Is it time to throw out my DVD Collection?

There was a article published this week The chronicles of a futile battle: Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD outlining the war of the new Digital Video Format.

They discuss the limitations of the current dvd format with its resolution limitation of 720x480. This in now easiy outstriped by current 1080i HD formats with resolutions of 1920x1080. The fight to an extent comes down to size.

Blu-Ray promises 25 GB for single-layer and 50 GB for dual-layer, compared to HD-DVD's 15 GB for single-layer and 30 GB for dual-layer.

This would tend to indicate that there is no real race at all with HD-DVD supporting almost double the amount of data than its Blu-Ray compeditor. However Blu- Ray is currently offered support by its inventor, Sony, and Dell, Hitachi, Hewlett-Packard, Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips, Samsung and other IT equipment producers. HD-DVD (High-Density Digital Versatile Disc) doesn't have support from nearly as may IT Companies: only Toshiba, the inventor of the format, and NEC. It does have in its favour the backing of more movie studios: Universal Studios, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros and New Line Cinema while Blu-Ray has only received backing from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Walt Disney.

What does it all mean for the movies? Well a single layer HD-DVD disc (which can store about 25GB) will be able to hold about 2 hours of HDTV using current MPEG2 encoding while using MPEG4 would deliver about 4 hours.

So it looks like the humple DVD format which changed the way we watch movies at home and turned many people into movie collectors may not be long for this world. But don't throw out your DVD player and collection just yet, it probably won't be until 2006 before the format is widely available.