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And it looks like Blu-Ray is going to win out. Of course, Blu-Ray is not fully ready…and this is the thing that concerns me. It is kind of like a car manufacturer declaring, “Yeah, we knew we were a year away from fully functional breaks and stuff…but man, Saturn was putting a new car on the market, so we rushed it out early. Sorry your cars do not work right folks-but we have a newer version of the car that will work! Just buy that!”
Some Blu-Ray fans have tried to suggest that this is similar to how early DVD players did not support DVD-/+R formats, but there is a difference between not being able to play a DVD you burned on your computer and one you bought in a store. And most of the studios chose a side, naming among other things, not wanting to continue producing two seperate versions of the same movie for Hi-Def, now the plan is to do that anyhow-just for Blu-Ray only. (Certainly, there were other reasons the studios have chosen Blu-Ray over HD-DVD, such as the fact that HD-DVD is region free and Blu-Ray has a “better” anti-piracy code)
Blu-Ray has continuously seemed the less consumer friendly of the two formats (in spite of the ardent fans of Blu-Ray) while being very studio friendly. It’s not a bad format, but it is a format not nearly as ready for use as HD-DVD was when it was released. I’d I have preferred to see a format win on it’s true merits, rather than “the Studios were convinced to go exclusive.” But it looks like the format war will be over far sooner than I thought it would be, initially. I am curious to see what Paramount and Universal do. TheBlu-Ray camp keeps publishing articles about how they COULD switch sides…but both studios continue to state they are standing by HD-DVD.
