HD-DVD versus Blu-Ray

[Chancellor Valium]

Umm...yay for the colour blue?


...Why do I have the desire to make a pun involving ethical non-positivism?

[whoiam]

Technical point - HD-DVD uses (or used) a blue laser diode to read the disks, same as blu-ray. So they're both blue.

Personally, I was pretty much always in favour of Blu-ray - not because I cared in the slightest about the movie format, but because the ultimate plan for the format is an 8-layer ~200GB disk. The chance to backup my entire media collection on a mere disk or two is something I've been looking forwards to for a long time. So in that respect, it's a shame HD-DVD folded this early - if they'd been deadlocked longer, then there would be more incentive to boost the blu-ray capacity...

((At the present time: Blu-ray max capacity, 2 layers, 50GB. HD-DVD max capacity, 3 layers, 45GB. Still a small stack of disks to do a backup))

Of course, it's a good thing on the whole 'soon all movies will be on the same format' front.

As for the console war, I don't think it'll change much. Expect MS to (quietly) announce a blu-ray replacement for their add-on HD-DVD drive in a few months, when the last couple of studios sign up for Blu-ray.

[PointyHairedJedi]

I guess my whole response to this is a resounding 'Meh'. I may hypothetically buy a PS3 at some point, but that's a long way off, and I'm only marginally more enthusiastic about it than I am the Wii or the 360.

Go astronauts.

[Nate the Great]

The idea of compressing one's data collection presents to me the fear that it could go a little too far. "The dog ate my media collection!" "AGAIN?"

[danieldoof]

Yeah burning all of my media collection on one disc....a bit optimistic don't you think?
They should really work on discs more durable then. I wasn't too happy with DVDs and CDs. One or two years with normal use and some of them cannot be read by players anymore.
I would love to personally make a durability test for Blu-Ray discs and players before I trust them with all my audio-books and music :P
Does anyone know about such tests already?

[whoiam]

Varies by brand of disk - there's about 3 or 4 different coatings out there for Blu-Ray disks, and I'm pretty certain they're not entirely identical.

But that does sort of miss the point. What I wanted was a one-disk backup - written once and only read in case of emergency - stuff that gets used often is still going on hard disk. Blu-Ray disks still can't match the raptor 10K drives for sequential read speed. And a cheap RAID array still blows them out of the water.

[Nate the Great]

I suppose the only answer is datacubes. If the outer surface gets too scratched you can take it in to be buffed up and a new clear layer added on. Go h2g2!

[Nate the Great]

So it's been a year and a half, and I still don't have Blu-Ray, nor does this bother me.

Have any of you guys taken the plunge?

[Tate]

No, plain ol' DVD still works fine as far as I'm concerned. Blu-Ray seems interesting, but not enough of an improvement for me to want to spend any amount of money on it.

On the other hand, Blu-Ray does provide me with some incentive for buying a PS3 someday. If I ever do decide to try Blu-Ray, I'll probably get a PS3 instead of a stand-alone player. And I'd probably try to find one of the original release PS3s that plays PS2 games too. Why did Sony remove backwards compatibility anyway?

...But I digress. To sum up, Blu-Ray: now, no; later, maybe.