My personal feelings on HD formats is that they are a suckers game from a consumer standpoint. There is just no way you can convince me the drastically increased prices for players and movies is worth the quality upgrade for the 2 hours that I watch one of these movies.

I literally have zero desire to invest in HD players or discs right now or in the foreseeable future. And I would probably considered to be right on the edge of early adoption as I tend to get stuff right as the price drops into the reasonable range after its had its run at "unreasonable" for a good while.

The general reluctance to replace a DVD collection is exactly why sony put Bluray into the PS3, The trojan horse technique will win in the end. Any household that has a PS3 in it, even if its confined to the kids room is unlikely to go out and buy the competing format.
I personally can see the draw of HD movies, but its not enough of a draw to bother spending loads of cash. Especially with the 'availability' of DVD5/9 formatted .mkv

I assume anyone with a dual format player would only buy Blu-ray because each disc is the same price and the Blu-ray version is of higher quality. I aslo said that that would be the case if as mentioned in the artical all companies backed both formats. Aslo realize that in five years from now Blu-ray discs will have a total capacity of 200GB while HD-DVD discs would still be at 51GB. This would allow for full spec bit rates for audio and video for the main feature, plus all of the extra features all on ones disc. At the current moment HD-DVD can not even get full spec on main features.

Yes my whole post is based on made up figures, and in reality I see HD-DVD being killed off by next summer, but I thought I would look at it from a few steps back, and see how dumb mine, and others predictions really are. One last thing to remember is that stores like well all of them are not going to carry, Cars on DVD, DVD SE, HD-DVD, HD-DVD SE, and Blu-ray. Thier is simpily not enough room in a store to cary that many versions of each movie, or even the top sellers.

Two key points:

And only the highest-resolution displays, the so-called 1080p HDTVs, for progressive scan, can show the images at their best. As a result, the potential customer base is limited. With a lower-resolution 720p set, “you are not as likely to see a dramatic a difference” between standard and high-definition DVDs
...
In addition, DVD players that can convert images to near high-definition quality can be found for under $100, hundreds less than a true high-definition DVD player, further reducing the urgency to upgrade to one of the new formats.

lol

Thats not entirely true, first of all, 1080P is pretty much pointless unless you have a seriously big TV ~ 50" plus. you can see a difference between 720p and 1080p on smaller screens BUT only if you are sat infront of the screen stupidly close. For the majority of the market, 720P is as good as they'll need, its just marketting hype the big companies are pushing to make the consumer buy their expensive 1080p screen more than anything.

Secondly, the difference between DVD and BD/HDDVD is more than just resolution, colour is ALOT more accurate on the newer formats, thanks to far better compression techniques. Ive compared screenshots from major DVD and HD releases, one being Children of men and the difference is very surprising on some scenes, Another great example is the remastered Enter the Dragon which I bought the DVD of years ago, it looked fine untill I say the HD version and looking back, the skintones are way over bright on dvd, almost like they have been over saturated.

Very good final point there about retailers.  They are no way going to sell 3 or 4 different formats of the same film as it will take up too much shop space.  Priotiry will go to biggest selling format which is DVD by a huge margin and I do not see that changing for a long while!

 Also don't forget how Sony took over the music format with MD and SACD and killed of VHS with Betamax! NOT! Sony do not have credability when pushing new formats, too many people lost out to these formats despite their clear advantages over the competition.

Your also ignoring the Internet and how its changed the music industry when the industry believed otherwise.  Same thing will happen with films/TV.  You can already download or watch many things on the net and if you are clued up with torrents/file sharing you can watch just about anything in very good even HD quality!!

I don't think it can really be called a war. Its more like a group of 5,000 highly trained US navy seals armed with M-16's (representing Blu Ray) shooting the shit out of about 300 of the most poorly trained African soldiers weilding large sticks (about 3 feet long) (representing HD-DVD).