Mmmm...51Gb HD-DVD discs??? Where are they then? Blu-ray has had the space advantage for a while now with 25Gb & 50Gb compared to 15Gb and 30Gb. This is also evident with the lack of lossless pure audio on the Transformers HD-DVD because of space. Also higher MBPS on the new Disney/Pixar films uses more space.

HD-DVD bring out 51Gb and then BR bring out 100Gb.

Who has the better movies? Well this is down to personal taste; and IMHO it has to be BR by quite a bit.

Has it even been shown that all BD players can read 4 layer BD media?  It seems quite unlikely.  The vast majority of BD movies right now are 25GB.  What I'm talking about is Toshiba proving all of their HD-DVD players can read 3-layer 51GB media, so movies that need extra storage could use them.  And it suggests that the future of the medium is 51GB discs.

But quibbles about storage aside, since they're mostly insignificant, there isn't a hell of a lot of reason to really prefer one format over the other.  As you've said, it comes down to personal taste about the movies themselves.  And all movies are available via DVD -- since optical media is how I get a tiny fraction of my HD content I don't mind watching some movies in DVD and some in high definition.  If I had cable, which has universally horrible HD quality, it might matter more to me.  It might matter enough to connect both a BD and HD-DVD player to my home theatre setup, but I certainly wouldn't pay more than $100 for the privilege of a few extra HD discs. 

And right now, even if I had a BD player (only) laying around I wouldn't bother putting it in my home theatre system simply because I don't need more clutter there and I'm saving a little room for another console as soon as I'm convinced to buy one.

Have Toshiba proven that their players can read 51Gb discs? 

I'll have to find my source, but I read that they had and the firmware updates recently rolled out supported 51GB discs. It is possible that the first generation players wouldn't get support for it, but there are so few of the first gen players on the market that they could be sent in for an update if necessary -- it would be feasible from a financial and tactical perspective.

The BD camp doesn't really have an answer for it yet and called it a 'publicity stunt'.  There are 100GB *writable* BD discs, but nothing more than two-layers in the work in BD players for BD movies.  To put it in perspective, the 51GB format has only had preliminary specs approved so far AFAIK with Toshiba announcing it nearly a year ago.  So early next year or perhaps even Q2 would probably be the soonest we could hope to see 51GB HD-DVD movies. 

Here's a really good article about the format war:

http://hddvd.highdefdigest.com/news/show/Joshua_Zyber/Commentary:_Living_in_Fear_of_the_Niche/1154

There aren't many strong reasons to care about who wins or whether either format will be alive in five years. A very small percentage of people will know the difference between DVD and high def formats, and most people think DVDs are high def. Just like most people care only about the size of their screen, not the contrast ratio, resolution, or content.

Hell, for a lot of people cable produces sufficient quality for television viewing, even though their quality is significantly lower than OTA broadcasts.

Doesn't matter who wins for me. It might be cheap dual format players and stalemate. I haven't bought DVDs, except anime, since I've been exposed to High Def formats. The difference is night and day for me.

I'm sure the Xbox 720 will have to have an HD DVD drive. I don't see how they will continue to use DVD 9, when its been a problem for some devs.

I think a major issue here is that before getting a new HDTV, most people had yet to experience even 480p.  So now they get a new HDTV and hook up the old progressive scan DVD player and suddenly they now see 16:9 at 480p and are blown away compared to the old 4:3 at 480i.

Its hard to convince people that just made that jump that they need to make another jump to 1080p when the price is so high. 

I personall am a HUGE home theater nut
I love my surround sound and HDTV

however... screw both Blue-ray and HD-DVD, this war is about to piss me off and I have not and will not support either one till every single movie is on one format. It is absurd... why the hell should I let a format decide what movies I can watch.

It is really getting to the point where I want them to both fail and something new come along.

Either way, expect HD-DVD and blu-ray combined to have week to week sales of about 10% of the units ( in america) of DVDs by march 08 because of all of the price cuts going on.

It's even worse than you believe. 

Read the article, look at his comments about his friends and their new plasma TV.  Most people connect that fancy progressive scan DVD player to that fancy TV via composite cables at 480i. This is much worse than using component cables at 480i.

Even more significant than quibbles about the sharpness and color detail of the image, which I'd consider fairly obvious but not as obvious as a really bad aspect ratio, the author fixes their aspect ratio problem. And they don't notice a difference!

Consider the consequences of this.  The quality of the TV and the image are completely insignificant to the average person.  They care far more about the size of the TV.  So their ability to detect differences is about as subtle as a hammer hit to the skull.  These are just regular people, and they probably don't notice the difference between standard definition and high definition broadcast TV, much less notice the difference between DVD and high def formats (since DVD is significantly better, in almost every case, than standard def TV broadcast).

So they don't notice the difference between the DVDs and HD-DVDs or BDs, then how in the hell are you going to convince them to pay 2-3x as much for each movie, even if they own a player?  If this format war drops the value of standard def DVDs, that alone is a huge win for most people and that alone will keep adoption down. 

Technical minded people can't understand why people stick with Cable TV (significantly lower picture quality vs OTA and Satelite).  Or why they don't care that they don't have HD content.  Or why they think regular DVDs are high definition.  Or why they can't tell the difference between the Xbox 360 and the Wii graphically.  Technical minded people don't realize that others don't know anything about it and don't care to know.  They just want the TV (or game system) to work and to be big.  Loud sound is impressive.  Good sound and surround sound are quibbles. 

You want to convince these people that they need to buy an HDMI 1.3 receiver so they can listen to uncompressed TrueHD audio?