A little dose of reality, please.

1) HD-DVD is toast. That one shouldn't even be in dispute. Many of us who bought the HD players will hang onto them as well as continuing to our collections at least for the short term.
2) Blu-ray still needs to get a completed format out there. 2.0 anyone?
3) The real fight between Blu-ray and DVD begins as soon as Toshiba makes it official that HD-DVD is gone.
4) The vast majority of people will never update their movie collections from DVD to Blu-ray. For most people upconversion of older titles is fine. Yes, I'm well aware that for enthusiasts this is unacceptable but let's think about the average consumer for just a moment.
5) Blu-ray is still not affordable to the masses. Perhaps $400 players are to some but they're going to have to drop below $200 at least and $150 preferably before we see large adoption. It happened with DVD too.
6) Blu-ray and HD-TV itself still is not a mass market item. The coming digital changeover will accelerate the latter and perhaps give the former a boost as well. That'll be dependant upon points #2 and #5.
7) Blu-ray still needs to make the switch compelling to the majority of consumers. This ties in a bit with point #4 but there really is not as much of a difference in going from DVD to either HD format as there was going from VHS to DVD especially when DVD can be upconverted. Please don't bother telling me how much resolution difference is. I can see it just fine as can just about everybody else on this forum. I'm not talking about us. The vast majority of posters have already been convinced to adopt hi-def.
8) This "format war" was really just a competition between two electronics giants over future royalties. That's it. Period. To all of the fanboys on either side who have compared this to cancer or worse, in the words of William Shatner

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Get a life!!!

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Blu-ray still needs to get a completed format out there. 2.0 anyone?

What makes you think 2.0 is gonna be a "complete" spec? If people have been duped into buying players with an incomplete spec (Thanks Samsung!) why would you think Sony and the BDA will stop at 2.0 if you guys will keep dumping your money into the next best spec? 1.0, 1.1, 2.0... How many more will you people buy into??

[Post edited by spoonard on Feb 18, 2008]

At this time 2.0 is supposed to be the one with everything turned on. If it's not, then that's their own fault and it will probably bite them in the ass eventually. I haven't bought anything BR yet. Definitely taking the wait and see route because I don't want another game console.

What I mean is how do we know they won't ever add BD 2.5 or BD 3.0? Maybe in BD 3.0 they add some kind of wierd feature that BD 2.0 hardware is not capable of and we have to buy new players or simply do without the new stuff. We'll start seeing hardware requirements on BD movies. Even if there is a single HD format now, it's still WAY too early to adopt into.

At some point the issue becomes moot. My first DVD player had no component video outputs, only composite and s-video. Does that mean that my DVD player's profile was out of date? No, just means that there were features added later. From everything I've seen the 2.0 should (yes, that can change) pretty well standardize the playback and special features. At least I hope so. If they can't gel the main parts of the standards then it'll never overtake SD DVD.