Has Blu-Ray won the DVD war?

ShareThis

For those following the battle between the two competing DVD formats for the hearts, minds and wallets of computer- and television users, something really interesting happened last week.Warner Bros. announced it was picking Blu-Ray, dealing perhaps a mortal blow to the competing format called HD-DVD.However, the developer of HD-DVD is not going down quietly. Toshiba immediately cut the price of its most popular players in half and announced a huge boost in the marketing campaign of the two remaining studios left supporting the video format.For those old enough to remember the battle between VHS and Betamax in the old videotape days, this is a rerun. For years consumers could buy video tape in both formats and Sony for years plodded on trying to convince people that Beta was the way to go. There were a few movies available on Beta for a while but eventually even though Beta was technically better, VHS won because most of the movies were available on that format.It certainly looks like we're going that way on Blu-Ray. Most of the major movie studios are moving to Blu-Ray, which comes with the Sony Playstation 3 and is available for installation in some computers.So now one will be able to buy an HD player for $150 and with marketing offers get five free movies to boot. But is that the way to go? It is not a major boo-boo if you goof when it comes to the video player in your living room.However, I would hold off picking a format when it comes to longer term storage for your data library on your computer. If you guess wrong and store something on a disc and there's no player for it 10 years later, you're not going to be able to easily able to get the data off when you want to.And then there's the matter of price. If you wait until the format war is over you will have two choices. You can pick the winner and enjoy drastically lower prices if you buy the winning hardware thanks to economy of scale as manufacturers ramp up production. Or, you can buy a bunch of the losing hardware and media at fire sale prices and only store stuff on it that you won't care if you lose some day.With either of those options you will save significant dollars on the computer side by waiting.On the video side of the house, you may consider a HD player at discount pricing if only because they "up-convert" your standard DVDs to higher resolution via your HDMI cable input making your regular DVDs look better. I noticed a significantly better picture on my new television when I used an upconversion DVD player and I was not expecting much believe me.Whichever way the war ends up the consumer wins in the end (as long as you were not an early adopter and bought the wrong format early.) I still have some LaserDiscs around as a testament to that.James Derk is owner of CyberDads, a computer repair firm and tech columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. His e-mail address is jim(at)cyberdads.com