Its over
http://www.reuters.com/article/compa...27196120080216

wow that sure is R & D $$$ down the drain. Personally i would have like to see the battle drag on a bit longer, just for the consumer to benefit from price competition.
$800 for a good BluRay machine is still pretty steep.

Wow... wow... wow...

The writing must have been on the wall for them to chuck it in like that...

This is big news!! (goes looking for a PS3!)

a.

I agree PS3 all the way

Yay! The war is over!

Wow, amazing news.

Sales will shoot up now that people know they aren't investing in a dying format

Sony will try and price gouge now that they have the winning format - lets hope they don't try to make so much profit that they kill the whole format themselves

Apparently blu-ray discs are still heaps to make - A guy a friend knows at JB said they get the discs for something like $32 wholesale hence why they sell them for $36 - they just can't make the discs cheaper, mightn't be wholly true though

Nah.. Sony have never done anything like that before... MiniDisc and the like...

Good on Toshiba for giving it a go.

Takes a lot of balls and common sense to cut and run after spending those kinds of dollars.

Losing Wal-Mart was the death knell for HD-DVD. When the world's largest retailer gives you the boot, you're pretty much done.

The cheapest player so far seems to be the PS3 still.

PS3 quality wise is sposed to be great for blu-rays too, reviews have put it at close to $1000 rrp Sony dedicated blu-ray players

Thats definately what I'd go for, even if I only wanted to play blu-ray discs

I bet Microsoft is happy lol

Glad that its coming to a close - makes me more inclined to get a PS3 (like a few others it seems)

It sucks to see the inferior movie format win again. IMHO, HD DVD was a far better format in every meaningful way to any consumer concerned with watching movies (seperate from the raw capacity issue, which I see as the domain of computers more than home theatre).

There's 3 main issues for me, because picture quality is now identical between the 2 after BD quickly moved from lowly MPEG2 encoding to VC-1, like HD DVD had from the start. HD DVD was a more mature format upon launch with mandatory internet connectivity and interactivity from day 1, where BD now has 3 separate profiles as a result of their desperation getting players into the market, where many upcoming movies won't play on early players, and as ethernet isn't part of the BD 1.0 or 1.1 profile, you can't upgrade the player either to fix this. Only BD-Live (profile 2.0) has mandatory internet connectivity, and Profile 2.0 players aren't being released until late this year. Fucking absurd. (My only advice is to buy a PS3, as it's the only player out there that will be future proof). Witness the fall-out of that stupid rush-to-market multi-profile decision by the class action suits in the U.S. against Samsung over their early BD players not playing recent movies.

Secondly, (and a personal gripe as someone that's invested much more in the audio side of my home theatre/hi-fi than the video side) apart from the LPCM track mandatory on both formats, HD DVD had mandatory Dolby TrueHD lossless audio, where BD only required plain old Dolby Digital (first heard back in 1992!!) like you get on regular DVD. So much for high-definition audio.

Finally, and my biggest gripe about BD, but the underlying reason they won the "war" thanks to anti-consumer studios like Fox and Disney, region coding. HD DVD doesn't have region coding, so HD DVD's from anywhere can be played on any HD DVD player anywhere. In addition to region coding, BD also has as many as 3 layers of DRM. AACS, BD+ and BD-ROM Mark compared to only AACS for HD DVD. If one of those 3 layers on a BD doesn't like something in your trusted hardware chain (player, AVR/processor or display) too fucking bad champ. Go outside and play in the yard, because you won't be watching your movie. So the most anti-consumer format won the most studio support, by virtue of how much studios could lock it down.

So the shit format wins..

Now this may sound like the bitter ranting of someone who's lost $0,000's on HD DVD software and hardware, but I've only shelled out $200-odd for the xbox 360 HD DVD drive which came with King Kong HD DVD and was given Planet Earth HD DVD for christmas. The rest of the time I've enjoyed plenty of HD goodness thanks to Quickflix to minimise my exposure to what I always feared deep down would be the losing format, so no great loss for me. I'm just annoyed the most anti-consumer format won.. Most people don't give a toss tho and have learnt to live with region coding and restricted release of movies etc according to a regional release timetable that some greedy studio executive c*nt has decided on. Average Joe has got no idea for the most part that it could have been so much better.

Wow.. The view from this soapbox is incredible...