DVD Wars - Blu-ray or HD-DVD?

Dammit! Toshiba, the company behind the HD-DVD technology has backed down, meaning Sony's Blu-ray will be the new standard.

So we're talking about High Definition Dvds here, which in-case you weren't aware came in two formats HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc. Two companies produced two different discs for this new technology.

This isn't unusual for Sony to bully it's way into the market, not really listening to what consumers want, instead telling them what the new standard will be. It wasn't that long ago that they tried pushing their Mini-Disk product using Atrac compression, this was an impressive looking product but came with so many complications and terrible Sony-dependent software that the majority of people have gone with Mp3 players, thank God!

 So what's happening now, well Sony released Blu-ray discs as Toshiba released HD-DVDs, and whilst HD-DVD might have been seen as the better of the two formats by consumers, the industry has chosen to go with Blu-ray.

The biggest recent blow was that Warner announced they were pulling their backing on the format and would now be going with Blu-ray instead.

"To be very honest we have been reviewing the options since the Warner announcements, we are disappointed by their decision, but in that brief time, the industry has become unfavourable and our position was unsustainable." - Olivier VanWynendaele - deputy general manager, HD DVD

Over the last three years the two companies have fought for the majority as they feared only one format would stick long-term.

Of course one of the biggest boosts came from next-gen video games consoles, as the Playstation 3 was released with a Blu-ray player built in, so in a market where people were holding back, unsure of what to buy, Sony were filling homes with Blu-ray players sold as games consoles. The Xbox 360 was released in High-Def but only supported standard dvd playback (which it upscales to HD) later releasing an external HD-DVD drive you could attach to enable HD-DVD playback through your console.

The difference being that Blu-ray was created by Sony and HD-DVD wasn't created by Microsoft but by a separate company (Toshiba), so now Microsoft states it has nothing stopping it from developing Blu-ray support perhaps through another external drive.

Toshiba however are dropping the format HD-DVD and say that there future developments will be in other storage mediums not optical discs.

The new product is really High-Def video, and can be available in a variety of formats, with lots of websites providing HD downloads, so why focus on battling over disc formats, be prepared to see more in the way of Downloads, Internet Streaming and Portable storage devices.