Hi-Def Blues

Blu-ray has been in the news this past month with the announcement that Warner Brothers would begin full fledged support of Blu-ray and slowly phase out HD-DVD production throughout the year. Many critics have seen this as a definitive blow, giving Blu-ray the clear lead over HD-DVD in the High Definition format war. Both Universal Studios and Paramount, however, have also announced that they have no future plans to release movies on the Blu-ray format, sticking exclusively with HD-DVD. Unfortunately for the consumer who can either pick a format and hope it wins the format war, there still isn’t a clear choice of either side as to which player to buy.
On the HD-DVD side there is the issue of the new 51GB disc. This disc was designed to nullify the capacity advantage of Blu-ray’s 50GB disc. However, the 51GB disc has been delayed on multiple occasions as it is constantly being refined in order to work with all existing HD-DVD players sold since their debut in January 2006. No major studios have announced use of the new, larger disc until it is completely finalized and certified as fully compatible by the DVD association.
The Blu-ray Disc Association has also announced two significant changes to the Blu-ray format since its release mid-2006. The first Blu-ray players and discs are known as Profile 1.0 which did not require any of the additional hardware necessary for a player to take advantage of the many special features found on most movie discs. The second generation of Blu-ray discs and players, called Profile 1.1 or “Bonus View” profile, were introduced November 2007. The new players are required to have more powerful hardware to take full advantage of the advanced menus and features found in Profile 1.1 Blu-ray discs; there is no guarantee that any of the Profile 1.1 discs will work on original Profile 1.0 players. The Blu-ray Disc Association also announced Profile 2.0 or “BD-Live” format which will bring more features to the players and discs. None of the Profile 1.0 and few of the Profile 1.1 players will be capable of playing Profile 2.0 discs when they are released this coming October. When commenting on the thousands of people who eagerly bought the first Blu-ray players only to learn that they would not play the latest or future movie releases the BDA representatives merely said, “[These people] knew what they were getting into.”
With these facts I don’t see myself purchasing any stand-alone high-definition player in the coming year. With the chance that HD-DVD may lose the format war I don’t want to risk spending $150 on a player that may not have any new content being published in a few years. On the other hand there’s no way I’d spend $300 on a Blu-ray player today as I already know that I won’t be able to play new movies on it once “BD-Live” discs become the norm later this year.

Sources:
BetaNews.com
Wikipedia.org/HD-DVD
Wikipedia.org/Blu-ray

HD-DVD Key

Hex 09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0

This string of hexadecimal is being threatened from existence. This happens to be the decoder key for most HD-DVD discs. This key will allow you to use these discs on your computer. The MPAA is threatening to sue web sites that have this key published. So naturally my love for the MPAA forces me to share this key on my blog for the whole world (being my 4 regular readers) to see.

Wow, I've actually been posting fairly regularly lately. Let's see how long this lasts.