I agree with HomeDad and CV as well. I have both and hardware price drops are going to make long term survival of both formats more and more likely. I have A/B Dolby TrueHD vs. Dolby Digital on movies like Constantine and The Matrix trilogy, and TrueHD is hands down the winner. The major difference I heard was the TrueHD track was much less harsh and dialog sounded more natural. This is a decent article comparing all the various audio formats here -
http://www.highdefdigest.com/news/show/J..._Explained/1064As CV noted, Blu-ray when released was an unfinished spec, so people with 1st gen players may not be able to take advantage of some interactive features on upcoming releases. The HD DVD spec was finalized
before any hardware was released, and further the format was a technical descendant of the DVD spec vs. the Blu-ray spec not being inherently backward compatible with DVD.
Additionally, BD are much more expensive to manufacture than HD DVD due to the costs of retooling production lines. Frankly, I feel Blu-ray would be dying a rather quick death had Sony not made the shrewd move of forcing it on the public via the exorbitantly priced PS3. Even so, they're not getting the disc purchase uptake they thought they would because it turns out a lot of PS3 owners primarily purchased their units for (go figure) gaming. Again, I own
both formats and these are just my observations. I'm not dissing Sony or their new baby out of prejudice, but those like me who were around for "VHS or Beta?" aren't experiencing anything new.
If you want to keep up on HD disc news, press releases, disc reviews and forums, I highly recommend
http://www.highdefdigest.com/ There is a mountain of information on this site, but beware that the forums are filled with rabid HD DVD and Blu-ray supporters.
The bottom line is that if you have a HD display and a way to listen to the new audio codecs, you are doing yourself a major disservice by not owning at least one HD disc player.
