HD-DVD vs Blu-ray, Class for Dan Ray

Question: What kind of bear is best?

My last post got my American friend living up in the great white north to say, "You can buy a HD-DVD drive for your XBOX 360 for only $200. There's really no difference between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, it's just a corporate thing." and " 720p is 720p and 1080p is something that normal people don't have the hardware to watch. I hate the Blue Ray / HDDVD dichotomy because it's stupid and I'm in favor of standards. It's all about advertising and money period."

Yes and NO. Yes, someone could go out and spend $200 for lack luster HD-DVD player and add it to there $399 Xbox 360 and then plug it into their TV with some component cables and get a maximum resolution of 1080i, and then buy HD-DVD's and be OK with that until a couple of years from now when they stop making the HD-DVD format movies and it is DIVX all over again. (DIVX was a format created by Circuit City and some investor lawyers back in 1998 which, the concept was: you were able to buy movies for $5.00 and you were allowed 24 hours to watch it, after placing it in your DIVX player that had a modem contacted servers to allow playback , before it became a coaster.) Let's just say that the format didn't even last more than a year and there were lots of people that had paid lots of money for the players and now had an obsolete box after DIVX called it quits. I can't say this battle will be as bad as the DIVX format war with DVD, but format wars are not good for anyone.

I have to say 720P (IMHO) looks really good, but if you have well trained eyes you can tell the difference from 720P to 1080P. This is especially true if you have a bigger TV. Here is something to think about, if you have a 19" monitor, you could run it at 1024 x 768, but why? Doesn't 1280 x 1024 just look better? As you get more lines of resolution the better the picture is going to look. No ifs, ands, or buts will change that. So when you say we “don't have the hardware” to see 1080P, I would have to say you’re wrong unless you were referring to a blind person.

Blu-ray is better because BD disc can hold 25GB per layer whereas HD-DVD only has 15GB per layer. That is about 8.5 hours of HD video on the BD and 5.1 hours on HD-DVD. Now, you are thinking that most movies are around 2 hours. Well why do lots of people buy DVD's? It’s because of the extras; how they made the movie, behind the scenes, etc. That is over 3 hours of extra footage that they could put on that disc. They can put on extra audio tracks. Currently Casino Royale has like 8 languages on the disc. When you have films like Pirates of the Carribean, Casino Royale, Pixar films, and Star Wars (someday) those films are money in the bag for the format.

Yeah in a sense it is all about that $, but we are trying to make a HD standard here. It’s just that two sets of companies have different ideas of what the standard should be. I will state the obvious statement of who’s is better. When you have 2/3rds of the big Hollywood studios (Disney, Fox, Paramount, WB, and of course Sony) for Blu-ray, that is telling you something. As of May 2007 BD movies hold 60% of the market share of movies, and in Japan BD totally owns the market. Those Japanese know what technology is since they brought us the Walkman.

Bottom line is, if you have never seen 1080P and you watch 720P on your computer screen, how can you say one or the other is the best? I double dog dare you to come by my place next time you are in town and I will show you what 1080P looks like.

Class dismissed.

PS.. Does this guy look like he knows anything about Blu-ray?