HD DVD Is Hybrid: The biggest draw back with Blu-Ray is that it’s not backwards compatible with the current generation of DVD players. What that means to you and me is that if everyone goes ahead and adopts Blu-Ray as the defacto standard, we’ll all have to purchase new equipment to play the Sony supported standard, which would translate into tremendous sales figures for manufacturers (namely Sony as Blu-Ray is Sony’s copyrighted technology). HD DVD, on the other hand, does support current generation DVD players in a pretty innovative move by Toshiba. Normally, a DVD is created by combining two discs together, which make it about 1.2mm thick. Toshiba is planning on putting SD content on one side of the disc, so when viewers upgrade their players and TVs to HD, they can simply flip the disc and play their movie on the other side. Can they be any more consumer friendly? Well yes, if they see more profits out of that.

Anyway, moving on, HD DVD has a 30GB disc ready right now and Toshiba claims to have perfected the manufacturing process. This means that whenever they are launched, the support would be right there ready to go.

In comparison, Blu-Ray still has 25GB in proven capacity with the 50GB disc under research and development.

To sum it up, HD DVD has a higher proven capacity, supports Managed Copy technology, features hybrid discs at the moment and the whole process just seems to be a lot more structured than Blu-Ray where we just have a 25GB disc that details on hybrid support as well as copy protection and higher capacities are scanty at best. Clearly, Microsoft has really thought this through and gone behind HD DVD, plus, it has not outright rejected support for Blu-Ray. It has cleverly stated that Vista will have native support for HD DVD while Blu-Ray support will be available as a separate download, so it has covered its bases and looks to be holding out even now for a unified standard, but that could prove to be more elusive than winning over the Linux community.