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source: zdnet.com

Blu-ray won
The sturm und drang over the Blu-ray vs HD DVD battle has come to naught. After a bit of jostling Blu-ray has taken an unassailable lead over HD DVD. Blockbuster’s Matthew Smith, SVP of merchandising, says“The consumers are sending us a message. I can’t ignore what I’m seeing.” This is what he’s seen:

Blockbuster has been renting both Blu-ray and HD DVD titles in 250 stores since late last year and found that consumers were choosing Blu-ray titles more than 70 percent of the time.

Ghost of Betamax laid to rest
Sony has played this game well. They own a movie studio, and got all but one of the major studios to release on Blu-ray. They put a Blu-ray player in every PS3. And they benefit by the rapid growth of HDTV sales.

Despite the disappointing sales of the PS3, the fact that it includes a Blu-ray player also tilted the playing field. A leading indicator: Toshiba recently reduced its US sales goal for HD DVD players by 40%. The rapid uptake of HDTV in the US completes the content-player-display triumvirate.

It is safe to buy that Blu-ray disk player now
The biggest loser in this is Toshiba. They’ve put a lot of time and money behind HD DVD. Microsoft is also a loser, partly as a supporter and partly because their add-on Xbox HD DVD player sales will tank. The folks who bought one can’t be feeling too good about Microsoft’s judgement.

Intel, another backer, loses too, but they seem to have had the least skin in the game. They probably just went along because of Microsoft.

The Storage Bits take
It is all over but the shouting. Expect to see some closeout sales on HD DVD players and burners, but I wouldn’t buy one. Now that the market has shifted you can expect to see Blu-ray burner prices drop faster. I expect that Apple will be adding on on their next gen Mac Pro, and after that, the MacBook Pro.

In time this may also boost Firewire, which is substantially faster than USB. In fact, USB 2.0 probably can’t handle 18x DVD writers at full speed, and 20x DVD writers are starting to make it to market. Once Blu-ray writers get up to 6x speed, Firewire will be the way to go.

The biggest winners though, are us, the consumers. 50 GB optical storage is good for all digital junkies. Now that we don’t have to worry about the format war, we can get back to rip, mix, burn!

Source: www.engadget.com

Well, as far as HD DVD vs. Blu-ray goes, it looks like we've pretty much passed the point of no return now; with each passing day it seems less and less likely that a compromise will be reached on a next-gen format. The ongoing peace talks between the two camps, which have been on-again, off-again for months now, seem to have finally dissolved. It's disappointing, but however you feel about the fact that the HD DVD and Blu-ray factions squandered countless chances to make it right and come together, it looks like in just a few short months they're going to be duking it out mano a mano right in our livingrooms. There may not be a lot we can do to fight back - apart from refusing to adopt either format out of sheer spite of their pigheadedness - but no matter what we might as well at least arm ourselves with the knowledge necessary to understand the nature of the situation at hand.

Here's the background:

Philips's development of the Laserdisc in 1969 yielded many of the technologies Sony carried over and adopted when they partnered with Philips to create a little something called the CD way back in '79. Both companies were hard at work together once again in the early 1990s on a new high-density disc called the MultiMedia Compact Disc (MMCD-original name, guys), but their format was eventually more or less abandoned in favor of Toshiba's competing Super Density Disc (SD), which had the vast majority of backers at the time, such as Hitachi, Matsushita (Panasonic), Mitsubishi, Pioneer, Thomson, and Time Warner.

The two factions cut a deal, brokered by IBM president Lou Gerstner, on a new format: DVD. Toshiba wound up on top after the dust settled in 1995/1996, and Sony and Philips, who weren't cut in on the standard (and royalties) nearly as much as they'd have liked, immediately started work on a next gen system. The Professional Disc for DATA (aka PDD or ProDATA), which was based on an optical disc system Sony had already been developing in the side, would eventually become the Blu-ray disc. Toshiba, not to be outdone by the pair, also started work on a next gen system, the Advanced Optical Disc, which eventually evolved into the HD DVD. After thirty-five years of optical audio/video disc development we're back where we were years ago: two money-grubbing factions fighting each other and threatening to wreak havoc on the consumer electronics industry. Apparently history really does repeat itself.

So here's the technical nitty gritty before we drop the graphs n' charts on ya. Both systems use the same kind of 405nm wavelength blue-violet laser, but their optics differ in two ways. Since the Blu-ray disc has a tighter track pitch (the single thread of data that spirals from the inside of the disc all the way out—think grooves on a 12-inch vinyl single vs. an Elvis Costello full-length album), it can hold more pits (those microscopic 0s and 1s) on the same size disc as HD DVD even with a laser of the same wavelength.

The differing track pitch of the Blu-ray disc makes its pickup apertures differ, however—0.65 for HD DVD vs. 0.85 for Blu-ray—thus also making the two pickups technically incompatible despite using lasers of the same type. HD DVD discs also have a different surface layer (the clear plastic layer on the surface of the data—what you get fingerprints and scratches on) from Blu-ray discs. HD DVD use a 0.6 mm-thick surface layer, the same as DVD, while Blu-ray has a much smaller 0.1mm layer to help enable the laser to focus with that 0.85 aperture.

Herein lies the issues associated with the higher cost of Blu-ray discs. This thinner surface layer is what makes the discs cost more; because Blu-ray discs do not share the same surface layer thickness of DVDs, costly production facilities must be modified or replaced in order to produce the discs. A special hard coating must also be applied to Blu-ray discs, so their surface is sufficiently resilient enough to protect the data a mere 0.1mm beneath—this also drives the cost up. The added benefit of keeping the data layer closer to the surface, however, is more room for extra layers.

Still with us? No? Blu-ray discs are more expensive, but hold more data—there, that's all.

So now that you know why Blu-ray discs cost more and why Sony/Philips and Toshiba are all harshing on one another so much, we can get to the really important stuff: the numbers, and who's supporting who.