SvennoJ on 12 June 2015
| Tachikoma said: inconvenient truth, the first few years of blu-ray were pretty dismal, hd-dvd versions of things available on bluray also, looked better on hd-dvd, because the VC-1 codec used was better than the MPEG2 used for bluray. |
Yep, HD-DVD forced Blu-ray to go to market before it was ready. Single layer discs, mpgeg2, uncompressed 5.1 pcm sound, H.264, DTS-HDMA and Dolby TrueHD weren't ready yet. Thanks to HD-DVD we had re-releases of many of the early blu-ray discs, and then again as the straight dump of HD-DVD movies onto Blu-ray became the inferior version.
Blu-ray had far more support from the start, higher capacity discs with more room for expansion and 1.5x higher data transfer rates.
Anyway here's a full retrospective http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/20/two-years-of-battle-between-hd-dvd-and-blu-ray-a-retrospective/
