Warner and Blu ray?

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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"South43":

It looks like Warner Brothers has swayed my decision as well. I was waiting for the longest time as to which way was I going to go (either HD-DVD or Blue-Ray). And now, it looks like that later on this year, Blue-Ray will apparently win out.

I am also going to wait and see what kind of player the other players (meaning brands in this context) are going to release before I finally dive in.

As it stands right now, I am looking at the Sony Playstation 3 Console (the 40 GB version..... I am not much of a game player, so it would be senseless to me to spend upward to about $800.00 for a console and I am not going to ever play any games on it) strictly for Blue-Ray DVD Playback and because it appears to have backwards compatibility (meaning I can still hold onto to my existing DVD collection (more than 300+ movies)). But since Denon appears to be closest to releasing their player, I am also going look at the Denon offerings first. But of the existing Sony offerings, I have read on other threads that their standalone Blue-Ray Players are having playback issues and that the Sony Playstation 3 does not, making it the best player in their lineup and at $450.00, also one of the cheapest.

But anyway, I am continuing to stand on the sideline at the moment, but I am leaning toward Blue-Ray right now.

My $.02 Worth.....

--Charles--

The Panasonic BD30 is getting good user reviews over at AVS. It goes for about $400 on Amazon. The cheapest Denon player currently planned will have a suggested retail price over $1k.