What's stopping you from investing in HD DVD or Blu-ray?

also i have a good eye sight but for now the "HD" media are mostly re encoded stuff to HD standards , not much of "real" HD stuff. for now i don't see that much of a difference with HD Video. A good encoded SD is not that different to HD 720when you look at it from lets say 2m or so ;]

 

It was HD King Kong that made me go "omg wow!", although it didn't justify the price

 

Still not as good as the cinema...

 

Watching 720p and 1080p on my 46" Samsung, myself and everyone that has seen it said the video quaility is amazing. However, I was testing a DVD-HD image on my media pc and Power DVD does not play it. Thanks to Vista and DRM, Power DVD does not see my TV, but my Denon Amp and says it can not play due to a repeater device being pressent.
So, I was going to buy a DVD-HD player for the XBox and connect it to the media PC, but until they fix Power DVD I can not. I am looking for other players but nothing so far.
Anyway, but the time this format war is over, I expect we will be downloading HD movies online, hence physical media will be a thing of the past.

 

You do realise you need at least PowerDVD 7 Ultra to play back HD DVD and Blu-ray disks? Normal PowerDVD won't do it.

But yea, the repeater devise warning sucks arse since a LOT of people will be using an amp/decoder, it's completely insane. How are you outputting to your TV? Does your graphics card have HDCP?

 

At the moment my ability to view things consists of a 17" lappy, and 19" monitor and a 17" crt tv. Sure my parents have a nice 32" HDTV but hell the only things that have ever been connected to it are my lappy (to watch a film with my dad) or my xbox (when the cat's away the mice will play). So for me a HD-DVD or BD player are redundant as i cant even take advantage of the full DVD quality atm.

Sure in a couple of years when someone has won and i have my own pad and sweet TV i might care. But by then i'll probably have an even sweeter HTPC and still not give a toss.

(sorry for the spelling today but have forgotten my USB and so cant use FF to check my spelling at work )

 

The films need to be available on both formats if the consumers are going to make a choice.
The way it is at the moment, if there are particular films you want to watch, you'll need both players - you want to watch superman? then you need a BD, King Kong? you need a HD-DVD.

With a set-up like this it makes no sense to upgrade (alright, I know you could get the other camps films on DVD and watch them on whatever next Gen player you've got, but what's the point in upgrading if your going to do that?).

 

Not here in the UK One HD movie would use up pretty much all broadbamd packages download limit and beyond that you'll be paying over £1 a GB. Movies over BB would be exorbitantly expensive Not to mention on my 512KBit/s connection it would take 9 days solid to download a single 50GB movie!

 

Toshiba Gen 3 HD DVD players are out in Q4 just in time for it. They should be cheaper and boot far faster, because currently it takes ~1min to boot a Gen 2 drive.

EDIT: I've been misinformed: http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=8429 and http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=8424.

$299 for HD DVD stand alone = £150? £200?

Ninja EDIT 2: No misinformation, available in October but the announcement was last week.

 

after buying a betamax vcr and then having to buy a vhs I'm in no rush to jump on the hd bandwagon plus i have already updated my film collection from tape to dvd once and not planing to do it again so soon

 

I just want to know that my favourite films will be available on whatever I buy and at the moment I don't know that

 

I'm waiting for the high-end players to announce machines. Interestingly, Denon have been the first to dip their toe in the HD waters, and will be launching a BluRay player sometime in the autumn. It'll also be the first machine to adopt the full Profile 1.1 spec (which includes picture-in-picture with separate video/audio streams). It'll also upscale standard DVDs to 1080p too. No news on a TrueHD amp though...

Actually, that's the thing that really gets me going - HD players have been around for almost a year, and they're still playing around with the BluRay spec. Leave it alone, guys!

 

DRM, lack of HDTV, too expensive, lack of good content, and lack of interest, in that order.

 

No interest, no good releases, too freakin' expensive, DRM issues. Both formats suck arse.

 

Perhaps that TV has a crap upscaler, my TV does a pretty good job of upscaling SCART and yes whilst its not quite comparable to my PS3 Bluray playback its very good indeed. Whilst the video is not the giant leap some expect the audio output into a good amp is spot on, most of the HD disc space is taken up with audio as well as video.

PS3 is a bargain BD player and does a good job of playing your old DVDs in near silence and upscaled, if you have a dodgy HDTV, buy one today without delay

 

I'm making NO investment WHATSOEVER in their competing formats until one or both dies and there is just ONE format.

I fell for the video tape format wars and went down the dead-end of Philips V2000 which was great quality, excellent usability, physically convenient BUT a dead-end.

They deserve NONE of our money until their a single format.

Regular 'DVD' would be a non-market if they'd foisted several formats on us instead of just ONE = mega successful format!

 

Yeah I remember that payed £500 for my Teac SCSI writer and used to pay £10-12 for a blank CDR Bluray in comparison seems quite cheap Especially when you'd get coasters because you filled up that massive £200 1.6Gb HD you just spashed out on doing ISOs.

 

for problems playing BD or HD-dvd on an PC for computer out to TV is an six letter word { AnyDVD } seems to remove all the DRM stuff and does not need anything expert to get it working

Blu ray for me later on most likey going to win any way disks are bigger (the PS3 is more usefull then an standalown player as well)

 

Several reasons;

1) Main one, I have no HDTV, and have no intention of buying one at their current price
2) Price, they're too expensive, both the players and the media
3) I don't really want to invest in one while theres the possibility it will lose to the other (I currently want HD to win since it's the cheapest)

Think that's about it

As bindi and others have said, HD-DVD is no smaller than BD, you can get tripple layer HDs that workon all current players

 

The main reason is the stupid format war. I just can't see them coexisting, especially when ludicrous amount of money are exchanged for exclusivity.

Second reason is the cost of the HDTV/player. However, I think this is mainly a ROB issue - if I lived in the US I'd have probably bought a HDTV by now, but at UK prices it 'aint worth it imo.