Interscription

There you have it; your resident 360 fanboy commenting on the the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD format war.  I should probably blog to the world my true feelings on the matter, and why I think we should all go home.  Much ado has been made regarding the recent Paramount HD-DVD exclusivity deal, and while I do agree this will string out the battle for quite a bit longer, there are two major points that I don’t think HD-DVD supporters like to think about:

1. - Blu-Ray is in every PS3.  That’s not going to change, and Sony will sell millions of "players" as a result.

2. - Sony is also a movie studio, and they’ll never utilize HD-DVD.  Ever.

Most businesses are going to side with Sony because the lay of the land says that Blu-Ray has hooks that HD-DVD doesn’t have.  These two points are dirtier then any $150 million payout, and it’s a cheap way to win the war.  After bombing out on 3 formats now, I guess they couldn’t stand going through it again.

Of particular frustration is the inferiority of the format.  (Read this for a surprisingly enlightening comparison of the technologies associated with both).  Blu-Ray is readying a release of a new Blu-Ray standard, Profile 1.1, that is going to mimmick the interactive features that HD-DVD owners have enjoyed for months (it is due this October).  What does that mean for current Blu-Ray owners?  Hard to say, but since this wasn’t part of the initial specification, I guess some folks won’t be able to realize these features without buying a new player.  (To be fair, if the player has an Ethernet jack and supports these features from a hardware perspective, they will be firmware-upgradeable.  The PS3 most likely doesn’t have anything to worry about here).

And it didn’t have to be that way!!!  There was a reported truce in the works last year, and Sony kicked the HD-DVD consortium to the curb in an effort to keep a larger share of the market to themselves.  (Sorry for the bias, folks, but why else would Sony deny a superior technology that they would then later adopt *cough* Profile 1.1 *cough*???)

I certainly don’t want to minimize the capacity differences between the two discs; 50GB is more than 30GB, plain and simple.  And while it’s a little alarming that HD-DVD is doing the same job better with less disc space (so, if you’re not gonna use that extra space for features, guys, how ’bout no disc swapping?  Nah, didn’t think so), I think we need to be real about the benefits of additional space.  If not for movies, definitely for games.  Blue Dragon on three DVDs vs. Heavenly Sword’s 10GB of audio on one Blu-Ray kinda puts the kibash on any argument there.  I’ll try to reserve my pro-efficiency thoughts about compression and procedural rendering for another post, but sufficed to say that a bigger pallete for world creation is never a bad thing, regardless of how lazy programmers will get in a 50GB fridge.

So I guess it’s Blu-Ray for the masses, folks.  Whaddaya think?