From a pure tech perspective, it’s a bit better than HD-DVD.

>they're more concerned about trying to win the console war
>which is a reason HD DVD was never built into xbox.

This is true. They wanted to get the 360 out quicker than the PS3 and get a jump. Original plans for 360 included an HD-DVD drive, but they scraped it because it was taking too long.

HD DVD is
>much cheaper for everyone involved as it was more like regular
>DVDs than blu ray.

It’s currently cheaper because it uses a similar process as DVD to make the discs. Once production really ramps up on Blu-Ray, the cost will be the same.

As it is, the cost per disc for Blu-Ray isn’t THAT much more than HD-DVD.

>Ultimately, blu ray won't provide anything
>that hd dvd didn't other than making it extremely hard for
>anyone to find a media alternative to buying expensive blu ray
>to get the most of their hdtvs.

Nope. Since I first heard about both specs, I always thought Blu-Ray was the better one because it’s possible to store more data on each disc. The theoretical limit for HD-DVD is a four layer disc with 15GB per layer. That’s a total of 60GB. Blu-Ray is a bit better since it can have up to eight layers in theory. At 25GB per layer, that’s 200GB, or more than double the amount of data that can be stored on HD-DVD.

The ability to eventually back up your hard drive to two or three discs is incredible, especially considering these discs have a shelf life that’s much longer than your average hard drive. Not to mention the possibilities this offers for gaming (not so much this gen, but next gen will probably get a ton of use out of that size increase)


Piracy using a 50gb disc will
>be very hard. Sony knows this. The encryptions will constantly
>change (hell, some of sony's recent encryptions on regular
>dvds is off the chains) plus it'll take someone much longer to
>copy. I don't like the reasoning behind blu ray. But it looks
>like it's the future till people all get super duper extreme
>internet download speeds which is a long ways off imo.

Both discs use similar security measures (maybe the same; ask RJ). The size of a 50GB Blu-Ray disc makes downloading a bootleg a pain, but it wouldn’t be that much better with a 30GB HD-DVD. Unless internet speeds increase in line with the filesizes, all of this stuff is going to be a pain to download.