Help! Blu-Ray or HD-DVD?

I never watched a hddvd movie but I do have a blu-ray player.

picture quality is amazing.

They both have pretty much identical pictures. As posted above, Blu-Ray has more and better support from movie and other industries. Technologically, Blu-Ray is superior but expensive. I have a feeling that Blu-Ray will win the next gen movie disc war but its reign will not last as long as DVD until a new and better disc technology comes along. Holographic- and gel-based discs, anyone?

EDIT: I forgot to explicitly mention that Blu-Ray is the superior disc technology right now.

If you are going to buy a Blu-Ray player, which I recommend...buy a PS3 :lol:......BEAN_LARD_MULCH

If you are going to buy a Blu-Ray player, which I recommend...buy a PS3 :lol:......BEAN_LARD_MULCH

Yeah, most blue ray players out their are $1000+

blu-ray duh

they're going to have players that play both fairly soon, so I'd wait for those.

Technically Blu-ray has the best chance at "optimal" picture quality, but alot of reviews I read say HD-DVD ends up looking better

I think the Toshiba HD-DVD HD-A2 player (1080i max) is $250 at Costco stores, then you can get 5 free movies by mail. Or if you have 360 there's the $199 add-on, includes a movie and I think some stores let you pick any 2 movies instantly with purchase.

There is a new Blu-ray player in the $500-600 range I think it comes with 3 popular movies in the box.

Both are neck and neck in picture quality. HD-DVD started off better, but over time Blu-ray quality went up compared to its initial releases. The only difference there might be on a multi-format relase is the HD-DVD version having more advance features and better audio over the Blu-ray version. Anyway, a lot of the bad stuff is in the past and both are good, but the early flaws might have had people make up their minds already.

Who will win? I like HD-DVD, but you never know. Blu-ray might seem like the best option especially with the PS3. Though, just look at the releases so far and see which format has movies more to your taste. Reviews and upcoming releases here: www.hidefdigest.com

Good point about this: It upconverts dvd's rather well.

The new Samsung player, and the Panasonic player share the same video chipset, they do it just as well.

Depends on the codec used.

Most HD-DVD's started with VC-1, which is around H.264 quality; BluRay started with MPEG-2, and barely looked any better than existing up-scaled DVD's. However, the majority of movies released now on both formats are now using MPEG-4 and/or H.264.

The codec used actually has no bearing on the final quality of the image, merely the disc space required for it. Since the vast majority of Blu-Rays now use BD-50, it's completely a non-factor.

Kingdom of Heaven for example is one of the best HD discs out there for video, and it uses MPEG-2. Most of the MPEG-2 hate came from inexperienced compressionists using DVD tricks on an HD compression, combined with some awful master tapes like Fifth Element,on a rush job to have product ready for launch.