HomeSony vs Toshiba. Blu-ray vs HD DVD. The war has really just started, and like a lot of other people, I’m already sick and tired of it. One side declares victory, the other produces stats to counter than, and then declares victory themselves … and it continues.
In this blog entry, I’ll peer into my crystal ball to try and predict what the final outcome might be for this format war. It will probably be totally wrong, but what the hell!
So the year is 2010. DVDs are still selling in large numbers, but more and more people are choosing HD over SD. Standard definition TVs are no longer available in the shops either, replaced by affordable high definition sets from China. Still no flying cars …
So who won? Blu-ray or HD DVD? Well, I’m sad to say that nobody has won. If you go into the store that you usually buy your movies from, you’ll see Blu-ray and HD DVDs sitting side by side – a quick glance and you see that for every Blu-ray movie, a HD DVD version is available, and vice versa. A quick look at the back of the movie container shows that they have identical features too. Sure, the prices differ a little, but for all practical purposes, both formats are the same. Most of the studios have gone dual format, except for the obvious ones (Sony owned MGM, Sony Pictures, Columbia/Tristar titles).
The same store also sells electronic equipment, so you decide to check out a new high definition DVD player. Sony has a Blu-ray player on sale, and so does Toshiba with a HD DVD player, but for a little bit more money, you can grab an LG or Samsung dual format player that plays both Blu-ray and HD DVD – you quietly wonder why Sony and Toshiba, or any other company for that matter, are still selling single-format players, when almost everyone has a dual-format player these days. But one thing is for sure, the competition between Sony and Toshiba has meant that high def players are as cheap as DVD players were way back in 2007. For a while, there were dual-format discs (both Blu-ray and HD DVD versions of the same movie in one package), but since people started buying combo-players, these have been getting rarer and rarer.
Dual format players, like this LG, on sale for $99 in the year 2010
You buy some HD DVD and Blu-ray movies – $9.99 for The Bourne Betrayal on HD DVD and $10.99 for Spider-man 5 on Blu-ray was too good an offer to turn down. You get home and you decide that you want to make a copy of the movie for your iPod, so you insert the disc into your computer’s dual-format reader/writer drive (writes both BD and HD write-once/rewritable discs at 16x/8x speed). No need to break copy protection or to go online to download a copy – the AACS Copy Manager software that comes with each disc allows you to easily make a iPod compatible copy that, while it has your computer ID recorded into the file just in case you decide to upload it illegally online, but basically is without DRM and playable on all sorts of devices. Sometimes the disc even come with pre-made iPod/H.264 versions of the movie, so it’s only a matter of running an authentication program to ensure you have a legal copy and to tag the file with your computer ID, just in case. The AACS Copy Manager also allows you to copy the movie to your Windows Home Server, so you can play the movie from any one of your connected computers/media centers – you might have to pop the original disc back in to authenticate your license from time to time though (after every 5 viewings).
AACS Copy Manager: allows you to make copies of your HD movies
There is talk of a new higher definition format coming soon … 5 different groups are all presenting their format as the next best things, looks like another war is about to start just as this one is ending…
