Who has been here since the format war, and are you surprised by how heated it got?

[meremortal]

It's an interesting old throwback topic and I was reading the online geek battles pretty much every week during the entire format war era. It seemed like there were constant plot twists and gossip, and there were even insiders from the major corporations like Microsoft regularly posting. In retrospect, I'm kind of glad hd dvd did not 'win' despite it being the format I was initially rooting for as the underdog. Blu had a pretty rough start out the gate and it took some time to fine tune the authoring as the earlier releases with MPEG-2 video and LPCM audio on 25gb discs were not very efficient and frankly were pretty bad. For a time it seemed like VC-1 and TrueHD on 30gb hd dvd discs was a pretty solid combo, yet 1.5 mbps DD+ was too often used. Blu's 50gb capacity proved to be a pretty good spec that still holds up and the scratch-resistance polish was a really nice addition.

The problem was the format wars confused and divided the public. Most people weren't familiar with the studio alliances and what movies belonged to which company. And not everyone wants to gamble on an uncertain product. It probably hurt blu's adoption after the format wars with people looking to other alternatives like Netflix and streaming. And it didn't help that both formats were always a work in progress such as players requiring firmware updates or some hd dvd combo discs not working. On one hand, the "competition" might've pushed blu to become a better product at the sake of a fairly unnecessary and divisive consumer war. Ultimately, blu's still an awesome format and has come a long way since those days.