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End of the Blu-Ray / HD-DVD Format War?

Posted by kdawson on from the two-in-one dept.

Next week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas should shake up the format war. The NYTimes reports that Warner Brothers will announce the Total HD disc that can store both Blu-ray and HD-DVD content. The article also mentions that LG (along with "possibly other gadget makers") is expected to announce a player that can play both formats. According to Yahoo, LG has not announced pricing, but the Times notes that such dual-format devices are bound to cost more than existing players. And the Times outlines the many considerations that would come into play before studios decide to release their content in both formats on a single disc.

4 of 266 comments (clear)

  1. Has Sony sold a License? by Thansal · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Last I saw was that Sony (and possibly Toshiba with HDDVD) was refusing to license any player that could play both formats?

    or has some one (LG?) gotten around this some how?

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  2. Re:As much as I hate Sony... by HappySqurriel · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Price should be a consideration in 'superior format' as well ...

    HD-DVD is currently much less expensive for consumers, and manufacturers of both discs and hardware. This may not be the case forever, but (hypothetically) if it is cheaper to produce 2 or 3 HD-DVD discs then to produce 1 Blu-Ray disc the storage capacity advantage is not really important.

  3. Re:Total HD Player by teslar · · Score: 4, Interesting
    If the manufacturing costs of these disks is comparable to HD-DVD/Blu-ray disks, it might just click.
    No, I reckon this one's DOA. These discs are thought to have an HD-DVD and a Blue-Ray layer, so essentially, you could either buy this and have access to half the disc or by the regular HD/Blueray (delete as appropriate) one and have the entire disc.

    Or look at it this way:
    People don't know which way the market will swing. Some manufacturers are trying to win either way with a disc that can be played in both players. However, once the market is decided, nobody will buy them, what'd be the point? If the market never gets decided, consumers will just get bored, buy an HD/Blueray drive and still ignore Total HD.

    Whatever happens, I reckon a year from now Total HD will be all but forgotten.
  4. Re:As much as I hate Sony... by powerlord · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Both HD-DVD and blu-ray use blue-lasers, so that is a non-issue. Blue-Ray has more capacity per layer (25GB/layer) as opposed to HD-DVD (15GB/layer), but a dual-layer HD-DVD has more than enough space to hold a movie and all the crappy extra feature, especially when using h264 or VC1 codec. So extra space for blu-ray is also irrelevant.


    The current "big thing" with TV programs is to package them in seasons for sale on DVDs (sometimes along with Extras).

    If this idea makes the jump to HD media (which is a reasonable assumption), then the extra space means less discs in the set, or the same number of discs with more space for extras.

    Just because the extra space doesn't seem relevant for one application (storing a movie with some extras) doesn't mean it couldn't be used for some other parallel application that might need it.

    Thats like saying "people will never need more than X amount of HardDrive space in their machines, since all you need is X to install WindowsXP and a word processor". Some people do things like Video or Audio editing which might need more space. Others need to run large Databases for businesses.
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