for each.
BluRays have [At last i heard]25 Gig Per disk
Thats like 5 DVDs right?

Yeah.. so I mean if you really wanted a bluray player you should just buy a PS3

Companies backing HDDVD:

HP, Intel, Microsoft, Paramount, Toshiba, Universal, Warner Brothers, HBO, and New Line Entertainment.

I saw a blu-ray writable disk for sale... (I haven't seen a BD-RW yet though) and it was £12.50 you can buy almost 100 DVD-R's for that.

From what my sony rep tells me, they'll have 80 GB in the near future (blueray)

I don't like either one, but I guess I'd prefer Bluray for storage purposes... or either one, actually.

In order for Bluray to win out (which is technologically the more advanced of the two), SONY will need to start licencing companies to produce the product for a much lower price than they currently are willing to release.

If more corporations are able to buy into the tech, the price will go down and the format will win. The data storage possibilities alone make it a better format. Higher quality video will fit on a Bluray disc as it becomes more plausible to do that (higher than 1080p HD).

Wikipedia: Bluray
Wikipedia: HD DVD

You should fine everything you need on there, I won't be boring and thieving and reproduce it all on here, but Wikipedia's articles on these things are always very good.

I also forgot, this is very interesting:

BD/HD DVD Hybrid Disc

as it is right now HDDVD wins.... the video and audio quality is better (possibly a situation like with early dvds having some compression problems) and the HDDVD players are half the price of bluray

That's a bit counterintuitive considering Blu-ray can holds significantly more data.

but bad encoding can easily mean a super high bitrate file that still looks and sounds like crap

though it is possible that they have fixed the problems since it's been a couple months since i actually compared both formats

Bluray is a cool name. I hope it wins. HDDVD as a name is the pinnacle of the lack of imagination. But I guess it suits the engineers in their sterile, dust free laboratories.

Yes, because in the end, the name is the only thing that matters at all

bluray. because it's going to be in the ps3. also because i want it to.

I read something that said a company in Asia created a dual layer disc burning process that would be capable of writing in both Bluray and HDDVD, so it will work in either player.

...and the catch is?

Uh, it's expensive? Not that hard to figure out.

My bad, it was a British company. Also, it mentioned cheap process.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/ptech/09/26/dvd.formats.reut/index.html

The license is not the issue. Sony has drained the market dry for blue laser diodes, which are a very important component of Bluray (both the 'blu' and the 'ray' parts, in fact). The Playstation 3 is, in fact, cannibalizing the Bluray market.

Jon`C, are you thinking what I'm thinking, that Samsung should come along with some superformat and smite both Sony and Toshiba?

$1000 for a player? I would rather buy movies on a hard drive, that way it's cheaper, faster, has a larger capacity, and I can make use of it when I no longer need the video.

Of course, the prices will eventually drop.

I'm ignoring the console "war" entirely getting a Wii and playing it on a good old CRT. It may not have very good system specs, but it's cheaper, and the games are much, much better seeing how they aren't mostly clones of PC games. If there was no Wii, I wouldn't get a console (I didn't last gen, didn't lose sleep over it), just not worth it, and when I am bored with it after one weekend, I'll probably sell it.

Until DVD's are no longer made, they are perfectly suitable for my less-than picky video needs, I hardly notice compression artifacts anyway and I am quite satisfied with the audio, which is only surpassed by a vinyl record.

As far as "which one's better", who cares? If the hybrid exists now, it'll be affordable in the near future, and if not, I'm perfectly happy with DVD's, cheap as that may sound.

I'm not sure if audio is encoded on DVDs, I think it is, but from your statement I believe that you are implying that vinyl is better than CD as well. I must protest! CD audio is in every way superior to vinyl. Vinyl has nostalgia and that's it.

dude i remember when dvd came out. i swear back then once at a Best Buy there was a DvD player that was like 1000 $ USD. I couldn't afford it back then, but know there are like dvd players that are like $20 and works great. I wouldn't get blu-ray till like it goes down cheap.

No, because Samsung isn't run by retarded people who antagonize entire industries by splitting off and creating their own useless and proprietary formats that nobody will ever adopt because their media division saddles them with so many content restrictions that they can never be used for anything.

Ahem. To summarize my argument, Sony is a terrible company and Samsung isn't nearly stupid enough to make their mistakes.

Besides, Samsung can make way more money by kicking back and watching who the winner is. It helps a lot that they manufacture a lot of the parts used in both kinds of player, and they've been working on a hybrid player for a while.