[ModBreak] The contents of this site are somewhat outdated and it will no longer receive updates, but it was actual when it was written a year ago. The first HD-DVD and Blu-ray devices have now made it into some rich folks living rooms and there is little to be done about the DRM now but hack it. Though this site has not yielded any result, at least I know several thousand people a month have read it and may have become a little bit wiser or at least learned something new :)

I will continue using the DRMadness.com domain as a Dr. Madness blog (planned, anyways), but I will keep these pages on here for future reference. [/ModBreak]

HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray

So we have these two new replacements for the DVD. HD-DVD and Blu-ray. Which is better?

Both were created for high-definition video and data, both offer a great deal more of capacity than the DVD and both use a blue laser and both are the same size as the traditional CD and DVD. It would seem that they are very alike. From a technical perspective however, they are not. This article aims not to be too technical.

The CD, DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-ray have one big thing in common. How the data resides on the disc. The disc is really just a round plate with pits in it. These pits represent bits. The DVD has smaller pits and less distance between them than the CD, which is why it can hold more data. The same holds true for the HD-DVD and Blu-ray versus DVD. There's also the matter of layers. The CD can only have one layer of data. The DVD can have two.

The Blu-ray has a lot more capacity than HD-DVD as well. First we will probably only see the single layer version of them. The single-layer Blu-ray can hold 25 GB while the single-layer HD-DVD can only hold 15 GB. The single-layer traditional DVD can hold 4.7 GB. The single-layer Blu-ray has a capacity over 5 times higher than the DVD, and almost twice that of the HD-DVD. Furthermore, the HD-DVD can only have two layers, while the Blu-ray can eventually have eight! That's a maximum of 30 GB for the HD-DVD and a maximum of 200 GB for the Blu-ray (almost seven times the capacity of a HD-DVD and over 20 times the capacity of a DVD!). The Blu-ray even leaves room to decrease the pit size in the future, again increasing the capacity. The Blu-ray can also offer a higher data transfer rate than the HD-DVD. While you will not notice this with a movie, when using a data disc you can read the data about twice as fast!

The Blu-ray also has a new superhard coating (developed by TDK) making it a lot more scratch resistant than the HD-DVD and has innovated in the modulation and error-correction sectors making the discs less prone to read erros.

As for the rewritable versions of the discs, besides the Blu-ray offering higher capacity than the HD-DVD, Blu-ray keeps compatibility while the HD-DVD rewritable is essentially a totally new (and fairly odd) format.

Compatibility can also be an issue. With Blu-ray it is possible to embed a traditional DVD in the disc, so you can play the non-HD version of a movie in every normal DVD player, and you'll never see the difference with a standard Blu-ray disc. HD-DVD can only offer a double sided disc, one side being an HD-DVD and the other side being a traditional DVD. It's really nothing more than just glueing an HD-DVD and a normal DVD together.
Blu-ray discs will probably be a bit more expensive to produce than HD-DVD at the start, foremost because current production lines can be adapted to HD-DVD more easily than Blu-ray. But those are only intial costs and will fade over time. When the production line is created though, a Blu-ray disc will still be slightly more expensive to produce than an HD-DVD disc. This shouldn't really make a difference though since the costs will still only be a few cents per disc. As for the players, the Blu-ray player will probably also be a bit more expensive than the HD-DVD player, because the Blu-ray player is a much more complex and advanced device.

Which one is better? Beyond the shadow of a doubt, the Blu-ray is the better format. It offers a lot more capacity, it's faster, it's less scratch sensitive and can offer DVD compatibility on a single-sided disc. Altogether it's just way more advanced than the HD-DVD.

Which one will prevail? Ultimately, Blu-ray. While HD-DVD currently has a bit more supporters in the content provider section, that's only a small difference and it seems to be slowly shifting into the favor of Blu-ray. In the beginning you still might see a bit more movies on HD-DVD, but this is the HD-DVDs only advantage. Since Blu-ray offers more capacity and a higher transfer rate, for data usage it will easily beat the HD-DVD. The Blu-ray is altogether more useful and will therefor be here to stay, while the HD-DVD might fade away if the content providers move to Blu-ray. We shouldn't forget that Blu-ray has more supporters in electronics companies/manufacturers than HD-DVD either. This might well prove that the Blu-ray rollout will be a lot bigger, faster and better than HD-DVD's.

So which one should I buy? When the time comes and neither the DVD Forum nor the Blu-ray Disc Association have stepped away from their insane DRM plans, or if you wish to use them for data, you should definitly go Blu-ray. It's just better, less likely to fade away and a very good solution until the next generation of optical media, the Holographic Versatile Disc, offering twenty times Blu-rays maximum capacity, arrives to blow us all away. - Related articles