Sorry Rysa,expected to be released, is the same old rumour spun once again with zero official backup.
You say hd dvd players are more powerful, but nothing could be farther from the truth.
Upcoming releases of Face Off and Blades of Glory in both formats have uncompressed PCM on the Blu-ray version and only core dd plus on the hd dvd version.
The Blu-ray version is also cheaper in both cases.
The PS3 remains far more powerful than any exsisting hd dvd players with plenty of power to spare.
I owned two hd dvd players and three BD players, and all the BD players were quicker at any function.
An hd dvd version of a movie can be ported to a BD version with additional HD audio lacking on the hd dvd version added.
The reason is not just the extra GB available on the BD version but mostly the extra bandwidth.
A Blu-ray version could never be ported to hd dvd because of both the 30gb limit, and mostly because it lacks the bandwidth of Blu-ray....ie there not powerful enough.
All Blu-ray players except the Philips and original Samsung play 1080p/24 which is something lacking on every hd dvd player.
Lets also not forget that Toshiba is really the only CE making hd dvd players compared to Panasonic, Pioneer Elite, Samsung, Sony, Philips, LG,and the announced Denons with their stand alone and Blu-ray transport arriving this fall.
Yes the future players will be able to do picture in picture but how many really even use that feature on their tv's, let alone during an HD movie?
What early adopters want first and foremost is 1080p/24 and actual HD audio as well as studio support, with picture in picture taking a very distant last place.
With Weinstein going neutral, this leaves only Universal or around 12% of current studio releases not available on Blu-ray yet.
Now whats more likely, Sony, Disney, MGM, Fox and Disney going neutral with Blu-ray outselling hd dvd everywhere in the world, or Universal going neutral?
And lets not forget that even though some hardcore early adopters reccomend boiling the hd dvd combos when they have playback problems, that the average consumer will be bringing his player and movies back to the store and certainly will not be boiling problem combo discs.
From experience and also from what I read all over the net, Blu-ray is ready now for average consumers with the exception of player prices needing to be under 99.00.
HD DVD is definitely not ready for average consumers at this point IMO.
