Am I being a little girl regarding HD?

[drseid]

As for HD DVD vs. BluRay, one of the benefits of BR is superior storage allowing Dolby HD and TrueHD sound (correct me if I'm wrong).

Well, not exactly Top... HD DVD can (and does currently) use advanced codecs like Dolby TrueHD... Actually they fit on HD DVD easily. Storage has actually ended up in HD DVD's favor with respect to most discs. 95%+ of HD DVDs are of the dual layer variety (HD DVD 30s) while 90%+ of Blu-ray releases are BR single layer (BR 25s). As such HD DVD actually in reality has more storage. Now BR *can* use dual layer (BR 50) discs, and when they do they have a storage advantage (although most BR discs will be of the single layer variety now and into the future)... But they give up any advantage because studios like Sony are using legacy codecs like MPEG-2 instead of the much more efficient VC-1 almost all HD DVDs use. BR tends to also use uncompressed audio as opposed to the advanced codecs HD DVD uses. Bottom line is HD DVD needs a lot less space, and long movies well in excess of 3 and half hours can fit on a dual layer HD DVD disc with VC-1 encoding (I believe they can hold up to 4 hours without video degradation). This also allows plenty of space for extras and lossless codecs. King Kong will be a superb example of this when it is released on the 14th for HD DVD.

I should point out that BR can use VC-1 and advanced codecs too (and if they do, single layer BR 25s will be fine for most movies). Unfortunately right now, many of the BR players do not have the ability to decode the lossless audio codecs within the player (HD DVD players do in the case of Dolby TrueHD), but this will change in time (and the PS3 can do this, I believe). Also, many studios are switching to VC-1 and AVC/MPEG-4 for BR to free up space, as they realise they botched the early MPEG-2 single layer BR releases due to compression/disc space issues (not to mention shoddy masters)... Sony seems to be the lone MPEG-2 holdout. Once the codecs are used, both formats will be able to fit plenty of stuff along with excellent picture and sound on all releases.

So round 1 is in HD DVD's favor here... the future is going to be pretty much even (with the possible exception of Sony BR releases).

---Dave