Why, oh Why would I pay nearly $1000 for a late launching device with deprecated and inferior technology? I’m all for cometition, but let’s have some, really. Codec’s aside, are the manufacturing difficulties not an indication that this device should have stayed on the drawing board? I’ll take HD any way I can get it, I love the stuff, but I will not shell out 2x’s HD-DVD hard ware prices (8x’s if you consider the Xbox360 HD-DVD add-on I just bought for $200) for this failure destined device. If the tech makes it to 3rd gen at consumer pricing, I’d consider it lucky - And maybe then I’d buy one, and only if the beholden Studios don’t reneg and support both formats. Bottom line is there is no advantages to Blu-Ray over HD-DVD other than storage capacity. That being said, I’ll take a well made, resonable priced Sedan that seats 5 over a slow moving Box Truck with room for 20!
(plus who is the “Wal-Mart” shopper with an extra $1000 - I’d sooner but a PS3 with BD for $600 than this)

**Please forgive my TYPOs**

HD-DVD is on its death bed.  The PS3 will be the final nail in its coffin.  First adopters will shed many tears. Joe Consumer will go buy millions of PS3s and watch Talladega Nights with the youngin’s.

Save some space in your closet for that $200 add-on.

I can’t think of any reason to buy the Phillps for $1000 when in two months I can buy the Pioneer for the street price of $200 more?

Unless you know something the rest of us don’t, Pioneer’s Blu-Ray player will retail for $1,500, when it is finally released in December.

Weird that Walmart would get this first. Even if it wasn’t intentional. I just saw another one of those Walmart ads which go after higher-end av product buyers, and in doing so slam the other resellers.

Donald, Jimmy - The Pioneer Blu-ray player is set to retail at $1500.

More here:
http://tinyurl.com/y9u8qu

Wow, the price keeps going up. I love having the opportunity to pay WAY more for the same* thing. And by same I mean inferior. Apples to Apples, HD IS HD. I had Beta, it WAS better than VHS. I had (have) LaserDisc, it was better than VHS, or Apples to Apples - better than RCA Video Disc. My point is that consumers on the whole are NOT uniformly brand conscious or loyal - Granted those in the middle are, the truely informed will jump ship if the facts support it, the uninformed buy what they are SOLD. Don’t be sold, think for yourself, do the research and if you can’t afford to choose wrong… WAIT for the dust to settle. If this was any other debate it would have been over already, Blu-Ray is just too early, expensive and plagued for its own good. And Sony will NOT be selling MILLIONS of PS3’s anytime soon, its a shame they couldn’t make 20mill avail for launch, because (I predict) once the first batch gets out and the issues start to present, Sony will be crying the blues. I have played PS3, I have seen Blu-Ray in action, it very simply and factually (not opinion) is NOT better than HD-DVD, or the Xbox360. The expected dominance at 1yr late could ONLY happen thanks to rabid fanboys, and I doubt there are enough of them left.

Its just Dollars and SENSE people. I wish it were different, I have a $4400 Sony SXRD (so I am not a Sony Hater by any means) and wish I could go buy a Blu-Ray player on the cheap and hook it up. But I CAN’T AFFORD IT!

The format war is over.  HD DVD has already won and is far superior to blur ray.  Have fun buying a $900 paper weight!

This unit is not expensive for what you get.
Toshiba’s XA2 will be the first one to properly support 1080p - it retails at $999
The X Box 360 add-on doesn’t even support hi-def audio, only lossy Dolby Digital and lossy DTS. It’s not even worth $200! The missing HDMI is also pathetic.

Blu-ray is the future of high definition.

Blur ray is the future of nothing, unless you’d like to count wasting money on it and a lighter wallet.  You can get the Xbox 360 add-on for $160 after the Circuit City rebate.  Hmmm $160, or $1000-1500 on Blur ray…

Who cares about 1080p!  Both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray use a 1080p/24 encoding.  This can be converted to 1080p/60 or 1080i/60 without loosing any info.  Any decent TV can de-interlace 1080i and produce the same quality image.  Read http://www.projectorcentral.com/retailing_HD-DVD_Blu-ray.htm for more into.

The Toshiba A2 will be fine for me at $450.  I have an HDMI capable receiver, so see no advantages to go to Blu-Ray or the XA2.

Both technology are pretty much equivalent.  The big advantage of HD-DVD is price!  Why pay more?

If all that you want is cheap HD video, then by all means, buy Toshiba or Microsoft, but I also want new games that are designed for HD.  Microsoft’s add-on is for watching movies only at this point.  For those guys claiming that HD DVD is superior to Blue-ray, they just don’t know what they are talking about.  When you really understand the underlying technologies and capabilities, Blue-ray is more forward thinking and future-proof than HD DVD, in terms of storage capacity, interactive technology, connectivity to the Internet, etc…  For my computer or TV recorder, I want a disc that can store 200Gb instead of 90Gb, currently, Blue-ray 50Gb vs. 25Gb HD DVD.
HDMI is not only about delivering 1080p video, instead of 1080i, it also carries the digital audio above 5 channels.  Professional reviewers of the technology have found that the older component video outputs, or conversion cables to HDMI yield mixed results, depending on your TV.
As for price, I can still spend $1000, but buy a PS3 and Toshiba XA-2, both with HDMI, and have the best of both worlds.  This market is not only about different formats, it addresses people who have different needs, wants and goals, as well as different wallets.  We are still much too early in this technology, to see how the various media producers are going to exploit it.  Choose what is best for You…

This has turned into a debate of “potential”, not practicallity. While the Blu-Ray has the potential for higher storage, in practicallity it serves little purpose at this point. Does that make BD “Forward Thinking”? Not really, because of the method by which BD facilitates this storage on the same size disc (via narrower beam on the substrate closer to the surface) it means the disc is inherantly more vulnerable to damage/data loss. If BD was forward thinking, why do (most) BD movies come encoded in the MPEG-2 format vs. the VC-1 and newer codecs that are in use? I have yet to hear any arguement for Blu-Ray that touts anything other than its potential storage capacity. As for the Xbox add-on, which I have, the DDS downmix is a perfect example of giving the user an option (The option to have MOST of the potential NOW, at a reasonable price). Part of the expense in the “fuller featured” drives is licensing the decoders for other codecs. If MS decides to support it, and the built-in Sound device can support it, it can be added later via updates. HDMI? Do the research, bandwidth potential is greater via componant cables, so 1080p’s hold back is only HDCP handshaking. Xbox360 does not have HDMI because it has no digital head on the video output, not because MS doesn’t like us. I challenge anyone to bring a BD machine to my house, connect it to my Yamaha 2600 and my Sony 60: SXRD XBR1 and show me a sound and picture dicernably better than what my 360 HD is offering me for $200.

***Edit to my previous post***
Now that I think of it, the 360 add-on does support the DTS and DTS-EX soundtracks, as I just watched CARS in SD on the THX-EX soundtrack. It does NOT yet support it for HD-DVD, so I suspect this is a licence issue, not a hardware issue. And for the record, the add-on does practically nothing, just sends the stream to the 360, the 360 itself does all the processing and output.

Update: See an interview with Philips representative John Morog at the Electronic House Expo. Morog discusses the BDP9000:

http://tinyurl.com/sse2x

Looks like the FUD team over at MS is working overtime.

Hey, you are entitled to your opinions. Just stop spreading FUD. Let me call out a couple of them.

Please explain how “the same” means inferior. Last time I checked the dictionary, “the same” means, well, the same.

“(most) BD movies come encoded in… MPEG-2…”
Show us. Post the list with call-outs for each encoded method. Or at the very least, list the ones you actually know of.

“...bandwidth potential is greater via componant cables, so 1080p’s hold back is only HDCP handshaking.”
You got me there. Do you get audio over the three (3) component cables? I know you can do it with one (1) HDMI cable. As for potential bandwidth, how are you figuring that? Are you counting the signal bandwidth going down the cables? HDMI is a digital standard. Component is analog. Since we are only talking about potential here. One can, with compression and/or encoding, achieve greater bandwidth given the same cable and signal. After all, even tho the content of the signal is digital, the signal traveling down the wire is still analog.

“...show me a sound and picture dicernably better than… my 360 HD…”
Only if you agree that a non-downmixed audio track “sound” better than one that is downmixed.

“...what my 360 HD is offering me for $200.”
So, the Xbox 360 is free?

<rant>
Ok, 1st off, only FUD I know is Elmer, so what’s that about? “Same” means inferior in the land of SARCASM, some place I assume you’ve never been.
To be fair the following quote describes both formats encoding schemas:

The original context can be seen here: http://www.hometheatermag.com/hookmeup/506hook/

“The Blu-ray side, led by Sony Pictures, is currently advocating MPEG-2 compression as the way to provide the highest-quality images. A Sony Pictures spokesman says that all of their initial releases will be encoded in MPEG-2, which requires more disc capacity to encode a movie. Sony and their other owned studios do not support HD DVD and do not intend to release discs in the format. Sony also owns a number of Blu-ray patents.

The HD DVD camp will be releasing most of their discs in either MPEG-4 or VC-1. According to Microsoft’s HD DVD program manager, Sage Schreiner, in a published interview, “On a quality 1,920-by-1080p display, MPEG-2 will not look as good as VC-1 (or H.264).” 

As for “Showing” you a list of MPEG2 movies, this is not the venue, suffice to say “early” titles, and those from SONY for the most part have been. The issue is not necessarily the ability to compress with quality, but with quality and smaller files. You point a finger a MS, but HD-DVD & VC1 (Thankyou MP9) simply does a more EFFICIENT job (As does MPEG4) of compression with quality, thus affording us the SAME (if not better on occasion) Picture quality on a less expensive, less delicate media. Point being, you can’t use a inefficient, out dated codecs to justify the necessity for larger storage capacity—

A Quick History of MPEG-2

  * 1970’s Work in digital compression lead to specification of Discrete Cosine Transform algorithms.
  * 1988, Motion Picture Expert Group (MPEG) formed.
  * 1992, MPEG-2 (TV) and MPEG-3 (HDTV) combined.
  * 1993, MPEG-2 Main profile defined (compatible with MPEG-1).
  * 1993, ETSI DVB Project set up to extend MPEG-2 system details
  * 1994, ISO 13818-1 MPEG-2 Systems Definition.
  * 1996, Standardisation of the 4:2:2 video format.
  * 1996, Set of Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) standards published by ETSI.
  * 1996, HDTV (1250/50) demonstrated in 16:9 (widescreen) format
  * 1996, 2 Million MPEG-1 video disk players in China
  * 1996, U.S. adopts a Digital TV (DTV) standard based on MPEG-2
  * 1997, Extended CPU graphics instruction sets able to decode MPEG on a PC
  * 1997, First interactive Digital Video Broadcast service using MPEG-2
  * 1998, Digital Versatile Disk (DVD) using MPEG-2
  * 1998, Active Movie API allowing MPEG-2 to be played on a PC
  * 1998, Launch of DVB-T terrestrial TV service throughout the UK
  * 1998, Launch of DTV service in U.S.A
  * 2000, Definition of the DVB Multimedia Home Platform (MHP)

Regarding bandwidth; I conceed that currently Single Link HDMI has just enough to handle the 1080p signal at 165 million pixels per second (1080p requires 144mps) and Dual Link carries twice that. Yes Component is Analog but then SO IS EVERYTHING, except the data stored on the disc. Not the FILM, not the TV and not the SOUND coming from the AVR (And yes, I know there are such things as digital Amps/TVs and Speakers, do you have these? I don’t) Don’t get me wrong, I love HDMI, I thnk its great - I hate extra wires as much as you do, I’m simply stating the facts. I have a fairly decent HT for consumer grade stuff, and I’m telling you its all good at this level, PQ and AQ. So as far as the Downmix from my 360, well my RX-V2600 does such nice work with DDS that I can’t really say I miss the extra oomph, yet anyway. I admit my quality time with HD-DVD has been limited. But, again, this audio stream issue can be addressed with licencing via MS and updated via XBL. I guess I have more faith in a device and its makers that admits that times will change, and builds-in the ability to adapt (Analog output only on the 360 not withstanding - Damn you MS!!). Yes, I was the dumb-### who sat in line for 12hrs for an Xbox360. I am no fanboy, just a semi educated consumer. So adding (my option, not a forced decision as is the case with SONY & BD -PS3) a HD-DVD for $200 is a deal. Even IF you went out and bought a $300 Xbox360 and a HD-DVD add-on $200 you have now spent $500, the price of a HD-A1 (Surprise! You get more from a Xbox360 - overall - than from a Stand Alone Player for about the same investment) Or you could buy a $1000 ~ $1800 BD Player, or a $600 PS3, if you can find one (Shocking, you get A LOT more for your $$ with a PS3, over all).
I guess I like things to be fair and equal. BD just plain does not deliver 2 or 3x’s the ANYTHING to warrant the price tag. </rant>

O’ Henry…  If you’re knowledgeable enough about the difference in how Blue-ray stores data, then you should also know that they addressed the vulnerability of scratching back in 2004, and this is no longer an issue.  Depending on the hardcoat, it has been shown to be resistant to steel wool. 
Blue-ray also supports all the HD codec types as HD DVD does: VC-1, AVC/MPEG-4 (H.264) and MPEG-2. 
It is the studio releasing the title that is choosing an appropriate codec type (no studio is completely wedded to any codec), and even Universal, which is HD DVD only, is releasing a title in AVC/MPEG-4 and not VC-1.

Kit,

The vulnerability addressed by 3M may very well have aided in the BD disc’s ability so stave off the occasional steel wooling, but it most certainly added to the production cost. This is never a positive thing. My point all along, regardless of how the negatives get addressed is that there are a) Too Many negatives that need/had to be addressed, and b) The production costs and/or difficulties make the format disadvantaged out of the gate. The Edsel was a really great car, ever heard otherwise? Sure you have, beacause it got off to a bad start…