Umm...yay for the colour blue?


...Why do I have the desire to make a pun involving ethical non-positivism?

Technical point - HD-DVD uses (or used) a blue laser diode to read the disks, same as blu-ray. So they're both blue.

Personally, I was pretty much always in favour of Blu-ray - not because I cared in the slightest about the movie format, but because the ultimate plan for the format is an 8-layer ~200GB disk. The chance to backup my entire media collection on a mere disk or two is something I've been looking forwards to for a long time. So in that respect, it's a shame HD-DVD folded this early - if they'd been deadlocked longer, then there would be more incentive to boost the blu-ray capacity...

((At the present time: Blu-ray max capacity, 2 layers, 50GB. HD-DVD max capacity, 3 layers, 45GB. Still a small stack of disks to do a backup:())

Of course, it's a good thing on the whole 'soon all movies will be on the same format' front.

As for the console war, I don't think it'll change much. Expect MS to (quietly) announce a blu-ray replacement for their add-on HD-DVD drive in a few months, when the last couple of studios sign up for Blu-ray.

I guess my whole response to this is a resounding 'Meh'. I may hypothetically buy a PS3 at some point, but that's a long way off, and I'm only marginally more enthusiastic about it than I am the Wii or the 360.

Go astronauts.

The idea of compressing one's data collection presents to me the fear that it could go a little too far. "The dog ate my media collection!" "AGAIN?"

Yeah burning all of my media collection on one disc....a bit optimistic don't you think?
They should really work on discs more durable then. I wasn't too happy with DVDs and CDs. One or two years with normal use and some of them cannot be read by players anymore.
I would love to personally make a durability test for Blu-Ray discs and players before I trust them with all my audio-books and music :P
Does anyone know about such tests already?

Varies by brand of disk - there's about 3 or 4 different coatings out there for Blu-Ray disks, and I'm pretty certain they're not entirely identical.

But that does sort of miss the point. What I wanted was a one-disk backup - written once and only read in case of emergency - stuff that gets used often is still going on hard disk. Blu-Ray disks still can't match the raptor 10K drives for sequential read speed. And a cheap RAID array still blows them out of the water.

I suppose the only answer is datacubes. If the outer surface gets too scratched you can take it in to be buffed up and a new clear layer added on. Go h2g2!

So it's been a year and a half, and I still don't have Blu-Ray, nor does this bother me.

Have any of you guys taken the plunge?

No, plain ol' DVD still works fine as far as I'm concerned. Blu-Ray seems interesting, but not enough of an improvement for me to want to spend any amount of money on it.

On the other hand, Blu-Ray does provide me with some incentive for buying a PS3 someday. If I ever do decide to try Blu-Ray, I'll probably get a PS3 instead of a stand-alone player. And I'd probably try to find one of the original release PS3s that plays PS2 games too. Why did Sony remove backwards compatibility anyway?

...But I digress. To sum up, Blu-Ray: now, no; later, maybe.