Bluray Vs HDDVD - were you right?

[Salsa Party Animal]

I think if Microsoft had HD DVD in XBOX 360 from start it could be different story.

HD DVD is wonderful but it lost due to coporations need to control the market. When I go to Audio Visual shows it always talk about blu ray and not HD DVD. So the fans might prefer HD DVD but business prefer Blu Ray. I didn't like blu ray due to region coding. But I am not going to give up Blu rays for that reason. It is annoying when I can't go to shop to buy cheap blu rays on whim due to region coding.

[Brad]

I was supremely confident in Blu-Ray simply because they had the cheapest standalone player at the outset. What do I win?

Plus I totally agree with the above poster.

[EJG1980]

I went with HD DVD because I could get the add-on player for the 360 cheaper than anything else, plus as others have said the region freeness was lovely.

I've switched to Blu Ray now but I've still kept my collection of HD DVDs and still buy them if I see a title I've missed that's available dirt cheap. There's no way I'm re-buying the Blu Ray versions of the tons of stuff I have on HD DVD!

[huxley]

HDDVD was a sucker punch to try and disrupt BluRay from the outset, Besides the player MS backed the most was the 360 add on which is kinda crap as the 360 cant out put hd audio via its outdated hdmi port. Having said that hook it up to an htpc and your good to go. I went with hddvd to start with but swapped to Bluray when I picked up an lg bluray/hddvd drive for my media centre. I stopped picking up cheap hddvd discs a while ago as it seems no one wants to support it going forward (cyberlink - MS) which is a shame as there are some bargins to be had.

[JP]

I think if Microsoft had HD DVD in XBOX 360 from start it could be different story.

The last thing Microsoft needed was to be sticking more hardware inside such a poorly produced machine.

I'm not convinced that customers buying a HD-DVD player with such a high failure rate would have done anything to help the format when the real problems were with Toshiba seemingly having no idea what the hell was going on at the time.

Also, would Microsoft be wanting to increase the price by ?100 at launch to cover the extra costs or would they be willing to make a larger loss per console as Sony were willing to do to get a foothold for blu-ray?

[Escape-To-88]

Slightly off-topic, but is anyone else fearing a dash update over the next year or two that might do away with HD-DVD drive compatibility? This is obviously totally unsubstantiated but can see MS doing it, as it's essentially a dead format.

[huxley]

MS made some of the hd dev tools free to anyone who wanted it and stated they would leave the 360 support for the drive intact but no future updates would be made, you`re safe mate.