The High-Definition war

Warner pronounced Blu-ray the winner of the High-Definition DVD war. Fair enough, Blu-ray disc has higher capacity, studio's favourite region coding, and the most playback units (PS3 mostly) sold. It's a sure winner of the Hi-Def DVD format.

To confuse the results of the long-lasting war, Apple announced iTunes Video on demand will provide both standard and high definition programs.

The biggest feature that High-Definition DVD offers is higher video resolution. Blu-ray and HD-DVD are just the same DVD disc with higher capacity and most cases, better resolution and sound. How much does it affects the regular consumers?

Look at how popular the MP3 format is nowadays tell us something. I bought SACD andDVD-A which provides more superior sound quality than the regular CDs. As far as I know, these 2 formats have always been struggling on the edge and never been recognised by the masses. MP3 can come from illegal download, but slowly it had be accepted by the main stream. Even Amazon.com has its MP3 download store now.

MP3 is a highly compressed format, it provides near-CD quality but it's fidelity is below the CD format. Most consumers just don't care too much about the quality -MP3 is better than FM and less defined as CDs. but portability is the deciding factor: besides who will really notice the difference especially when you are listening to the music in a distractingly, noisy environment (e.g. outdoor, buses, roads).

Legacy DVD is a good medium that deserves to live longer. Unless the size of our TVs grow faster, there is really no emergency needs to upgrade to any High-def DVD. Blu-ray may be lucky enough to win HD-DVD but at the end it may not be able to replace the original DVD as it anticipated. Like everything else, time will tell. But with the prices of the Blu-ray players stay high, now that it's the superior HD DVD format - it's even less likely to drop soon. High-Def will become the real mainstream one day, but until then, Hi-Def DVD will remain as a fringe. Likely, by the time Hi-Def TV is a norm, we will have some new formats to replace Blu-ray.