Quick Question

[Scryer_360]

Is the general consensus by videophiles that HD DVD is the better HD format, given its region free and has plenty of storage capacity? Really, does anyone need 100gigs for storing HD on a Blu-Ray disc? I think not.

[yoda313]

For playback I am guessing people here would say they are essentially the same - as long as you have an equal player and equal tv. If you only have a 1080i hddvd player and put it up against a 1080p bluray player than the bluray player would look better - even though the movies in hddvd are encoded in 1080p not all hddvd players are 1080p output.

NOW for RECORDING purposes I would say space is king. When have we ever had too much space for our digital needs??? We always want more.

I think in the recording market whichever comes out with the most space at the right price will win there.

But I think as far as performance they will turn out to be pretty equal in the end. However I don't have first hand bluray knowledge just yet. I have my xbox 360 hddvd drive set up through my pc with a dvi-hdmi cable and it looks great on my 32inch 1366x768 westinghouse. I have it set to the pixel for pixel mode so it matches the sets resolution.

What I am looking forward to is renting the bluray version of a movie I already have on hddvd and doing a comparison. Probably superman returns or maybe harry potter. This will of course be after I get my bluray rom drive shipped in the next day or so from newegg

These of course are just my opinions...

[Nilfennasion]

Wow, did you just make yourself look clever, OP. :P

Speaking from the perspective of someone who reviewed SD transfers when DVD-Video was the new kid in town, Region Coding is a moot point. You could divide the world up into as many Regions as there are countries, or even provinces/states, and it will not make a lick of difference when your format becomes completely mainstream. Someone, somewhere, will buy or be given a disc that is from a Region different to the one they live in, and they will want to play it. This time next year, Region A discs will be playable anywhere.

Which brings me to point B. In a growing majority of cases, if you want your favourite film in HD, then Blu-Ray is the only way to go. Comparing the list of titles available in each format side by side, my personal favourite director's work is available no less than five times on BD. It is available a grand total of zero times on HD-DVD. And from speaking with family members or friends, I am not alone in that respect. Given the stunt one HD-DVD enthusiast pulled recently, too, there seems to be a growing feeling of desperation. Hardly what I would expect from owners of a format they expect to be available a few years from now.

And lastly, you forget the golden rule of digital video. The more space you have to store things in, the better. While I doubt that commercial BDs will ever be released with more than fifty "gigabytes" per disc, having a bit of extra room makes all the difference, as anyone who lives in a PAL region where eight soundtracks, thirty subtitles, and a mediocre video transfer are frequently the expected norm will attest.

[jman98]

Scryer_360 - Yes, you have a valid point. It's a valid argument as to whether or not it's really necessary to have so much space on a BluRay disc. In the early days, thanks to the incompetence of Sony, it was necessary because the earliest BluRay discs were all encoded as MPEG-2 with very high bit rates because Sony's engineers couldn't get any other codec to work for BluRay encoding. This hasn't been true for a while now, but it was true in the early days.

As far as Nilfennasion's comments go, I tend to discount views from people who say that either BluRay or HD DVD is the clear winner now. Nobody really knows. For what's it worth, my favorite director isn't available on either format and probably won't be for 5-10 years, if ever. If his happened to be on HD DVD instead, I have a feeling that we could just
substitute "HD DVD" for "BluRay" in his comments.

Subtitles take up almost no space at all on a DVD, so who cares if PAL releases have 30 different ones? I have yet to see a PAL DVD with 8 soundtracks. I've never seen more than 3 or 4 tops. Anway, if they use AC3 and make some of those soundtracks 2 channel instead of 5.1, it won't take up a lot of space.