How come? Is it The Lens?
Oh my god just buy a proper player. But now I understand your concerns. If you're afraid that the baseline BR spec will not satisfy your audio needs, you must be a very small mammal with a lifespan of about two years tops. That explains why you are in such haste.
Its not just audio needs, though that is part of it - you need to spend $1299 on a Blu-Ray standalone to get the same audio experience that a $499 HD DVD standalone offers. But on top of that, even the best and most expensive Blu-Ray standalone has inferior interactivity (i.e. menus, extras, etc) than the cheapest HD DVD player because of HDi's far more robust state than BD-Java's current half-baked state. While this is only a software thing, I don't see it being rectified anytime soon. By the time BD-Java catches up to HDi's current state, HDi will be enabling internet features on HD DVDs and likely even games playable with USB game controllers even on a standalone - things that Blu-Ray can't offer because the hardware to do it is not mandatory in the player. All-in-all, HD DVD players seem to deliver a lot more for half the price. If you have used both Blu-Ray and HD DVD, you will see that Blu-Ray comes off as the same thing as DVD with better video quality, while HD DVD just feels like a whole new format due to the evolutions in interactivity/extras/etc.
Really, mandatory shmandatory. There's enough space on the discs for multiple audio tracks, and if you want the ability to use a specific super-duper format you got to have a player that supports it. DVDs do it all the time. Guess what, it allows baseline players to be cheaper.
Because of the lack of mandatory audio decoding, studios like Warner Bros have been delivering lossy Dolby Digital to Blu-Ray while HD DVD gets Dolby Digital TrueHD. Its not a multiple audio track thing, its a simple QA thing - they want their customers to be able to access everything on the disc with any player.
You must be making this up. Yeah, we all know what the players cost. The whole point was that there's no reason for a cost difference between player devices because they are alike except for the lens. Do you disagree with that?
No, there is a big difference. Blu-Ray players are required to output 1080p60, HD DVD players only are required to output 720p/1080i, with optional 1080p60 - not to mention the above differences.
Pardon I lose a little faith in you when you try to convince me that it costs 500$s to output a signal in a slightly different fashion. In actual reality it's simpler to ouput a progressive frame, but hey, we're talking about a few lines of code in the software here so we really just shouldn't go on with that.
Not as simple as you state, otherwise Toshiba obviously would put 1080p on all their players. In reality, its not just a few lines of code - if you simply output the progressive frame to the HDTV, you will get a scrambled unwatchable picture because the progressive frame is 1080p24 (24fps) and most HDTVs only support 1080p60 (60fps). You basically have to take the 1080p24 signal and use a 3:2 cadence to upconvert it to 1080p60 - this can be done by using a video processor or by decoding the signal to 1080i60 and then converting 1080i60 to 1080p60. Either, way its certainly not cheap as evidenced by player prices with 1080p60. While Blu-Ray prices will drop, HD DVD will get to the magic $199-$249 point a heck of a lot quicker than Blu-Ray.
Player devices please. Not there?
Look at the tabs on the top of the page... Although the players haven't been updated in a while and lack the latest HD DVD/Blu-Ray players. Still, you can manually check Amazon and see that HD DVD is murdering Blu-Ray in player sales as well despite the 1st gen HD DVD players being out of production for a month and the 2nd gen HD DVD players not being available in bulk until next week.
BR has ramped slower and we all know that. The question of the hour is: can the PS3 tilt the installed base in BR's favor? Or in other words: how many HD-DVD players have been sold?
So far PS3 hasn't tipped the scale. It may have somewhat improved things for Blu-Ray, but it still remains far behind HD DVD - and the fact that it didn't tip the scale has caused many industry experts to give the edge to HD DVD. There are two problems with PS3 tilting anything - first, most will likely by the PS3 for games and nothing else. And second, the XBOX 360's HD DVD addon allows 360 owners to get into high definition video at a much cheaper price than buying a PS3 - and even if you don't have either, 360 + HD DVD is the same price as PS3. By next XMAS, HD DVD standalone prices will likely be around $299 street, making the PS3 even less attractive as a movie player.
HD DVD/DVD combo discs (which are now HD30/DVD9 as I listed above) will eventually be able to be used as a trump card as well. Once manufacturing capacity gets up there, studios will be able to release ONLY a MSRP $24.99 HD DVD/DVD combo disc for a major release with no DVD version available. Meaning that if you go to Walmart to buy some movie on DVD, you will have no choice but to buy the HD DVD/DVD combo; likewise, the studio could sell only the HD DVD/DVD combo to Blockbuster, too. This single stocking will put HD DVD into the hands of everyone and will give everyone a very real reason to upgrade to HD DVD - because they already have a lot of HD DVD discs! When HD DVD gets to that point, sales of HD DVD will equal sales of DVD. Which will be a lot.
