My wonderful wife, Amy, and I may have only been married for less than a year, but we’ve been a couple for more than eight. And one thing I’ve gotten used to is this “look” that I get every time we go grocery shopping. Just as we’re about to check out, Amy looks at me suspiciously, to see which checkout line I’m leaning toward. If she can’t tell, she’ll just ask me.

“Which line are you going to?”

“This one, why?”

Then she points to the next line over (it doesn’t even matter which way), and says “Let’s go to this one instead.”

See, here’s the thing. Whether it’s grocery shopping, toll lanes, a line for tickets at the movie theater…whatever…I always choose the wrong line. I always pick the one where some woman has 8,374 coupons. Or a guy’s axel has just cracked in half. Or a couple hasn’t been to the movies in 7 years and asks the 16 year old behind the counter to “give a rundown” on all 30 movies so they can decide what they want to see. Invariably, in any of these situations, I’m the next guy in line.

So it comes as somewhat of a relief to know that I finally chose the correct line. Not at the supermarket or on the highway, no. But in our family room. I did this by purchasing a Blu-Ray player.

You see, for the last 18 months or so, there’s been yet another home video format war going on. The first, way back when, was VHS vs. Beta. As we all know, Beta lost (even though many claim it was a superior format). Then, when DVD was introduced, Circuit City had the retarded idea to introduce a competing format called DiVX (pronounced div-ex). The idea behind DiVX was that you’d pay EXTRA for a DiVX player ($50 to $100 more than a normal DVD player) and then pay just $3 or so for a movie, which you could watch all you wanted for a week or so. But then, after that, you’d have to pay another $2 every time you wanted to watch it.

Huh? Why would anybody do that when DVD players were less money and you could just rent a DVD from Blockbuster (and eventually Netflix) without having to have a phone jack near the player?

Well, Circuit City learned their lesson the hard way and DiVX died a fairly swift death.

This time, the battle was between the Red team (HD-DVD) and the Blue team (Blu-Ray). Led by Toshiba, HD-DVD was marketed as the “official” high-definition successor to DVD, which has always been silly. That’s like saying the color green is the official successor to the color pink.

What?
Exactly.

Toshiba has maintained that HD-DVD is the best choice for high-definition movies for consumers, because it’s always been cheaper than Blu-Ray (as far as the players have been concerned) and that HD-DVDs themselves offer more features.

Blu-Ray, on the other hand, is Sony’s baby, and one of the main benefits touted by Sony of their format is that it has a greater capacity than HD-DVD. This means longer movies in better quality or multiple versions of a film on the same disc or much more in the way of extras. While an HD-DVD can hold 15GB of data per layer, a Blu-Ray disc can hold 25GB per layer. Layers are on top of one another and allow a dual-layer (or prototype quad-layer) disc to be read by the player without having to turn over the disc.

Capacity and price aside, it’s been difficult for most consumers to get a clear answer on why they should choose one over the other.

It’s come down to content.

Unlike Toshiba, Sony owns movies. Lots of them. Not just Sony Pictures, but also MGM, Columbia and Tri-Star (as well as some smaller studios / labels). So right off the bat, everybody knew that Sony’s movies wouldn’t appear on HD-DVD. And there have been plenty of ugly rumors circulating for almost the entire life of these two formats that suggest (and some would say ‘prove’) that both Sony and Toshiba have bribed studios to support only their format in a bid to win the format war.

While Sony had its own movies exclusive to Blu-Ray, it also claimed Disney (which includes Touchstone and Miramax) as well as Fox as exclusives to its format. HD-DVD on the other hand, had exclusivity (after one of the rumored bribes) of Paramount, as well as Dreamworks on its side. Warner Brothers has been releasing films in both formats.

All of that has changed.

Warner Brothers recently announced that it would stop releasing films on HD-DVD and go exclusively Blu-Ray starting in May. Once this happened, it was the beginning of the end for HD-DVD. On Monday, Netflix announced that it would support only Blu-Ray, and stop offering HD-DVD titles to its customers. Later that day, Best Buy announced that in March, it will begin showcasing Blu-Ray more prominantly than HD-DVD, and that they feel it’s the “right choice for consumers”.

Then, yesterday (February 14th), the Hollywood Reporter ran a story claiming that Toshiba was close to officially abandoning the HD-DVD format. Toshiba officially denied the story, claming that it will continue to support the format, but let’s be honest here, folks. If there are only two studios releasing movies on HD-DVD, if HD-DVD is going to be sidelined at Best Buy, and if you can’t even rent HD-DVD from Netflix, is there really any reason for Toshiba to continue with it?

Things didn’t get any better for Toshiba when Wal-Mart announced today that it, too, would go exclusively Blu-Ray by early summer.

It’s never a good thing when a solid technology like HD-DVD bites the dust, but it’s a worse thing for consumers to have to choose between competing, incompatible formats. Sure, Blu-Ray players are currently more expensive than HD-DVD players, but once the war is officially over and there’s only one new upgrade path to choose for peoples’ home A/V systems, people will buy more and the price will drop, as it always does with such things.

My first DVD player ten years ago was $500. They can be had for, what, $30 now?

For me, the decision to go Blu-Ray came when I heard that Steven Spielberg, in a move outside of and separate from the Dreamworks deal, was releasing “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” on Blu-Ray only. It’s one of my favorite films, and, if you ask me, one of the finest films ever made. And the idea of being able to see it in high-definition, with a new transfer and a “branching system” that would allow you to choose between watching the original theatrical version, the Special Edition, or the Director’s Cut…all on the same side of the same disc…was too tempting. So I waited for the pre-holiday sales and scooped up a low-end Sony Blu-Ray player for about $250. And with that, I’ve got 5 free Blu-Ray movies coming my way.

Plus, places like Amazon frequently have specials on Blu-Ray discs (they do this for HD-DVD, too, but, you know, who cares?) whereby you can buy one and get one free or buy two and get one free. And with the prices of some discs already being as low as about $14 on Amazon, you can get some really great deals if you’re into the idea of building up a new, high-definition movie collection.

So while I’m sure I’ll continue to get that suspicous look at the grocery store, probably for the rest of my life, I’m just glad that this one time, I chose wisely.

UPDATE: As of Tuesday, February 19th, Toshiba has officially announced that they’ll cease production and marketing of HD-DVD as a consumer video format by March. They’ll continue to watch the laptop computer market to assess viability of HD-DVD drives as optical storage solutions for that market, but otherwise, the HD-DVD format is going away and the format war officially over. Additionally, Universal has announced that they’ll begin releasing their movies on Blu-Ray, although specific details and a timeframe were not given.