HD DVD bids its farewell

[Sinizter]

Looks like I was wrong. I honestly believed that it would be dual-format for the medium term.

I had just sold my Xbox360 - was thinking about getting a new one with HDMI out, guess I wont be getting one for a while now. I bought both my consoles for the HD movies. So gaming was never a priority for me.

[Hicks12]

bah, hd-dvd is better for movies so i have too say this is annoying and sad that blueray won. Blueray is for storage short and simple, the features in hd-dvd superseed that of blueray.

Lucky for me ill just buy a blueray player for my pc for £60 , sorted ay?

[Stoo]

bah, hd-dvd is better for movies so i have too say this is annoying and sad that blueray won. Blueray is for storage short and simple, the features in hd-dvd superseed that of blueray.

Umm, no they don't

Both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray supported the same codecs, in fact the latter has higher capacity, and supports higher bit-rates.

Yes, the initial Blu-Ray discs were encoded using MPEG-2, but later ones are all AVC/H.264, and I think the odd few use the VC-1 codec.

Audio-wise, Blu-Ray supports everything HD-DVD did, plus DTS HD and Dolby TrueHD lossless..

Both had the same "DRM-crap", and both can use regional coding (although HD-DVD were going to implement it at a later date to act as a differentiator in the launch period).

I really hate all this FUD crap that *still* floats around...

[TooNice]

....ask my mate who is making an ABSOLUTE mint out of Laser discs he's picked up for a couple of quid and shifted for £100+ per disc.

But did anyone make a fortune out of BetaMax? I think there are no easy rules for market trend. Some movies released on both format were better on HD-DVD. In the short-medium term they may fetch a premium. Several years down the line, they will fetch a big premium IF the movie studios don't release another edition on BD that is known to have everything the HD-DVD version had.. and perhaps even some. But if there are better alternatives, I don't think the value of the HD-DVD version will remain. Okay, so there may be some die hard collectors who'll pay just for rarity; but are there more of them than copies floating around?

In my opinion, the Hi-def reduced to a single member has now a better chance of not going the same way as SACD/DVD-A (essentially super niche format, and in my opinion, a failure to what they were set out for). DVD will remain here for a while. Perhaps it will not even be entirely replaced unless the industry forcefully phase it out (I am saying this because DVD did not manage to replace VCDs and I do know people who will get the VCD version because it is that little bit cheaper). But I do think that in the long term, BD has a chance of being the dominant format at least as far as physical media is concerned.

[chiman]

Did Laserdisc becomes an collector's item?

Yes, but did these collectors made money- no.

I suspect that HD-DVD goes the same way...

[dakini]

There are only 2 films i want on hd dvd tbh. matrix trilogy and face off. the upshot is the existing stock will now be heavily discounted, esp the matrix set.