HD-DVD Officially Dead

Yes! I just bought one yesterday, very impressed with its 1080p upscaling, and I guess I will buy some of my fave movies once the drop in price, maybe even a second player to keep in storage, at these clear out prices it's hard not to be tempted

Now:

1. companies like OPPO will be able to choose a new format to focus on and we will start to see reasonably priced high quality BluRay players on the market at about the same time as

2. the switch to all digital HD broadcasts occurs in less than 12 months and

3. many consumers are faced with buying either a set top box to control their current 4:3 set, or purchase a new HD wide screen tv that takes advantage of HD broadcasts, downloads and disks and

4. standard DVD will begin to fade to black as the cost of entering into full on HD falls and

5. land fills around the world will brim with all $50 DVD players, and cheap 5.1 non HDMI HT systems people bought and are throwing out with their perfectly good 4:3 CRT televisions and

6. both Sony AND Toshiba enjoy incredible profits as the entire world retools to go HD.

You got to love it.

PS - the dead parrot thing was too funny.

Knownothing, Oppo has already announced a BD player.

Blu-ray is the superior tech despite what a couple of naysayers have tried to preach in this thread.

Warner has publically stated that BD was cheaper and easier to encode than hd dvd was because of bandwidth.
Now lets just hope they use the extra space and bandwith on future releases instead of the good enough hd dvd ports we had been getting on Blu.

Bandwidth and space are very important for HD optical.

With all the CE's backing Blu from the beggining, I can't believe anyone is suprised that hd dvd lost.
The truth is that this would have been over long ago had M/S not suckered Toshiba into pressing on last year.

I owned several players from both formats as well as a PS3, and BD's best looking movies do look better than hd dvd's on my 110" screen.
Is it far better?...no
Is it enough to matter to a true enthusiast with a dedicated theater?
That would probably depend on the size and quality of display ect.

BD had always had the better audio with uncompressed PCM on every single Disney, Sony title, and DTS-=Master Audio on every Fox title.
Warner sold 63 million dollars more on Blu than hd dvd in 07 with 25 titles including The Matrix, Batman Begins and V for Vendetta not out on Blu.

The consumers/ enthusiast have chosen BD so let's just hope that Universal and Paramount actually use the 50gb discs with higher bitrates and Lossless/Uncompressed audio.

With reportedly 7 out of 10 HDTV owners waiting for a clear winner in the previous pillow fight, we should see quite a bit more adoption between now and the end of 08.

Nobody with any common sense is going to pay 300.00 for a box so they can pay to rent crappy looking downloads that are barely better looking than dvd, and take 7 hours to download, when they can rent the better looking and sounding BD from Netflix, Blockbuster, Hollywood Video and Movie Gallery ect.

Actual 1080p downloads that will most likely never have lossless audio, are mnany years away for the majority.
I would say at least 5 years.

BD Players have ben problematic from day one for so many reasons. It is important for all of us to keep em honest so that we actually have a decent product to choose from in a couple of years when Blu Ray catches up to where Hd-DVD already was.

The main problem is a lack of agreed upon spec so that all of the players dont have similar functionality.

Assuming that Blu ray movies actually move to web enabled content and true interactivity at some point in the future ( I believe this will occur)- then a viable Blu ray player will need to have an ethernet port, picture in a picture capability, and persistent memory capabilities. Maybe Toshiba will teach them how to have all of this in one player for a reasonable price so mass-adoption has a chance.

Most folks dont own an audio system that allows any of the hidef audio formats to make a difference. Obviously on this forum that doesn't apply.

I have both formats and still prefer HD to Blue Ray in both picture and sound quality.