Format war between HD DVD and Blue-ray is over: Blue-ray wins the battle

Toshiba finally has surrendered to the format war. It said that it would stop making or marketing HD DVD players and recorders by the end of March. While the company is generous to support the drives sold. It said that it will continue to provide the after sales support for the 1 million HD DVD drives that it has sold until now. The notable part is that the Xbox 360 contains a HD DVD player and not the rival counterpart. No what Microsoft is going to do is an interesting thing to watch. Is it now going to adopt its rival’s format?

Reason behind the victory of Blue-ray:

Warner Bros, which supported both the formats earlier, pulled its support for the HD DVD format few weeks back. The largest grocery retailer, Wal-mart recently announced that it will no longer sell HD DVDs (Read story). Few studios like, Twentieth Century Fox and Walt Disney were already in support for the Blue-ray format. With the support of electronic manufacturers like Apple, Dell, Panasonic, HP, Samsung, Sharp and the many of the Hollywood studios Blue-ray made a clear victory.

Difference between HD DVDs and Blue-ray discs:

The difference in the size is about 10GB. HD DVDs have a capacity of 15GB per layer, which is about 3 ¼ of that of a DVD. While the Blue-ray disc clear won the race with the capacity of 25GB. More capacity means more data and effectively better quality. A four layer Blue-ray disc could contain as much as 100GB of movies/data.

The manufacturing process that the HD DVD undergoes is very similar to that of a normal DVD. In fact the same machines that could be used to press DVDs can be used to press HD DVDs with a minor modification. While the Blue-ray manufacturers are required the change the disc pressing equipments that increases the initial cost for the manufacturers. Yet Blue-ray has won the war.