Last Friday, Warner Brothers Home Video announced that they will be releasing their high definition movies on the Bluray format exclusively starting in June of 2008. That was great news for all consumers, except the early adopters of HD-DVD. And it is great news, it takes the relative equality of the content available on the formats out of the equation, now if you want to watch Warner Brothers or New Line Cinema movies in glorious high definition, you have to have a Bluray player, the most common of which is the Sony Playstation 3.

Toshiba quickly responded that they will be undeterred in their attempt to replace standard definition DVDs with their creation the HD-DVD. Unlike the HD-DVD fanboys and the Bluray fanboys, I didn't really care who won this one. They are essentially the same thing, they use the same video codecs and audio codecs (with the exception of the minimum required in the Bluray players). Bluray was created first as a storage medium, and Sony et al. decided that they wanted to get back some of their investment in the technology decided to try to make the storage medium into an entertainment medium, it made sense. Then Toshiba decided to take a similar technology and force it into a "standard" with the DVD consortium, it failed in the vote for being a standard twice, but eventually came out as the "official" successor to DVD.

Before you get the impression that I am a dyed in the wool Bluray fanboy, Sony decided to keep going with their plan to create a different standard using their existing technology, not really cool. The problem with the Sony technology itself was that it required new manufacturing equipment, and an altered disc. HD-DVDs could be produced on the existing DVD manufacturing equipment, with some changes, since it buried the actual information 0.6mm below the disc surface, Bluray buried it only 0.1mm. I know, huge numbers. But, in Sony's defense they were working on the project to actually get use out of their blue laser technology before Toshiba even started their foray into blue laser technology.

Both formats had their merits. Then in 2005, a failed attempt (or two) was made to bring the two groups togther on the physical specifications of the discs and software required in the players (and hardware). HD-DVD had decided on Microsoft's HDi software for interactivity, Bluray wanted Java in the form of BD-Java. They never got it together. So in 2006 both sides began to launch players and movies.

HD-DVD was the early leader based on the relatively cheaper players, and very often Hybrid Discs that had HD-DVD on one side and DVD on the other. Then the Playstation 3 was released. Within a week Bluray had surpassed the install base of HD-DVD. But, early Bluray movies were poorly encoded, still using the older DVD codec of MPEG-2, that was simply brute forced to higher resolutions. Eventually VC1 and AVC codecs were used and Bluray was on par visually with HD-DVD.

Fast forward to August of 2007, Paramount announced it was going HD-DVD exclusive. Rumors swirled that they had received a $150 million payoff to stop straddling the fence. It didn't matter, and looking at the current state of things I think they jumped off the fence to see if Bluray's momentum was for real, the money was just a bonus. I say it was an experiment, because of the announcement made on Friday from Warner Brothers. The new rumor on the street is that the Paramount deal had an escape clause that if Warner Brothers switched to only Bluray they could get off of the sinking ship.

Here's my own personal conspiracy theory: Paramount was approached by Toshiba and the HD-DVD Group to become exclusive, and so was Warner Brothers. Paramount and Warner together decided that one of them should take the money, to see which way the winds were truly blowing, since riding the fence was going to be extremely expensive. So they decided together that Paramount (which releases the most movies) would jump off the fence, with the caveat that if Warner Brothers jumped to the other side they could switch back, really not a big risk for either party, since Warner Brothers cost for producing all of the dual format releases could be offset with some of the money from the Paramount deal, and Paramount could jump off of the sinking ship should their experiment show that Bluray was the way the wind was blowing.

So after Paramount's deal, and many angry Bluray owners who could not get Transformers, it became clear that Bluray was still outselling HD-DVD in the disc area, and that's where the money is. Even after the $99 HD-DVD player deals at Wal-Mart and Best Buy. And Warner Brothers decided enough is enough of the two format support. After the Harry Potter series was released in High-Def it became clear that they had to leave the format agnostic world, they dropped HD-DVD.

If the rumors about the contract allowing Paramount to switch back after a Warner Brothers exclusivity deal are true, then it will probably only be a few weeks before they come back to Bluray. Leaving only NBC Universal left exclusively on HD-DVD (who cares about American Pie in high definition?).

My take on the two formats:
HD-DVD - more consumer friendly name, better initial interactivity and Internet capabilities due to its already completed specification at the time of initial release, cheaper hardware
Bluray - potential for better quality video, since it has nearly 50% more allowable bandwidth available for video
Otherwise - they are pretty much the same.

Since I care more about the image quality than special features and interactivity I would never use, I would have leaned towards Bluray all along, and luckily have a PS3 so I can watch Blurays without officially entering the war until it is settled.

There is good news about the war, it brought down the prices of players on both sides very quickly. By this point in a replacement medium for entertainment we the consumers are usually still paying $500-1000 for the new format.

As a last note, to all the idiots with their heads supremely jammed within their posteriors talking about downloads being the future of entertainment: not for a long, long while. We aren't talking about standard definition porn from some sleazy website, we are talking about 15-40GB of data for a two to four hour movie. Since on my glorious Internet connection it would take months or years to accomplish that, with no apparent incentive (like competition) for my DSL provide higher speeds, I will not be able to download a movie in standard definition (in a reasonable time frame, such as quick enough to measure in minutes instead of hours or days) for quite some time. It may be possible in Korea now or Japan next year, but not in the United States.


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