HD-DVD launched. Bluray launched.
People don’t care. Of course there are reviews in the more tech geek media.
But apart from that there is not much movement.
As expected people don’t care.
There was a format war before this one. Audio CDs with their 44,100 Hz 16 bit sampling rate were not state of the art as far as technical ability around the turn of the century. So Philips and Sony came up with the Super Audio CD that quickly went into a format war with the similarly feature yet incompatible DVD Audio.
That was 1999. There are probably around 631 audio geeks who can get really excited about these formats and their differences. The rest of us is happy with compressed mp3s that indeed can sound horrible.
The current HD DVD format flavors do present a bigger quality jump than the CD / next gen format had to show. Most peoples eyes are better educated than their ears.
In order to watch next gen material there is a very considerable investment needed. You need a HDMI capable screen with enough resolution and the right image processing ingredients. And an expensive player.
Roughly between 3000 and 6000 US$ worth of equipement.
I remember that we paid 450 US$ for our DVD player three months after it came to market. There were 18 titles available, but the quality jump from VHS was stunning. VHS was considerably bad compared to live TV. DVD was noticable better. And there was decent sound too. And the things needed no rewind. And there were multiple audio tracks with commentary and an OK navigation system. And the disks seem to last longer than tape. And they used up less space.
Sure in the beginning many Studios were betting on the other format. Divx, not to be confused with Divx , was an attempt to get people used to the fact that they can not own anything that Hollywood creates. A failed attempt, but not the last one.
HD-DVD vs. Bluray
The score seems to be zero zero.