Bluray VS. HD DVD?

Question

Which one do you think is better, BLURAY or HD DVD, and why?

Answer 1

Why wasn't Shawn more excited about his new HD-DVD player? Because the $99.00 A2 is only a 1080i player, not 1080p. At any moment in time, a 1080i signal is only showing 540 lines since it's interlaced. His old DVD player will show 480p so at any given moment, he is seeing 480 lines.

There's not much difference between 540 and 480. For a true test of the dramatic improvement of HD disks, you have to try a 1080p player on a TV with 1080p capability.

HD-DVD looks great, so does BluRay. I have both in my theater and both in my computer. I'd side with BluRay only because the disks hold twice as much data. BluRay is a little more expensive than a 1080p HD-DVD but double the storage is worth it in my opinion.

Answer 2

Let me say this a two hour movie is a two hour movie when the credits roll I never say god I wish I had more space on this disk and the audio compression is so non existent that the average consumer will never never hear it. Unless we are all running a $15,000 Bang and Olufsen system with analog tube receivers. They both produce 1080p and well it has nothing to do with image quality but more to do with which organization can suck more money from the average consumer. Pick what ever you want I have the Phillips HTS8100 and the picture on that is amazing and all it does is upscale. Don't get me wrong Blue Ray and HD DVD's look amazing with a HD TV that can put out 1080p as well as with a good quality surround sound system. If you don't posses that then the purchase and argument is pointless.

Answer 3

Everyone will have different opinions on this one.

From what I have read, the quality is about the same on both, even though BlueRay currently has larger capacity discs. HD-DVD is cheaper. No one knows which one will win the format war, and it may take another year to really start to see who is the winner.

I had not planned on buying a player yet, but Wal-Mart's $98 HD-DVD player last week enticed me to go for it. They gave 5 free movies with it. The quality is pretty good, but unless you have a very large screen, you will not notice a huge difference. I've got a 60" screen and have Transformers on HD-DVD and standard DVD. You can see the better detail level on the HD-DVD, but for the price of the discs, it still isn't worth it. Movies are going to have to come down in price to the sub $20 before people will abandon the regular DVD format.

Answer 4

You know honestly, IMO, it comes down to which format will release the better titles. IMO bluray has had the better titles vs HD.

Answer 5

From a totally theoretical perspective Blu-Ray is a superior format ... i.e. based on specifications it can have more storage space and slightly better sound and video (based on bit rates). See the comparison section of the document at the link for further details.

BUT .... all objective tests to date have shown far greater variation among disks of the same format than between formats. In fact early Blu-Ray disks were markedly inferior to HD DVD disks, and even today Blu-Ray disks from a video and audio quality perspective are equivalent, but all too frequently have fewer special features.

Even the hype about superior capacity and bit rate are, from a practical perspective, irrelevent. The extra storage space is not needed since a single HD DVD can hold any movie on one disk, and the extra bit rate capacity is not needed to give audio or video quality indistinguishable from Blu-ray. There are numerous examples of lower bit rate disks actually giving BETTER results than higher bit rate disks.

Result: Slight benefit to HD DVD over Blu-Ray, based on special features.

Now, turning to the hardware side, there is NO COMPARISON. HD DVD is superior hands down. The technical spec for HD DVD is complete and stable and furthermore makes most features mandatory. Blu-Ray, on the other hand, has major problems. First, the technical spec is (still!) not final, and second, many features are NOT MANDATORY, leading to wide variation in hardware capability. ALL HD DVD players meet the current (and original) spec. NONE of the current Blu-Ray players meet the current spec. HD DVD players are now on their 3rd generation ... with differences being mainly in cosmetics, operational speed and lower price, while blu-Ray players continue to all too slowly evolve toward a feature set HD DVD players have had since day 1.

There are other differences. HD DVD does not impose region coding while Blu-Ray does. HD DVD is (mandatory) backwards compatible with not only DVDs but also CDs ... while Blu-Ray is only mandadtory backwards compatible re DVDs (most Blu-Ray players won't play CDs).

The result is that ALL EXISTING Blu-Ray players fail to meet the (partially completed, i.e. BD-1.1) standard approved Nov 1, 2007, and existing players all work differently because manufacturers have chosen to implement the spec differently.

So, behind the scenes studios don't know what features to program Blu-Ray disks for (and in some cases have chosen to delay release or release Blu-Ray versions with fewer features than the HD DVD version).

This lack of a coherent implementation strategy led to the recent debacle whereby 2 Blu-Ray disks were released with BD+ (Blu-Ray's DRM format) implemented, without full testing, ... resulting in consumers having paid $30+ for a disk that wouldn't play, or only loaded very slowly. The studio blamed the hardware suppliers, but it was an excellent example of poor coordination and poor implementation typical of the whole Blu-Ray story to date.

Even in terms of hardware pricing HD DVD has been better implemented. Blu-Ray player manufacturers have largely ignored the lower end of the market -- insisting on producing 1080p players for $500+ -- while Toshiba has produced a 1080i player now selling in the sub $200 range but with a full set of features which is a far better match to the needs of lower end home theatre owners than Blu-Ray, while competing with superior feature set 1080p players at the upper price points.

HD DVD is more an evolution of the old DVD standard and -- theoretically-- not as technically advanced as Blu-Ray, but implementation of HD DVD has been exemplary, while Blu-Ray's 'strategy' has been largely to say how good it is, while in fact being (at best) seriously flawed:
- Advanced codecs allowing more efficient compression were implemented from day one by HD DVD, and only much later by Blu-Ray (they had the space available, so why be efficient?).
- video and audio quality from disks are equal to present (and better than early versions of) Blu-Ray disks.
- special features are easily programmed in HDi (vs complex (read more expensive) coding in BD-Java), and
- features like picture in Picture and on-line firmware updates and access to special features are universally available on HD DVD players (but not Blu-Ray).

Result: From a hardware perspective HD DVD is much better than Blu-Ray.

So .. HD DVD is, in my view, the better format, not so much because of the disk format per se, but because it has been better implemented, gives essentially identical results from a video and audio quality perspective, and -- most important -- offers a complete range of hardware with a predictable, mature feature set.

Hope that answers you question.

Now... do we need either ... that's another question, but in my view, both will remain a niche format for a long time to come.