Now as everyone knows there is a war going on out there, not a war between nations, but a war between the formats. Today I take a look at what’s out there and what’s happening in the way of the next format for watching movies. Now everyone seems to hear about the issues that are happening at the moment stuck in the middle of this “war”. Playstation takes blu-ray however Paramount/Dreamworks is staying HD-DVD exclusive. What does this mean to me and you? That means if you got a PS3 so that instead of spending the money on a blu-ray player you spend a couple hundred more and get a gaming console too, it means that you can’t watch films such as Shrek and Transformers as they wont be released on blu-ray(yet anyway). (This in effect has rumoured that Michael Bay will refuse to make Transformers 2, read post here.)

Now it generally obvious, won’t people just go for the best one? It is obvious, but who’s to say what’s best? Now honestly they are very similar in specification to one another, however where one lacks the other doesn’t. If you want a full break down of how they compare, I highly recommend reading the article here. However if you want the punch line here it is:

Significant review averages tell us that Blu-ray titles were slightly, but definitely superior in audio playback. HD DVD titles had far superior standard def features and moderately superior hi def features.

So we can see how they play off against one another. We can see it’s ultimately going to be the trade off between features and audio, and only they will decide. However, what if the world goes another way. In this ever increasing digital media age, we are able to download anything we want, legally. Itunes allows you to download tv-series and movies, and soon enough the quality will be good enough to watch on a high def TV. It’s bearable on a computer monitor, but not quite good enough for TV yet, and with more and more TV’s being made computer ready, would it not be more convenient and eventually as good if not better to watch all your stuff through your computer/tv. There’s another nice article on the subject here.

There’s a few things to think about at the moment, personally, I’m sticking with DVD until we get the next medium set. The digital medium sounds best for me but lacks the quality at the moment. And it is quite obvious that blu-ray is leading the market share in Australia, however from reports I’ve read elsewhere, it appears to change from country to country. Below is a couple of images showing the differences between covers.

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