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Yes, at long last, the industry is consolidating the number of media types for pre-recorded movies… unfortunately, it looks like both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD will be launched as is, without any compromise.  This really isn’t all that unexpected, given the jockeying back and forth lately: Blu-Ray announced that its media can be manufactured inexpensively (which was supposed to be a key HD-DVD advantage) and HD-DVD announced 45GB capacity versions (nearly matching Blu-Ray’s 50GB storage, which was supposed to be a key Blu-Ray advantage).  But the two formats are fundamentally different at a technical level.  For example, the laser reads a …

There’s been a flurry of news over the past month about Blu-Ray and HD-DVD backers getting together to avoid a format war for the next generation of high definition discs.  I’ve avoided covering each step on the drama, so here’s a quick recap of the posturing between the two camps: "Hey, we’re new here at Sony, and going proprietary hasn’t worked out so well in the past few years. Let’s work this BD/HD-DVD thing out" "OK" "Um, we can’t," "No, really, we’re still trying," "Look! HD-DVD can do 45GB per disc, too!" "A single format doesn’t look likely – the …

It seems like everybody’s writing stories about the upcoming HD disc format war between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray (BD).  The technical specs are reasonably locked down, but everything else is up in the air – perfect fodder for journalism/rampant speculation.  Gizmodo had prematurely called HD-DVD the winner based on studio support (I called them on it here).  More recently, DVDFile.com posted a follow up of sorts – also trying to predict a winner based on the various studios and where they’re currently lined up on the issue. This is pretty hard to do because the studios are about evenly split, and …

Wired is reporting that Disney has given up on Flexplay’s EZ-D disposable DVD format.  The press had a field day getting environmental activists all riled up against the format, but that’s just a sidebar.  If consumers found disposable DVDs moderately convenient, then the used discs would end up in the landfill alongside the rest of our disposable society.  If the discs were a smash hit, then we’d end up with another color plastic recycling bin for media (which might not be a bad idea anyway.  I must throw away hundreds of discs a year, even after AOL stopped mailing them …

I don’t know why this didn’t come out at CES, but Samsung is expanding their lineup of upsampling DVD players.  The key product feature is added 768p support, which is the native resolution for many plasma and projectors (the players will also do 480i for regular TVs, 480p for digital EDTVs, and 720p and 1080i for other HDTVs). This is great news if you have a recent model 768p TV with DVI or HDMI, but this is NOT HD. It’s merely moving the process of image manipulation from your TV over to your DVD player. Your HD TV has more …

Last month I pointed out that Gizmodo declared the HD-DVD wars over with Blu-Ray victorious due to better studio support.  This week, four major studios lined up behind HD-DVD.  With Sony and Columbia firmly behind Blu-Ray, this is shaping up to be an interesting format war. Bill Hunt over at The Digital Bits suggests that a format war is better than the situation we had at the launch of DVD – where nobody other than Warner was promising to support the format.  He goes on to say that if hardware vendors provide universal players, actual format could be irrelevant.  In …