If you own a HD-DVD player, you’d better start buying clearance movies now before you can’t get any more!

I have both hd dvd and blu ray player but I prefer
hd dvd, It is sad that studios, retailers are blind when it comes to this, hd dvd you can always sell it cheaper than bluray, bluray is overpriced and so their movies. if walmart offer a cheap price I would buy movies from them. Sony products are overpriced. They are too greedy to make money from consumers. I hope toshiba hd dvd continue selling movies.

Peter - Yes, the studios and retailers are blind to your individual preference for HD-DVD.  It is the greater group preference for Blu-ray movies that is important to them. 

It may have been in part due to the PS3 but the fact is that demand has been much greater for movies in Blu-ray format.

Well, when this starts happening, I hope Wal-Mart offers bargain-basement pricing on their hardware. I’d love to pick up another machine just in case mine goes kaput any time soon because if the price is low enough, it’d be cheaper than having to re-buy my entire collection on Blu-Ray. Like Peter B, I too have both but prefer HD DVD. It really is a shame, but I’m sorry, Toshiba just wasn’t competitive enough with their advertising. This was all-or-nothing for Sony and I think if Toshiba had been more aggressive, things would have been different.

Before all the Blu boys chime in and say, “Thank God!” “Kill HD DVD!”, remember this, if it wasn’t for a competing product, Blu-Ray machines would still cost almost $1000 and I’m sure the software would be more expensive. If there’s one good thing you can say about the format war, at least it gave average people like me the ability to purchase hardware and software that may have been more expensive otherwise.

I GUESS SONY PAID THEM OFF TOO!!

“I GUESS SONY PAID THEM OFF TOO!!”

I HEARD THAT SONY PAID OFF JOHN MCCAIN ALSO!!! ;=oB

YEAH!!!! I admit, I have been a blu fan boy from day one and knew this would happen. HELLO!! HD-DVD had ONE manufacturer, much less studio support and the discs were the same price?!?! What gives?
Time for HD-DVD people to wake up and smell the flowers and ADMIT they were wrong.
Buy your cheap discs and hardware now, what fun in years to come to tell your friends choosing a movie at your home,’ oh, hang on a minute, if its in a red case, it means I have to pull the old HD-DVD player out from the closet and hook it up. Isnt there any blu movies your would prefer to watch….’ hehe.
Bring on the Blu baby!!
Everone picks on Sony! Why was Toshiba the only CE co that was too stuburn not to join ALL the other CE to make just one HDM to avoid consumer confusion.  I love compatition but not with media! “this movie is red, that one only blue etc etc” Crap!!
They make great computers, hey, then again, so do Sony. Im done :-)

LOL @ HD DVD. Twice in one day…

Now I can truly say, “it’s over”, there’s pretty much nothing they can do now. That means I don’t have to buy Iron Man on regular DVD when it comes out.

“LOL @ HD DVD. Twice in one day…”

Don’t you feel a little sympathy for the HD-DVD supporters?  Even if you didn’t want them to win, you have to feel a little bad for them now that HD-DVD is so far gone that there is nothing left to fight about.  I know I do….

THE ONE PERCENT DICTATE AGAIN WHAT THE MASSES SHOULD HEAR,WATCH AND SAY.HOW CAN A BETTER PRODUCT, AFFORDABLE,CHEAPER TO PRODUCE,FAIL.IN ONE WORD GREED AND PAYOFFS.PS3 OWNERS KEEP ON PLAYING THOSE GAMES THAT’S WHERE THEY WANT YOU TO BE.GOOD LUCK WE ALL GOIN TO NEEDED.

I don’t feel badly for the HD-DVD crowd. Not because I’m mean or anything, but for months I read post after post about how storage space doesn’t matter, but PiP was like some gift from the gods.

Someday we’ll look back on this time and laugh that people actually defended more compression and less space as “superior” in 2008.

It took longer for Blu-ray to work out the full spec, but man, it’s been worth the investment.  I bought Blu-ray discs like mad and encouraged others to do the same and it paid off. We outspent the HD-DVD crowd. I kept saying “they could give away HD-DVD players and if people are buying Blu-ray discs at ratios of two or three to one over HD-DVD media, it won’t matter if everyone in the world owns an HD-DVD player, they lose.

This is great news. Happy to see the drama coming to an end. However, it is a little sad that these people are so bitter that they are willing to pass on Blu-ray just to make a point. It’s really their loss. They’ll be waiting an eternity for 1080/24p streaming over the Internet.

Soundzilla
What are you going to do with all those blewray discs you bought that was hardly worth watching once let alone twice.  I guess the shiny blue covers will look good on a bookshelf.

Soundzilla…  Yeah, I guess I don’t feel so bad for the HD-DVD people.  Now that I think about it, many of them had to lie in order to try and sell their format to people online.  A thread didn’t go by without someone propagating some kind of BS about HD-DVD that wasn’t true, or making personal attacks against Sony, or lying about Blu-Ray technology in order to make HD-DVD look better.

I have both formats.  I wasn’t even involved with taking sides until I just got so sick of the lies that I finally started to counter them on Audiogon with the truth to balance things out…  I am a technical person (as many early adopters are technically inclined) with a Bachelors in Computer Science.  Seeing the total BS being spread by HD-DVD definitely helped me to pick a side and eventually stick with it. 

It is funny how that whole approach ended up alienating their primary nascent customer base.  They shot themselves in the foot thinking that the early adapters weren’t intelligent enough to see through the BS being posted online to the technology underneath in this day and age.  Perhaps that kind of crap would have worked a few decades ago, but not now with so many early adopters being technically inclined instead of just foolishly wealthy.

Despite the smear campaign they pushed on people online, HD-DVD lost.  I guess HD-DVD got what it deserved.  Perhaps justice had nothing to do with it, but it certainly feels good to think justice had something to do with it.

I did not know that having a computer science degree would make you an expert.  I thought being in the Home Theater business (like I am) would.  I do think that my Accounting degree and Master of Business Administration helped me to decipher which format favored the consumer (HDDVD) vs. the format that favored the suppliers and retailers.  I also have both formats and I calls it like I sees and hears it.

It’s fine.  I will continue to enjoy my HD and upconverted DVD’s until bluray is more affordable.  The ~$400 price tag is more than I want to fork over considering the A3 upconverts SD to near HD quality.  Heck, I may not upgrade to BD until 2012.

actiondvdguy,

The Computer engineering courses and math courses taken in a computer science degree make it easy to understand the technology underneath these formats.  I never claimed to be an expert, but it certainly is easier to be an expert on the technology involved with that kind of background than to be one with by just being in the home theater business or having a business degree. 

What your background didn’t illuminate is that early adopters tend to be technophiles nowadays, and technophiles tend to understand the technologies underneath are more important that the illusive and ever changing smokescreen of format issues (which can be altered while remaining backwards compatible via software and firmware programming).  People chose the better technical format.  I know that helped me decide.

BTW, who said I didn’t have a business background also?  That post is exactly the kind of horsecrap I was referring to… ;)

Most of America doesn’t bother with advanced degrees so mentioning you have one merely establishes that you are not uneducated. I don’t think anyone here is mentioning their degrees because they consider it to make them an “expert”.

Actiondvdguy: I’ve been collecting movies for over 20 years. I watch movies often in my dedicated home theater. Trust me, my movies don’t gather dust.

Wow, sorry for the typos…  My kids kept my wife and I up all last night.  They have fevers and were vomiting generously.

Corrections:

I never claimed to be an expert, but it certainly is easier to be an expert on the technology involved with that kind of background than to be one by just being in the home theater business or having a business degree.

What your background didn’t illuminate is that early adopters tend to be technophiles nowadays, and technophiles tend to understand that the technologies underneath are more important than the illusive and ever changing smokescreen of format issues (which can be altered while remaining backwards compatible via software and firmware programming).

actiondvdguy quote: “I thought being in the Home Theater business (like I am) would.  I do think that my Accounting degree and Master of Business Administration helped me to decipher which format favored the consumer (HDDVD) vs. the format that favored the suppliers and retailers.”

Response: Unfortunately, cheaper is usually not better.  The Japanese understood this and consistently called “HD-DVD” the “inferior” format.  To a tech saavy culture (with lots of tech giant companies), hardware capabilities and limitations are what make something better.  Software is not limited in itself - it is only limited by the hardware.  Blu-ray has the greater hardware capability with higher storage potential and faster data transfer.  HD-DVD, on the other hand, only made a small improvement over DVD in storage and they were not able to push it past DVD in data transfer (higher speed drives were not working out).

When you want to move to the next step in technology you can’t base it on cost alone.  You have to make your basis on actual improvements to current technology.  HD-DVD was a very minor improvement over DVD.  Blu-ray took the improvement to a much higher level.  Data storage capability alone compared, Blu-ray compared to HD-DVD is the same level of improvement in potential as HD-DVD compared to DVD.  Why stop half-way in improving technology when you can go all the way?

A $150, 1080i, 30GB HD-DVD player IS technically “inferior” to a 1080p, 50GB optical, 40GB hard-drive equipped, bluetooth equipped, game-ready PS3 at $400.