http://tinyurl.com/2njzt7 It definitely looks as though Blu-Ray will be the winner of the format war. It, also, sounds like it would be wise to give things another year or so, to develop.

My little opinion is that home will stay with 1080p for a long time but cinemas will eventually change to 4k with things like the RED camera making it affordable for even low-budget independants to own their own and shoot in 70mm quality. The theatre owners whinge and cry again but in the end we'll be seeing images infinitely better at the multiplex than the badly projected/focused films we see today.

Lost.rules - huh? Was that English?

I sort of agree about the ownership thing, but remember the irony there is that it only really happened in a mass consumer way with DVD (which wasn't true on a large scale with VHS). I absolutely agree people want something solid for their money and I think a big part of why music went virtual is that the something solid for your money was replaced by the caché or solid proof of your purchases in the form of the iPod - replacing the original physical items with another.

Since people succumbed though to "owning it on DVD" (to paraphrase) over the last decade, they do like to see their collection on their shelves and we won't shake that for a few years yet. Maybe 5?

In the end though we will be downloading, but the thing the download fans (the future is NOW!) never seem to mention is compression. Sure I love downloading 1080p trailers but have you seen the compression and artifacts & banding in those things? Sure over the next couple of years that'll decrease but look at stuff like the HD Pirates bitrate and a sane person would surely agree 30 to 50 gigs of info will take a while to download for a little while yet. Between that and people wanting something real to show for their cash, both regular DVD and HD are fairly safe for around 5 years I reckon. Even with e-ink finally reaching market (and soon to be wrapped around every piece of public transport advertising space you can think of), books will take another decade or more to disappear - there are a lotta old fogeys out there after all. Just my opinion.

So, no.

The other thing I was gonna say before is that buying a download for someone for Chrissy is a bit like giving 'em a gift voucher. Sure they can buy exactly what they like but the first thing they think is "You don't know what I like". In 'the future' it'll be like "you couldn't be bothered/left it too late to go out and get me something". Heh.

Notice I at no point said HD-DVD itself or HD in general wasn't great, just that their "Blu-Ray are the devil because they're forcing new techniques on us" is lame and transparent propaganda, especially when they then turn around and make you pay extra to include old dvd with the combo stuff. Guess what, the HD stuff can downscale to old TVs too, so you could buy HD-DVDs OR Blu-ray and play 'em on your XBox add-on, Tosh player, Blu-ray deck or PS3 and they'll look every bit as good as regular DVD. Then when you eventually get your HD telly they'll look much MUCH better. It's sort of stupid that combo discs DO make you buy your dvd again when you haven't even purchased it the FIRST time!

Yes I know their rationale is that you can play the same thing on your 15 old DVD players scattered around the house, but shit man if you've got a pristine high-def version sitting there why the holy fuck would you WANT to??!!

Just keep in mind like I said that Yamauchi blackmailed the industry continually into paying ridiculous prices to develop for proprietary cartridge-based formats which crippled many 3rd parties (ironically making development as expensive and comparitively risky as it is now) and then even after everyone else had gone cd-based begrudgingly giving in but still going with the mini-cd. You forget that part of the financial failure of the Gamecube (yes it did fail despite being the best console of the 3 at the time) was in LARGE part due to all the bad blood that they'd built up with 3rd parties previously. As fantastic as their 1st party stuff was, Ninty couldn't live on bread alone. They'd say it was just piracy concerns which lead them to stick with proprietary tech which is a disingenuous lie at best.

I think it's great you love Nintendo's stuff but supremely ironic you chastise Sony for essentially doing a similar thing years after. I say this as someone who's owned all the Nintendo consoles including the Wii but I can't stand sheeplike support or the sins of the past. I own a PS3 too (and saved hundreds by waiting for a local release to drive local import prices down severely on ebay as I buy all r1DVDs and games are region free anyway). So I'm as unbiased as I can be. Having said that HD-DVD quality for movies is fantastic too. But Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft are ALL a pack of filthy lying bastards, don't be fooled. Developers will always yell and moan like they did with the PS2 which they wailed about when Sony "forced" them to use an architecture that favoured assembly coding 'down to the metal' rather than a nice lazy interface (strange how even devs have forgotten that one) because they knew it'd pay off in the longer term by being able to squeeze every bit of juice out of it to the point where it's still outselling the following generation in some territories and some titles. Not bad. People are moaning all over again about PS3 but we'll see where things are at in the what? 1&1/2 years that the X360 has been out? They all have great points, 360, PS3 and Wii. You don't have to shit on one to shine the other.

On the same note, I saw a "quote" on the cover of a regular dvd yesterday which said something like "Incredible!" or "Best film of the year!", with, get this, NO byline for the source of the quote. Fucking shameless self-promoting marketing wankers. Yes I have to deal with them constantly. Aaarrrrrrrgh!

Shudder.

Although after MS's comments yesterday about how they don't think even their HD-DVD will even last 5 years, it'd be pretty funny if Universal turned around and bit them back by going neutral after all! Microsoft would probably shrug their shoulders though and just release a cheap Blu-ray add-on drive @ $100 for the 360, screwing Toshiba in the process as well. That Bill. He's so funny!

To whoever posted about the Installed base of HD-DVD drives on Toshiba laptops (so many posts and threads on this stuff I can't find it anymore): I bet they're pretty fucking annoyed those things are all PLAYERS and it took what? a YEAR or two to finally come out with a burner (with a 30 gig limit)? FanTAStic!

Wait, what was this thread about again? Oh, um... fuck HD-DVD and Blu-ray, I can't afford that shit.

Also, have you actually READ that site? And for how many years? They've only just hopped off the fence. Disagree with their choice? No problem. But "Enough said"? Those aren't even Digitalbits' numbers, they're Nielsen figures! Whatever, man.