Uncompressed sound is not an advantage.  Lossless sound is an advantage.  If you compress something lossless, you produce /exactly/ the same stream when it uncompresses as if it was never compressed in the first place.  That's just a fact.

Higher quality sound is primarily an advantage of HDMI as digital optical could only support 1.5Mbit/second feeds.  But telling the difference between 1.5mbit/second and significantly higher bitrates will be fairly difficult for 5.1 sound.

What blazinhead69 said.  Bottom line however you want to state it is that audio on Blu-ray is better than conventional DVD's.

Wow. You can see this argument is just another fan boy argument. Wii and 360 fans say there is no difference or minimal difference and want blu ray to fail.

This article is just silly, if you look at the trend over time in ssj12's ongoing update about blu ray sales, the sales are up and down depending on releases http://www.vgchartz.com/forum/thread.php?id=23025 (you can see that it varies between 7mil a week and 12mil). Its very narrow minded to say that one week down turn means that blu ray is finished.

For the person who said that he turned from the SD to HD channel and could not tell a difference...was the HD channel broadcasting in HD or just digital? All you have to do is open you eyes and tell the difference between hd and sd. Clarity, color, sound (if you have surround sound, hd on tv is usually in 5.1).

As for Blu ray it is not just a better picture, it is far better sound quality as well (the space allows for it). Most dvds have only dts if you are lucky, most blurays have more sound options. It also has advanced controls and nifty menu options.

Most digital downloads are more equivelent to renting movies and not buying movies. Streaming movies should not bite into movie sales. And upscaling dvd players are not as good, and the top quality ones are almost as expensive as a bluray player. If you buy a 50 dollar upscaler then it will not look much better than a progressive scan dvd player. Now if you spend 200...but you can get a bluray player for that these days and they usually have a powerful upscaler in them.

Finally. You can buy new release Blu rays at walmart for 20 dollars. I bought transformers there for that price the day it came out. Same price as DVD transformers. I saw blu rays for as low as 15 dollars at best buy. prices are coming down quick.

Fila you make a good point about downloads, they are very restrictive. And i dont use the downloads on my PS3 because it takes forever to do it, and you only get 24 hours to watch it.

It's not just about first week sales, it's about lifetime sales.  The first week of a big hollywood movie is gonna be most biased  towards blu-ray than anything else.

See that's where you are wrong.  The real benefit in the jump from cassette to cd and vhs to dvd was not the picture and sound.  On the tv sizes and technology (CRT) that were available at the time you couldn't really tell a major difference between vhs and dvd.  It is only with flat screens (and their crap performance with anything with a poor quality source) and with surround sound systems being more readily available that you noticed a difference in sound and picture quality.  The real benefit was not having to bother with rewinding and forwarding and not having to worry about your tapes wearing out from significant use.  This is especially true in the case of music.  Quality is not the reason why cd had a strong uptake.  Otherwise how do you explain the fact that mp3s are killing off cds?

Blu Ray unfortunately does not offer that advantage over DVD which is why I think unless Blu Ray manufacturers force it on people by making movie studios stop producing movies on DVD I don't think it is going to have a chance.

Downloaded media is SD not HD.  If you want HD you can either spend 3 days downloading it or just buy a BD movie.

Where you are wrong is that you CANNOT accept the FACT that your statements are OPINION. No matter how you want to spin this, there are improvement from DVD to Blu-ray, and the difference and cost are all relative from person to person. Just accept the FACT that not everyone will have the same perception as you, and that doesn't make you better or worse. I for one (and others) saw and heard the difference between a VHS and a DVD on a 25" tube Sharp SDTV back in late 2000. But guess what, you don't see me shoving it down people's throats.

Blu-ray is great and worth it for some while not for others, and that's okay. Just accept it, and stop being so self-righeous and closed-minded. And in regards to mp3, some people are willing to trade quality for convenience. It worked for 8-tracks when compared to turn-table albums. Besides, it's becoming more commonplace for audio products to offer quality enhancing options for mp3 playback. "Killing off cds" is at the best subjective. And really, there is a different mentality and aesthetics between listening to music and watching a movie. That's always been a bad comparison.

$20 dvd player vs $250 BD player
$5 mega dvd collection vs atleast $15 small tiny bargain bin crap

extra quality and high res or not, you go tell the general walmart shopper to do the math. Still try to argue why BD going to dominate????

you can state every facts of advantage jumping to BD all you like, but million or billions of other bargain bin shopper don't give a shit what advantage it had over DVD.

until I see a $50 BD player and $10 mega BD collections to choose, then it'll replace DVD.