I work really hard and on the odd occasion I have the time to sit down and watch a movie I want it to be in the best possible quality. I also like to control my media so I use a HTPC (home theatre PC).

I fell in love with HD-DVD (sigh) until some big wigs decided having region free movies was far too convenient to the consumer.

The HD-DVD format is dying a lot quicker that people expected with planned upcoming titles being cancelled.

The formats demise does have some fringe benefits, you can pick up a Toshiba HD-DVD player for £50 with 2 free movies. Tip: these also make excellent up scaling DVD players if you have a 720p display or above. Also lots of people are selling off their movie collections cheap and retailers have dropped the price of some HD-DVD titles to circa £6.

But what now? Should I stop watching HD?. I only have one choice Blu Ray.

The benefit of having a HTPC instead of a dedicated player is I can just pop in an inexpensive OEM BD ROM Drive and pick up where HD-DVD left off.

I chose the entry level Pioneer BDC-202BK. This connects into a SATA connection and installs without the aid of any drivers, just like any other optical drive.

This is a combo BD-Rom and DVD writer.

The operational noise of the drive while reading a Blu Ray disk is slightly louder that I would have liked but is acceptable.

So I am now begrudgingly dual format.

I see that some retailers of consumer  Blu Ray players have increased the costs of the devices as there is now no effective competition.

So in this example I have managed to survive the curse of the early adopter relatively un scathed. I’m not interested in formats, I’m interested in movies.

So how does Blu Ray compare to HD-DVD?, well the movies are more or less in the same codec(s) VC-1 for example so really the viewing experience is very similar.

Blu Ray titles tend to be less swishy with their extra features like picture in picture to maintain compatibility with the different Blu Ray profiles.

Blu Ray titles have regional encoding Like DVD did.

So I now have to live with Blu Ray and all its many “issues” as there is simply no commercial alternative available for 1080p content today.

I am literally being dragged kicking and screaming on to this format.

DRM free, Legal, 1080p downloadable content cant come quick enough, That may sound naive but music is moving fast to DRM free so why not movies down the road?