While this might be a bold statement, all things point to this. Blu-Ray was already winning in market share slowly but surely, and today's Warner decision to go BD-only puts the final nails into this HD format war as Warner is the biggest movie distributor. The HD-DVD Group didn't seem to know about Warner's decision and they canceled their CES conference out of the blu tonight, amidst making vague references to possible legal action. My take: I wish Blu-Ray had a region-free policy like HD-DVD does. Living in USA today but one day moving to Europe, it will have an impact in my media library.
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Member since:2005-07-06
Hang on, you go from one extreme to another; firstly your side say that BluRay wins because of all the PS3's out there, and the other side you're saying that it doesn't matter if it comes with the console - which one is it?
As for the external drive, its IIRC US$179 for the XBox - who knows how cheap it could be with the combined user base of XBox 360 + Wii.
Member since:2005-07-23
No, my point for why Blu-ray should win have always been as simple as that the discs could carry the most data. I don't see why we should go with anything less than the biggest if we will have to change format anyway. The bigger the media the longer the format will last. To make small increments all the time just to have to redo it later suck. If we are going to mess it all up better do it right.
The PS3 and movie sales argument was just that, blu-ray have sold more for some reason and I guess PS3 buyers which bought one or two movies may have been part of that, (or people buying PS3 mostly because it's a hd-player but secondly because it was a next gen console aswell.)
Of course it matters if it came with the console FROM THE BEGINNING. Any developer will know that a PS3 have a hdd for caching data from the disc, and that the discs can hold 50GB of data or whatever. A 360 developer won't. They will have to make sure that the game is for DVD if they want to be able to sell to everyone and that it works without caching data on the HDD since not everyone got a HDD.
But Wii has nothing to gain from having a hd-dvd-drive. Why not just buy the Toshiba ones, they are very cheap anyway. Aren't the Toshiba drive CHEAPER than 179 dollar? In the USA atleast. (http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/005840.html I've also seen low prices with movies.)
The later is actually one huge point which make it hard to understand why HD-DVD isn't the winner, if the players are that cheap how come it can fail? =P)
Edited 2008-01-05 15:08
Member since:
2005-07-23
Noone want to play movies with their console anyway, and the Wii probably haven't got powerful enough hardware to play the content, not to mention it may also lack encrypted DVI/HDMI. And the external drive would probably cost almost as much as a real player anyway.
Not to mention the GPU are probably not capable of doing HD either, so it would just be the only HD-DVD-player which required a Wii to work aswell, great! And it would have to have all its hardware onboard anyway.
Edited 2008-01-05 14:58