Quick, grab it!

A while ago, I promised to write a blog entry about my adventures with HD DVD. Sadly, these sorts of things have a tendency to fade into the abyss of obscurity and doubt. Better late than never though, right?

Ah, what a glorious time! When men were men, red and blue desperately vied for customer acceptance, and bonus features inevitably turned out to only be available in pitiful 480i. I'm referring, of course, to the high-def format war which ended earlier this year. Blu-ray and HD DVD were the standards in question, and each spent eight years and (probably) billions of dollars convincing studios, equipment manufacturers, and consumers that their standard was the better of the two.

Like the VHS / Betamax format war before it, the Blu-ray / HD DVD format war required consumers to make an expensive gamble if they wanted to upgrade to the next big thing. Like the previous war, Sony was almost singlehandedly pushing one of the formats. Like the previous war, consumers quickly fell into camps which zealously defended their format of choice. Like the previous war, each side made claims to significant advantages over the other.

But unlike the previous format war, those claims were all lies.*

While there were minor differences in realms such as disk capacity and maximum supported bitrate, the similarities far outweighed the differences. Both formats supported the same video and audio codecs, both formats had the same multi-stream capabilities, and the differences in capacity and bitrate range were arguably irrelevant in most cases.

But the startling absence of differences between the formats did nothing to reassure consumers. The media-encouraged parallels with the VHS / Betamax war had taken root in the population's psyche. So, when HD DVD bailed, Blu-ray won, and consumers did exactly what they had been programmed to do. They panicked.

The second-hand market suddenly flooded with second-hand HD DVD merchandise, and I was thrilled. After all, despite the leaning tower of marketing lies looming over the issue, the video quality of HD DVD was never inferior to Blu-ray. So even people as broke as myself now had access to gorgeous HD DVD movies for less than the cost of an average used DVD.

But there was still a concern. After all, manufacturing of HD DVD players has ground to a halt, and it's very unlikely that future decades will see a change in that regard. So there will come a time (in the not-so-distant future) when my shiny new HD DVD disks won't be readable, just because there won't be a player or drive to read them.

How did I address this problem? I simply bought a cheap XBox 360 HD DVD drive. (They're $50 brand new right now, and compatible with every major operating system.) Then I copy the movie off the disk, decrypt it, and store it in whatever format I choose: A perfect, future-proof solution! (Yes, I'm publicly admitting to ripping my legally-owned HD DVD movies for the purpose of watching them privately in my own home. It's shocking, I know.)

In fact, due to the inherent similarities between HD DVD and Blu-ray, I believe it would be a trivial matter to simply re-multiplex and author a Blu-ray disk directly from the HD DVD sources. Which would result in a feature film presentation identical to the original HD DVD, but compatible with the dominant player format.

I admit, the process of ripping/decrypting/demultiplexing/transcoding the HD DVD is far from trivial. But for a tech like myself, the journey is half the point, and the result is beautiful 1080p video in the comfort of my own home.

ttyl!

--Alex

* - I'm concerned only with a disk format's ability to reproduce the feature presentation. Since both formats were capable of decoding the same codecs at mostly the same bitrates, feature presentation quality would only come into play in extreme situations. (Such as trying to fit more than one LotR extended edition movie on a single disk.) Furthermore, bonus features, interactivity, and other ‘goodies’ are not factored in to this discussion at all.