After least week's announcement that Warner Home Video will begin supporting the Blu-Ray Disc high definition format only and drop their support for the competing HDS-DVD format by mid-year, I have noticed a dramatic influx of email and questions that I feel need to be addressed to avoid confusion. Sadly, I find that oftentimes these questions are not properly answered on Internet message boards and forums. So here, is a quick rundown of some important details.
Warner's dropping of HD-DVD support can easily be seen as the death knell of the HD-DVD format. With only Universal and Paramount left to provide content for the format and with only a single hardware manufacturer providing the hardware to play these movies back, it is quite easy to see that the impact they can create is marginal at best - though the potential for confusion and customer reluctance is enormous, sadly. Quite frankly, I expect Universal to announce their Blu-Ray support by mid-year also, giving in to public and stockholder pressure. They can only so long afford to exclusively support a format that is outsold by its competitor by a factor of 3 to 1 or more - and with Warner throwing their weight behind Blu-Ray only, this ratio will change dramatically, as Warner used to be the leading content provider for HD-DVD. With their titles gone, the HD-DVD release output will dry up to a trickle.
Paramount will be left standing in the rain with no umbrella and they will sadly becoming the laughing stock of the industry - which they do not really deserve. However their move to let themselves be paid into supporting HD-DVD exclusively was a poorly evaluated move and it comes back to bite them in the behind. They have only two options right now. They either support HD-DVD exclusively until their contract expires, presumably in 2009 from what I hear, or the HD-DVD camp folds entirely. Or they can buy themselves back out of the mess they have created for themselves. Pay back the $150 mio. the HD-DVD paid them, pro-rate it and hope the HD-DVD camp will let them out of their contract. Either scenario is a corporate nightmare and I would not be surprised if some heads are going to roll over this.
So, the way I see it, Warner's move is a good one. It strengthens Blu-Ray, which I have always considered to be the format that is better suited for the future than HD-DVD. And it may open the gate for future possibilities as hopefully more people will come to embrace high definition video.
Standard DVD will go away however. It seems to be a common fear among DVD owners that the format may be killed off by the end of the format war. This will not be the case. DVD will go away when the format has become so insignificant that it is no longer worth producing discs for it. Right now, in my estimation, we are at least 15 years away from that to happen, even in a worst case scenario. This has nothing to do with the format war but is a simple business equation.
Another very important point to stress is that yes, Blu-Ray players do play back regular DVDs and what's even more is that all players are capable of upconverting DVDs to high definition, making them look noticeably better when compared to regular DVD players.
Despite what you may hear all over the place, Blu-Ray has picture in picture capabilities. Early players did not support that capability until recently but going forward every new model in the market will support this feature. It is part of the Blu-Ray 1.1 profile specifications and even players that are currently not 1.1 compatible can be most likely upgraded with simply firmware updates. The Playstation 3 is a perfect example, but pretty much every player in the market can be updated with a simple update disc or an Internet connection. If this is a serious concern for you however, there's not much to worry. Simply go to a store and check the player's capabilities. Within the next 3 months you probably won't even be able to find a player on store shelves that cannot play picture-in-picture streams.
Also, despite much false information floating around, Blu-Ray is fully 1080p capable, which means it supports all resolutions ranging from 480i, which is your standard NTSC DVD format, 480p, 720i, 720p, 1080i and 1080p. Ultimately it is most likely not the player that determines your output however, but your TV set. If you have a mediocre plasma TV set - and there are way too many out there for my taste - you may be able to only display 720p resolution because these set do not have a native 1080 resolution. Higher end displays and most LCD TV sets will give you proper 1080i or 1080p resolution for the best possible presentation quality, and once you've seen a Blu-Ray disc on a 1080p display, trust me, you will never want to go back!
Entering the high definition arena does NOT mean you have to abandon your DVD collection. Quite the opposite, in fact. Your DVDs will look better than ever and going forward you can buy high resolution versions of new releases and enjoy them in the best quality that is possible in today's high tech world. There never was a better time to jump on the high definition bandwagon. With Warner making its decision, the path is cleared for a Blu future, and we hope to welcome you as part of that community soon. Many of you are ardent movie lovers and many times I simply don't understand why so many of you are so reluctant to upgrade to high definition. Believe me, the grass really IS greener here on this side of the fence.
For additional information, please feel free to also browse our previous entries in the Road To HiDef series, in which we try to clarifiy issues surrounding the emerging high definition formats.
