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No Ceasefire in DVD Format Battle

Posted by Zonk on from the fight-to-the-last-player dept.

haja writes "The BBC reports that the high definition DVD format war will continue until a winner is declared. There is no sign of the two camps working on a unified format. Some believe the industry at large is being damaged by the war due to consumer confusion. From the article: 'Backers of Blu-ray are bullish and are predicting victory. Blu-ray has more backing from film studios and more makers of the players, but HD-DVD has sold equally well in the first year of release. But the Blu-ray camp believes a library of exclusive titles and the power of PlayStation 3 - which has an in-built Blu-ray player - will see the format pull ahead in the next 12 months. Mike Dunn, president of worldwide home entertainment for 20th Century Fox, said: "I really believe the format war is in its final phase."'"

2 of 359 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How can they be that confident? by cpuh0g · · Score: 3, Informative
    1. Lots of people already have an Xbox 360
    "Lots of people" ?? Gee, that sounds like hard, scientific, evidence. I'm not a Sony defender by any means (still playing my 4 year old PS2 just fine), but to insinuate that XB360/HD-DVD as king's of the hill is a little premature. PS3 has only been available in very limited fashion for about 2 months. XB360 has been out for how a while and still lags behind the old PS2 in sales. The high-end XB360 is $400. Tack on the cost of the HD-DVD and you are probably gonna spend over $600, same as you would for a PS3.

    Neither HD-DVD or Blu-Ray really excite me much now, at least as a video medium. DVDs in progressive scan on a high-quality bigscreen TV look pretty damn good to my tired old eyes. HiDef discs might be nice, but not enough to justify the change, at least not for a couple of years.

  2. Re:They Can Keep Battling it Out by DRJlaw · · Score: 3, Informative

    Oh, if you _do_ need them on all the time, look for something like the Western Digital Caviar special edition drives, which have a 3 year warranty, or SCSI drives, whose warranties go up to 5 years. Standard consumer drives come with a mere 1 year warranty, and there's a good reason why...

    Source for the last statement?

    Seagate consumer drives come with a mere 5 year warranty, and there's something that directly refutes your point.