Entertainment Center: TVs, Stereos, VCRs and DVDs - HD DVD Format: Officially Dead

According to an article yesterday from Reuters (http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSL1643184420080216), Toshiba will announce the end of the format next week.

Oh wow, this is huge news.

Thanks for posting that Rick; I probably wouldn't have heard about it for weeks. Sure am glad I hadn't purchased anything yet.

This is good news..........the longer it dragged out the more that bought the loosing technology would be burnt.

I wonder how long before Blu-Ray is replaced by low cost high capacity flash cards (http://www.engadget.com/2008/01/07/sandisk-launches-hd-video-flash-card-line/)?

:eek: I feel bad for the people who bought expensive HD-DVD players.

Still no word on plans for the X-Box either.

I'm glad I waited; I thought the sub $200 HD-DVD players would get them in more houses than the BLU-Ray, but now I see why they suddenly dropped in price.

I hate to see Sony's BluRay emerge victorious. After owning many Sony products and having bad luck with way too many of them, I refuse to buy anything with "SONY" on the nameplate. In fact, I've been pretty much purchasing Toshiba TV's and DVD players the last few years. I'm not concerned about hi-def DVD's, as everything I've read indicates that the difference between regular and hi-def DVD picture quality is practically undetectable. And I imagine I'll be dead and buried before the local grocery store (my only outlet for DVD/VHS rentals) ever switches to BlueRay.

Solid State storage (for the same capacity) will never be cheaper than optical media. The next generation way to get movies will be internet download services and set top players.

I bet X-Box makes an adaptor to play Blu-Ray......

:eek: I feel bad for the people who bought expensive HD-DVD players.

Part of the appeal of the HD-DVD players were that they were always less expensive as the BluRay players.

One thing I've learned from my consumer buying experiences over the years: Never buy the latest & greatest of anything.

In the past 40 years, I shelled out thousands upon thousands of dollars for a brand-new:
-- Ampex reel-to-reel tape machine, which played 2nd-generation "masters" of popular albums. I still have a Lovin' Spoonful tape, but nothing to play it on.
-- RCA Victor 8-track player. (Hah!)
-- Studer studio-quality turntable. I have several hundred vinyl LPs, and nothing to play them on. (They've been transferred.)
-- Nakamichi cassette tape deck. The hottest thing in the world at the time, which pre-dated Dolby.
-- JVC VHS videocassette recorder.
-- Sony Betamax videocassette recorder.
-- Sony CD player.
-- Apple IIe with the 10k add-on memory card, two 64k floppy drives, mouse, and 300-baud modem.
-- And on & on into the 90's, when computers got ridiculous.

In 1998, I bought one of the first DVD burners to hit the market. It cost $5500. Within two years the price had dropped to $1500. It had paid for itself making hundreds of one-offs for our video clients, but that was the last straw.

I'm typing this on a $19 keyboard connected to a 1.7GHz box with 512 meg of ram. I paid a total of $160 for the mobo, CPU, memory, drives, and case.

No more. When they shut off my analog TV spigot, I'll buy last year's HD TV and the winner of last year's format wars. No rush. My VCR still works.

BTW, can somebody please tell me how to stop that VCR clock from flashing 12:00? ;)

Ya, no problem Rick.

You can use a pair of scissors to neatly cut a piece of black electrician's tape and apply it over the flashing numbers.

The tape will look like part of the machine.:thumbup: