HD For Indies

Tom's Hardware Guide: Tom's Hard News has an excellent article about why Microsoft is backing HD DVD rather than Blu Ray. Initially neutral, Microsoft yesterday (and I didn't report it, to busy sorry) announced they were backing HD DVD.

I'm always quick to suspect Microsoft of skullduggery, and some of the interactivity standards stuff still might be questionable, but ASSUMING the other factors are correct, HD DVD is making a lot more sense. Here's the rundown of why MS decided to go HD DVD - they had 6 key areas of interest/functionality:

1.) HD DVD has a plan to let users make authorized copies to hard drives for home theater/media PC usage. (I'm guessing it'll require sticking the disc in every so often so that the "rent/rip/return" model used for DVDs won't be valid). Blu Ray is noncommital on this issue (perhaps Sony, the big backer behind Blu Ray, as a movie producer as well as manufacturer doesn't like that idea?)

2.) Support for hybrid discs - both have talked about it, but Blu Ray's combo disc with standard def DVD on one side, high def on the other doesn't exist outside the lab, and is nowhere near manufacturable.

3.) Keeping production costs low - HD DVD has always been rumored to be lower production costs, since it is closer in spec to regular DVDs. Blu Ray looks to be more expensive.

4.) Similarly - low disc replication costs - same kind of thing. Keep costs low to make it market viable.

5.) Disc storage capacity - while Blu Ray looks like an obvious winner with single layer capacities of 25GB vs HD DVD's 15GB, Blu Ray's promise of 50GB with dual layer looks like vaporware, whereas 30GB HD DVDs look very doable and manufacturable. Of course, that's just for read only media. I'd imagine that the evolution of single vs. dual layer burnables would be similar to that of DVDs - it's been years that we've had single layer burners, but dual layer burners are new in the last year or so.

6.) Interactivity standards - Blu Ray was going with a Java based solution, which major studios purportedly don't like as complex and unwieldy (I can't comment on that, dunno).

Mike's (further) analysis: All of this is pretty suprising. When I read that MS was backing HD DVD, I figured it was because they had a hand in developing the interactivity layer of HD DVD and didn't want Blu Ray's competing Java based standard. MS wants the world dependent on an MS based standard, period.

But the other reasons are surprising - now that the technologies are getting close, and actual, deliverable product is getting close as opposed to plans and intentions, HD DVD is looking better if all the above comments are true about what is and isn't ready for mass production.

One thing that has always bugged me about Blu Ray was the fact that the media gets written 1/10th of a millimeter away from the surface of the disk - what about scratches? In theory, I'd love to see Blu Ray win, but it sounds like they are way behind in their implementation.

I'd figured that Sony's inclusion of a Blu Ray player in the PS3 would be a massive stealth push of Blu Ray discs into the population, but with both Intel and Microsoft backing HD DVD, the computer world is now wrapped around HD DVD pretty tightly. Where will Blu Ray support come from for the Windows users of the world? That gets pretty confusing, and if there isn't native Windows driver level support built in, that's a huge blow to Sony and their camp.

So it might be HD DVD that wins this one by default from the computer side of things - remember, DVD-ROMs were the stealth door in for consumers to get used to DVD Video.