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HD DVD vs Blu-ray Direct Comparisons
An anonymous reader writes "With today's release of three movies on Blu-ray, Warner Home Video has become the first studio to release movie titles on both high-def formats, making it finally possible to do an apples-to-apples comparison of the same titles on both formats . High-Def Digest has just posted reviews of all three titles — 'Training Day,' 'Kiss Kiss Bang Bang' and 'Rumor Has It' — comparing video, audio and extras to the previous HD DVD releases. Their verdict? Due to issues with image cropping, audio selection and supplemental features on the Blu-ray discs, the HD DVD versions win this first face-off."
People have been encoding burnable 4.53 GB DivX/XviD movie rips from HD television broadcasts for a long time now. On many torrent trackers that mainly cater to people who care about quality, these DivX HD DVD-5 rips are slowly starting to push out regular MPEG-2 DVD-5's. An added bonus is that many set-top players can play them just fine. It is my guess that in countries where people don't regularly buy legal DVDs, this will be the format of choice. It has enough quality for an average Joe to tell that it's better quality than a DVD-9, and is comparable enough to true HD releases on HDDVD or Blueray to keep video buffs satisfied. As rips like this will flood the torrent networks, and with more set-top players supporting the full DivX/XviD specifications, it will catch on in the West, and is likely to be the standard of choice until we get HDDVD-R or Blueray-R discs for under $1 (if we ever do). With the spread of piracy and availability of bandwidth, it may take much longer for HDDVD or Blueray to catch on than many people expect, so we might just see another format come in and take over before the battle between HDDVD and Blueray is settled.
Just my 0.02 roubles.