Paramount gets smartly HD-DVD excl., format war gets interesting

Even in light of the Blu-ray camp's babbling about 2:1 sales against HD-DVD, it appears that Paramount/Dreamworks have decided to join Universal in being HD-DVD exclusive.

Check out the TOP 5 reasons HD-DVD is better than Blu-ray. Note that the comments on the article have valid points as well. Not mentioned is that HD-DVD has standards set it place for hardware and software so the consumer gets consistency. Special feature support, ethernet support, encoding; all of those were standardized for HD-DVD. Blu-ray has no such standards, so hardware can be inconsistent, and video encoding can be poor (MPEG2).

A superb article resides at projectorcentral.com. It is long winded, but it shows how retailers are misrepresenting HD-DVD (well..the misrepresetn most electronics). The article hits up the pros and cons of each format and has a surprising recommendation: buy HD-DVD now and Blu-ray later when the price drops.

Format wars are a damned mess. Even as a PS3 owner, I will always root for the higher quality product with standards. In this war, that's HD-DVD. Paramount has figured out, hopefully other studios follow suit.