[Sonnova]

On Sat, 15 Dec 2007 08:21:17 -0800, Arny Krueger wrote
(in article ):

"willbill" wrote in message

Steven Sullivan wrote:

Kalman Rubinson wrote:

Yeah but what are the odds that there will be pure
music audio discs of any consequence on those media?

*IF* the music industry is at all interested in selling
multichannel music, it would be insane of them NOT to
move to these formats, since in a relatively few years,

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

afaik, it's already true *now*

i don't know the current numbers,
but my hunch is that BD and HD-DVD
players already outnumber by at least
a 2-to-1 factor (maybe even more
than that)

Absolutely not true.

In terms of current sales, or in terms of units in service, there is simply
no comparison between the number of traditional DVD players, and the numbers
of Blu Ray and HD-CD players.

I know of only one Blu Ray player that any of my friends have. No HD-CD
players at all.

According to industry sources, HD-DVD players outsold Blu-Ray players in 2007
by a more than 1/3. As far as titles are concerned, they are about neck and
neck at about 400 titles each. However, There is four times the replication
capacity online for HD-DVD as there is for Blu-Ray and Sony has only one
replication facility that can make the 50-gig discs. Blu-Ray authoring is
more difficult, more expensive and more error prone than is HD-DVD as well.

Both Dream Works and Paramount have dropped their support for both formats
and have announced that forthwith, all of their HD releases will be HD-DVD
only.

Allan Bell, Paramount's chief technical officer also said that while
Blu-Ray's higher capacity is better suited for raw data, movies need
"minutes" and due to the fact that Blu-Ray uses less efficient Codecs such as
MPEG2 video and PCM audio, the potential for greater capacity is lost.
According to Bell, using VC-1 or AVC a 30-gig HD-DVD can provide up to four
hours of HD playing time. If one needs more, one simply adds another disc to
the package, and it will still be cheaper and easier than trying to get a
50-gig Blu-Ray disc out of Sony.

Add to this the price disparity between Blu-Ray players and HD-DVD players
($499 for Blu-Ray vs $199 for HD-DVD) and the writing is clearly on the wall
for the eventual emergence of HD-DVD as the HD format of choice.