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HP No Longer Exclusively Supporting Blue-Ray
linumax wrote to mention an MSNBC article stating that HP is dropping its exclusive support for Blue-Ray. They'll be offering support to the HD-DVD format as well. From the article: "The decision is the latest sign of a looming 'format war' between the competing standards for a new generation of digital video players that can record high-definition films and video games. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD-compatible devices are expected to hit stores worldwide early next year."
This trumped-up format war is going to be dead on arrival -- because 90% of U.S. televisions won't be anywhere near an HDTV signal until 2015. It's going to be DVD right up to the holocubes.
a looming format war? what have you called the last year? minor consistent back and forth skirmishes?
sorry folks, the format war has been going on.
The decision is the latest sign of a looming 'format war' between the competing standards for a new generation
First of all, only those of us who actually want to use this stuff will "lose" this war. As with the DVD +/- "war", we'll just end up seeing every device need to license both formats, boosting prices and causing massive incompatibilities where people argue about which brand of media works best in which brand of drive. And Grandma still won't understand why she can't burn her now-in-HD soaps to a plain ordinary CD ("But it fits in the drive!").
These industry groups REALLY needs to suck up their pride, and just play a hand of poker to decide which format wins. The winner will agree to buy out the loser's R&D costs (perhaps with a bit extra as a deal-sweetener), and the loser will in turn refrain from unnecessarily fragmenting the market. Then we all win. Even the industry groups.
But more importantly, I see the whole Blu-Ray vs HD-HVD issue as all but moot. Regardless of who wins, we'll only see at best a roughly 10x increase in optical storage capacity per disc, and even that only at the tail end of the effective lifetime of the media (ie, look at writeable dual-layer DVDs - Oh wait, I can't, I've never even seen one in person, and they cost a few bucks each).
The "home theater" market does not have the same requirements as the data storage market. For home theater, just switching the existing DVD standard to allow MPEG-4 would allow for HD movies. But for data storage, particularly backups, we now have desktop PCs with 500GB drives - Which will still take 20 first-gen Blu-Ray discs, or 34 HD-DVDs, to completely back up. And many of us who appreciate the need for good backups have home file servers in excess of a terabyte.
What we really need, we won't get out of simple industry greed in pushing incremental upgrades on us - We need everyone to say "screw the sub-100GB optical formats, let's finally get one of these multi-TB holographic techs we keep hearing about, to market".