Blu-Ray Beats HD DVD (Jan 7, 2008)

I wouldn't call this the death-knell for the so-called format war just yet. This is still a battle of business egos who are backing one format vs. another, and leaving the consumers like me in a lurch in the undecided mode until one format prevails over another.

I remember the DVD vs. the ill-fated DIVX disc war back ten years ago and I didn't participate then until the format I hoped to win, DVD, did. DIVX was made to be a pay-per-view disc that you could buy for cheap and play for a couple of days, until time expired, then you had to pay again to watch it. What baloney. What loser company backed this DIVX dud?

I remember when the CD format was released, but nobody came up with a competetive format to battle it, which is the way it should be. Before then, we had the Beta vs. VHS videotape wars, with VHS winning solely because you could tape basically six hours of programming in SLP mode on VHS vs. four and a half hours in slow mode on Beta. On a VHS, you could tape a football doubleheader if you had a T-160 tape in SLP mode, allowing eight hours to tape the games.

VHS won in the same way that Blu-Ray beat HD DVD: amount of space. Blu-Ray has 50 GB of space, while HD DVD has 30 GB of space. The more space, the better.

Now that we're going the way of Blu-Ray, how long will it take for the DVD format to become obsolete? VHS, Cassette, and CDs are already becoming obsolete, though they're still widely used in my 20th century analog world. I didn't adopt the CD as a format officially until, get this, 2000, because it was easier to rip the songs from the CD than the cassette format.

So, with that in mind, just go out and buy all thins Blu-Ray and forget the HD DVD format altogether. HD DVD can join the pile of losers like DIVX, Beta, Videodisc, digital cassette, and mini CD as formats that never widely became the standard in its era.

I have only a dozen LPs in my collection because it's too hard to play a record as opposed to popping in a cassette tape to listen to the albums. Some of my cassettes go way back to the 1970s, and I still have an audio copy of a Brady Bunch episode I taped way back in May of 1972, the one where Peter's voice began to change while Greg was trying to record a song for the label.

Nowadays, I have only a dozen DVDs in my collection since I mostly rent the movies, just paying the fee, returning the DVD, and be done with it. DVD audio should have taken off since it could hold more hours of audio than CDs in the same 44.1kHz fidelity, as well as replicating the same songs on CD in 5.1 surround sound. What happened to Super Audio CDs? Haven't seen them either much.

Is everything going to be Blu-Ray? Even the audio-only albums? Sure would make things more easier for us. Just use it for video play, audio play, recording video or audio, whatever, and not worry about whether it would work with a standardized Blu-Ray player or not. No more figuring out whether the CD will play in a DVD player and vice versa (DVD won't play in a CD player). Just adopt the Blu-Ray format as a standard, make all of the disc players play and record Blu-Ray, DVD, and CD formats, and not worry about compatability problems ever again! Have the disc players play and record all kinds of video, all kinds of audio ranging from mp3 and WMP format files to 192kHz 7.1 surround sound files, all kinds of picture files, even text and database files (for computers and computing devices).

Just make every new release one format, Blu-Ray, and make the players for it backward compatable for older CD and DVD formats for the long term future.

Now, about resurrecting the reel-to-reel tape format?