You may have heard we’re at war. HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are having it out in the market right now, and it’s anyone’s guess which will come out on top.

Format wars are common in the audio/visual industry.  The War of the Speeds was a format war between two competing records in the mid-twentieth century.  Later, VHS and Betamax competed heavily for market share, and VHS won out.  When the DVD was first developed, a format war was narrowly averted when Sony and Philips decided to abandon their competing technology and invest in the DVD.  

There have been some breakthroughs in DVD technology since then—and it’s too late to avert another format war.  The two competing discs, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, deliver high definition video sharper than a traditional DVD.  Both use blue lasers for a more focused beam, and both pack many times more information on a disc than will fit on a standard DVD.  

There are some significant differences.  Blu-Ray discs hold more information.  Because of the way the two discs store their digital information, they are incompatible—no Blu-Ray player will play an HD-DVD disc, or vice versa.  Blu-Ray is less similar in structure to standard DVD’s than HD-DVD’s are, and they may cost more in the short run.  However, from the perspective of the ordinary consumer, both look and sound similar.  

HD-DVD’s were released on the market about two months before Blu-Ray, and their name is considered more user-friendly—people already know what DVD’s are, and most are fairly familiar with the concept of HD.  Along with the cost, this suggests that HD-DVD may have a slight edge.  Blu-Ray claims better technology, but that claim conjures up echoes of the VHS-Betamax conflict of past decades: the best technology doesn’t always win.