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Compare One Movie on Both Formats
When I compared Warner's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix discs, the Blu-ray edition in a PS3 and the HD DVD in an Xbox 360, the differences were startling. Never mind that the HD DVD has an entire online component that the Blu-ray can't yet implement, with features such as mobile downloads and user-organized live screenings. Never mind that you could watch the entire HD DVD with pop-up actor-commentary windows on screen—if Warner had implemented this in the Harry Potter Blu-ray, it would have been compatible with exactly one currently shipping Blu-ray player.

The surprising thing was, even when you compared the exact same experiences, the HD DVD behaved much better. Every so often an icon appears in the top left corner of the screen, indicating a behind-the-scenes featurette about that particular scene. On the HD DVD, you click it, watch what you want to, then click Enter again to return to the point you left off in the main movie. With the Blu-ray, the system had no way of returning you to the movie; it could only dump you in the featurette menu, where you were stuck watching more of those. Sure, these problems could be Warner's programmers, and not a format issue, but Warner is going for as similar an experience on both, and it clearly can't do everything on Blu-ray that it can on HD DVD. Just have a look at the back of each disc:

As I discussed previously, Blu-ray has specifications for picture-in-picture, but to date, only one Blu-ray player that has shipped, the Panasonic DMP-BD30, will be able to handle the discs when they start making their way to stores in early 2008. Except for some rumblings from Daewoo, nobody has promised an internet-connected Blu-ray player, while all HD DVD players can. (Samsung's hybrid BD-UP5000 Duo has Ethernet, but only for HD DVD.)

Given that I can browse this site from my PS3, and given that the overwhelming majority of all Blu-ray players currently in consumer's hands are of the PS3 variety, I find that comment by the reviewer a bit disingenuous.

I think they were implying that no movies on bluray have web enabled features.

Can you pop a bluray movie into your PS3 and access the extra web content that is avaialable on the same title in HD DVD format?

"Except for some rumblings from Daewoo, nobody has promised an internet-connected Blu-ray player, while all HD DVD players can. (Samsung's hybrid BD-UP5000 Duo has Ethernet, but only for HD DVD.)"

Sounds very much like an indictment of Blu-ray players in general, not the content of the discs themselves. It's a fair comment to a point but the reviewer should point out that nearly 90% of all Blu-ray players in the market will require nothing more than a quick download to in order to implement the full set of specified functionality. Of course that would conflict with his thesis that there are no Internet-connected Blu-ray players out there ....

Playstation 3 could go profile 1.1 later this month PS3

FWIW, I took the time to sign up for web enabled content after receiving BSG season 1 on HD DVD the other day. Much to my dismay I saw zero web enabled content tied to the disc itself, rather just a few stock trailers for download.

My experience with the HD DVD "U-control" features has been seamless and I quite like the inline PIP interviews and featurettes.

I use a PS3 as my Blu-ray transport so I don't believe at this point I can even do the PIP commentaries and such, even if they did happen to be included on a given BD.

Hey Halo! Glad to see you posting again.

Thanks again for the audition, my epic 80-500 system sounds awesome. I have had no problems whatsoever driving the m80's with the denon 3808.

I have not used the web enabled features much, but I do like the u-control PIP!

terzaghi - No problem, I'm glad you're enjoying your M80's! I hope you're not keeping the girlfriend up too late at night

I finally got my new Integra pre-amp so have been tweaking it quite a bit lately.

I have decided to go with the Samsung BD P1400. The video processing chip is supposed to do wonders processing 60p content (as another post indicated my TV does not process this well).

I just watched Harry Potter 5 last night on the Blue Ray player I borrowed from my parents...

WOW!

To me the question is for a movie that is available in both formats is there a difference between the two? If both sound and look the same then I couldn't care less! I don't care about extra features much (beyond what we already get with DVDs).

I'd think that in virtually all cases movies available in both formats would be essentially identical. Given the small sales volume for HD media in general I can't imagine studios incurring the expense of performing multiple encodes when they can just encode for the smaller capacity media and roll that encode onto both formats for pressing.

I just got back from Circuit City with a new 1400, man this thing is hard to find! I guess I have officially chosen sides.

I've seen a few titles on both HD DVD and Blu-ray formats, and for the vast majority of them the studios use the same exact transfer and codec. This translates to identical picture quality.

You are absolutely correct haylo75. It didn't used to be that way, and Blu-Ray image quality early on (for the first many months) was fairly poor in comparison. Today, they are both pretty much identical in codec and specs.