HD DVD has won the format war

At least in my household, my neighbor's and my extended family.

I actually woke up early to go to the land of AOL users (Walmart) and stood in the short line and bought a Toshiba HD A2. This is a fantastic High-Def player- and at $98, was stupid-cheap. It normally sells for $299, so this was a coup.

After buying an HD movie (Unforgiven), I'm sold on HD.

I really wanted both formats to lose and a common format to come out. Here's what I wrote on the subject at HTS:

This an old-and sensitive topic for me as I got into an online scuffle about this BR versus HDDVD.

As an engineer, I hate both formats. Most technologies that are to be released (at least in the software world) are based on standards. If they aren't- they end up being forced to (witness Microsoft and ODF).

If this industry had any morals, they'd have come up with a high-def format and released it publicly so that anyone could make a player.

For example- look at 802.11- that's Wifi- you can buy any wifi card and it'll work with any wifi hub. Products which don't write to a standard stagnate and die.

For both Toshiba/Microsoft and Sony/Coalition of the willing to pick a 'side' means that half will lose.

Sony upsets me with Memory-Stick- a useless format that was introduced to fill in a gap that didnt' exist. At least Betamax was arguably better than VHS. There are a zillion other Sony-proprietary formats too, from their minidisc to their walkmans, that eventually die. I avoid Sony products to the extreme- IMHO, the quality is long gone and they're living on a name- and bad marketing.

Don't even get me started on Microsoft- but Toshiba hasn't been a 'bad guy' in the past, so they must have gotten a Sony exec somewhere along the way.

I'm really torn because my HT rocks and I want high-def, but I'd rather both these technologies die and come out with a HD player that benefits neither manufacturer, but the industry at a whole.

My feelings aside, I think HD might win, even though I think BR is technically better.

Two reasons:

HD-DVD sounds like an extension to DVD and I think it is- didn't Toshiba manage the DVD spec? If you describe your High-Def player as a H-D DVD, they kind of win the name game.

Price. HD is consistently lower priced and that means a lot when someone is going to buy their new player.

As far as me? I'm still on the fence.

Needless to say, I'm not on the fence anymore. After hearing the podcast from Real HT, I'm even more convinced I made the right choice. The speaker gave a litany of bad Sony choices that echoed some of my comments above- but gave even more- such as Toshiba *did* make HD disks first and through the DVD Forum- and Sony came along and wanted their own version and started the war.

He concludes that unless Sony can ship $199 Blu-Ray players by Thanksgiving, HD wins.