What is more consumer friendly....I don't know BD has what only 75% of the European HD market, 95% of the Japanese HD market....only what 66% of the North american HD market. Consumers love HD-DVD

How does this have anything to do with the fact that HD DVD is more consumer friendly?  Answer:  It doesn't.  When you show you are such a fanboy, noone listens to you anymore.

That's 8Gb for the main feature and 43Gb for all the extra crap they add just so they can charge more.

Did anyone care to read up more about the 51GB discs??

There was no announcements made on whether the HD DVD players out there now can play this disc, although there were informal leaks that it would indeed play them, but with a LOT OF ERRORS during reading.

They are hoping that the built in error-correction in the players will compensate for this problem so that you won't notice any issues during playback.


And having a storage space that barely trumps (only for now) Blu-Ray discs isn't something to crow about. The fact that the data streaming rate is still limited to 36Mb/s on HD DVD means that you only get a cap on video and audio quality (though to most people this won't be noticeable).

Being "consumer friendly" is all subjective. HD DVD doesn't have region coding. Yeah, that's somewhat consumer friendly, but most BDs are all-region as well. HD DVD has less DRM, but that's only consumer friendly to the illegal guys.

In some ways, HD DVD is very unfriendly to the consumer. Convincing a studio to go HD DVD exclusive out of the blue was just wrong. I had Transformers pre-ordered on BD, only to receive an e-mail from Amazon stating, "We are sorry, but this product has been removed by the manufacturer." That's real consumer friendly. If they had given us a little warning, maybe saying, "All movies after ____ will now be HD DVD only," and fulfilled all existing orders, it wouldn't have been near as bad.

Also, it's a good thing that HD DVD may get 51gb discs soon. BD's extra space is really beginning to come into play. For example, the Blu-Ray version of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix comes with an extra 40 min. A&E special on the making of the movie, and it and many of the other special features on the disc are in 1080p. All the extras on the HD DVD version, however, are in 480p. The additional scenes and other featurettes are all in HD on Blu-Ray, but only SD on HD DVD. Sure HD DVD gets PiP and that community chat thing, but I'd much prefer getting HD extras on my HD format.

Just look at the backs of the OotP cases (top right, under "Special Features", and more info in the "Special Features" box in the middle of the case):

The HD DVD and DVD combo discs is quite consumer friendly. Buy it now and play it in your dvd player and later when you want to buy either blu ray or hd, youll already have movies for one of them

Actually, no it wouldn't - it would be 78% larger. Not only in size, but also in data rate. It would also require significantly better video decoders. Meaning, a new format. Meaning, it doesn't matter now. Meaning, you throw your brand new TV, your AV receiver and your movie player, out the window. 

Is anyone really looking forward to this now!? Seriously. There's literally zero chance the current standards will be updated to support higher resolutions, unless it's optional support and discs come loaded with several versions of the same movie. Even then it means buying everything again, if you really must have the latest and greatest.

Why would any rational person think that HD-DVD was consumer friendly given the likelyhood of its imminent demise as a viable format? If you cannot tell that my comment was meant in sarcasm then you seriously need to repeat grades 5-12. 

51GB will not be enough to hold movies like Star Wars or LoTR in High Def on one disc, we need at least 100GBs for that