Warner and Blu ray?

That's too bad that they are joining the Blue ray camp.
HD DVD has announced that they have cancelled their booth at CES. Bad idea, this is like throwing in the towel.
With no competition what will happen to the prices of players and software let alone the driving force for better picture quality.
The upconverting of SD DVD's with the Toshiba XA2 is better than than the Blue rays that I have had. They include the Samsung, Pioneer, and Sony.
Now Paramount stands alone in the manufacturing of HD DVD.
I will still support and buy the the HD DVD copies but for how long ?

I bought HD- early on,then latter bought the bluray. I only own one disc of each format and rent what I watch. I could easily see,early on Sony would be the ruler. They spend more for advertising and now one more studio in their camp doesn't help HD- 's cause. I just wish they would finalise the discs for audio and video so one could play the damm discs without another firmware update.

LA Times this morning declared the format wars over in favor of Blu-Ray. According to the handy dandy chart provided, with the addition of Warner BluRay now has 75% of all the studio content

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/homeentertainment/la-fi-dvd5jan05,1,3370348.story?coll=la-entnews-homeent&ctrack=4&cset=true

Word on the street is the hackers have already cracked Blu-ray but there is no way to efficiently move that much data on the Internet ... what’s the point if it's going to be compressed into Xvid or DivxX? I suppose they did it just to take a whack at Sony's copy protection. No question it will be cracked and copied but only when it's the dominant force and DVD releases are no longer available. Part of my job is managing the computer labs at a mid sized college. I have had a few deviant young employees over the last few years and I seem to get a lot of info out of that group. Most of the computer geek kids come to me for work ... the whole copyright theft issue really sickens me at times. I have argued with these kids and there seems to be a real attitude that copyrighted material is FREE. We had to take extreme proactive measures to keep the college out of trouble with this issue. Time after time they found ways around it - I got fed up with being nice. We have a philosophy where I work, that the students are our customers and I try hard not to limit content. We ended up throttling certain notorious protocols down to the absolute minimum. They can load a bit torrent client or Limewire but it will take a week to get a single track or large file. If you get caught – you get booted. Forget stealing movies.

This much is for sure; whatever format gets selected it will be cracked and copyrighted material will be available for free. When the Blu-ray burners (or some other 25-50 gig capacity format disc) are available cheap for the PC and Mac – look out. I think you can get them for about $800 right now. The Blu-Ray players might be able to temporarily stop the piracy but my guess is the pirates will just convert formats and stream a high definition feed through a PC or Mac right to their TV. I’m no format expert but wouldn’t it be interesting if the HD-DVD format concentrated on the computer market and created really cheap burners. Could they possibly dominate the computer market? Drop the price to $150 for a writer and mass market the media at 50 cents a disc? Dump all the copy protection stuff and just go for mass storage. From a computer person’s point of view I would sure like to see cheap 50 gig archival storage on a single disc costing less than a buck.

Am I way off base ?

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I really don't care either way, as long as they keep making standard def dvd's. I prefer the 4:3 aspect ratio of the standard def discs for my movie screen. All of the hi-def discs that I've viewed are in the "letterbox" type aspect ratio. I personally like the upconverted standard discs in 4:3, that way I get much more screen area in a hi-def picture. The movie is much more immersive that way.

My Toshiba HD-XA2 does a killer job of upconverting the standard discs. I don't even buy or rent hd discs...because they don't play in 4:3. The upconverted standard picture I get is stunning in 4:3 on my 12 foot by 16 foot screen.
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