(Update: August 24th - just wanted to note I wrote a core dump on the post-HD DVD situation here. There are a couple of major points it makes: firstly that my comments below about online downloads are actually somewhat missing the point as HD DVD was originally intended to integrate into the online world and eventually become an online format. The other is that Blu-ray is simply not viable because it's not a compelling upgrade over DVD, something HD DVD was intended to be, and as such it's going to be very interesting to watch what happens next. In addition to the above article, I've also adjusted this article to reflect the true situation regarding DVD and HDCP - I was a little off on December 28th.)

(Update: Jan 4th - added online competition section)

(Update: Jan 2nd - added one more counter-point based upon discussions I read in the last Slashdot story on the subject)

(Update: Dec 28th - let DVD have a half point for not doing the whole stupid HDCP over HDMI thing, and addressed it further in the conclusions.)
(Update: Dec 24th - made changes for readability and clarity. Added audio quality, as I didn't address that.)

I've been thinking about this a lot, especially since I got the HDTV a few months ago, and I've come to a conclusion that's surprising to me given the circumstances.

I want HD-DVD to succeed.

Or rather, perhaps it's not that, so much as I want DVD and Blu-ray to fail, and something marginally better to survive. The choice is between three evils. All three media formats are laden with DRM, and controlled by consortiums that are myopic and constrictive. Back in the late nineties the war was between DIVX and DVD. Virtually anyone interested in the two took the side of DVD as soon as they found out what DIVX was. But DVD's "evil" too: it's laden with DRM, controlled by the DVD-CCA, and we've been waiting for years to find something better. It's just DIVX was worse.

What makes HD-DVD less evil than Blu-ray? What makes it better both technically and on the evilometer than DVD? Well, here goes:

1. DRM schemes - optionality, and stupidity

All three systems have DRM. DVD has CSS. HD-DVD has AACS. Blu-ray has AACS plus two entirely new systems. DVD and HD-DVD make the use of their access control systems optional on the part of media producers. This has two effects: it makes both formats accessable to anyone who can afford to press the discs (only payment of patent royalties is necessary), and it allows for the possibility of some open media existing.

By comparison, Blu-ray makes use of AACS mandatory. And that's bad, but it gets worse: BD+, the other major access control technology is complex and ill-defined. As a result, BD+ disks have been failing on several legitimate players.

The lack of reliability of a copy prevention mechanism has never deterred content producers, be they software, music, or movies, from using them. In the eighties, computer users had to put up with everything from dongles that plugged into unavailable serial ports to "solutions" based upon hardware timings that would fall over if a joystick controller was plugged into the same machine. Music lovers have had all manner of moronic hacks to deal with, most infamously the Sony Rootkit scandal. Blu-ray's backers - who should know better - still think giving content producers the ability to shoot their customers through their own feet is a good idea.

Two points each (one for making it optional so at least studios can act ethically if they choose, and one for at least making the DRM fool-proof - that term meaning "the fools in Hollywood can't screw it up", not "unbreakable"), therefore, for DVD and HD-DVD. None for Blu-ray.

2. Image and audio quality

The second issue is quality. HD-DVD and Blu-ray are, for the most part, indistinguishable. At least, they should be, they use the exact same video codecs, and frame rates and resolutions high enough to be equal given the majority of source material today. The only reason to encode one differently from the other is to save space, and at between 15 and 30Gb for an HD-DVD (one or two layers, default these days is two), the format with the lower capacity doesn't have a problem. Earlier HD-DVD players could only output 1080i, but that issue doesn't exist in modern players. Some people will still claim there's a visible difference. There probably are differences between the same movie viewed on a Toshiba HD-A3 and on a Sony Playstation 3. Likewise, my Yamakawa DVD player seems to produce a really good picture compared to my Samsung DVD-R130. Oh. Wait.

Exact same video codecs. If Blu-ray looks different to HD-DVD, it's because either the studio or the player maker did something different.

DVD, by comparison, is stuck on 720x576 (at best).

Is image quality a major issue? Probably not in the short term, I quite honestly have been amazed at the quality of DVDs on my 32" 16:9 LCD, but more resolution is better. That's unarguable.

One point each, therefore, to HD-DVD and Blu-ray. Nothing to DVD.

On the audio front there's no good reason for HD-DVD or Blu-ray to have a significant advantage over one another. Blu-ray makes lossless surround codecs optional (HD-DVD makes Dolby TrueHD support mandatory, so every HD-DVD publisher can ship HD-DVDs with lossless surround audio if they want), but I'm personally not a great fan of the concept of "lossless" - the term assumes that PCM is somehow perfect, and that 1440kbps PCM audio is better than any "lossy" alternative, even 1440kbps 5.1 24bit 96kHz "lossy" audio. Realistically I doubt this particular advantage of HD-DVD makes any difference, though the sound of both HD-DVD and Blu-ray should be noticeably better than DVD. We'll give the HD formats both one point each too.

3. Acknowledgement of fair use rights; or at least a loosening of the chains

The third issue is fair use. All three attempt to restrict your use of the media you buy. But, in fairness to HD-DVD, they've at least recognized that (a) there are legitimate uses that involve copying of movies and (b) studios are too stupid to allow any of those uses without force. So HD-DVD supports mandatory "managed copy". Want to write software to allow an HD-DVD to be uploaded to a library on a laptop so you don't have to take your movie collection with you? It's possible to get a license that'll allow you to do just that. Want to make a video jukebox so you don't have to have all your media in a bookshelf near the TV? You can get a license to do that.

Blu-ray makes managed copy functionality the choice of the media publisher, and DVD doesn't support it at all, with only lawsuits over ambiguous licenses preventing the one or two companies that have tried from being shut down.

To be fair, managed copy is no panacea. It's not even necessarily free, even on HD-DVD customers may have to pay for the privilege of transferring their (bought and paid for) HD content to their own devices, but it's considerably better than the current state of affairs with DVD.

An additional point in this category is HD-DVD's lack of support for region encoding. While DVD and Blu-ray still insist that a movie bought legally overseas should not be playable on a local device, HD-DVD does not presently restrict your right to watch them. Region encoding is an unfair barrier, whether you're someone like me who's moved 3,000 miles, or whether you're trying to get hold of a movie simply unavailable in your home country.

Region encoding continues with Blu-ray and makes less logical sense than it ever has before. The world is split into three regions which have no apparent economic or cultural aspects in common. Indeed, if it wasn't for Australia and parts of Asia being lumped into the European/African and North/Central/South American regions respectively, it could almost be said that the regions appears to be based upon time zones. The usual justifications for region encoding have to do with release dates (arguments that make little sense given region encoding is usually applied to all movies, not just new movies) and price differentiation by market (eg. you can't make a profit without selling DVDs for $10 in most areas, but you're not going to get $10 for a DVD in, say, Malaysia.) Neither really can explain Blu-ray's region system.

It's tempting to make the loosening of restrictions worth just half a point for HD-DVD on the grounds that the DRM is still restrictive - you can't legally make an open source HD-DVD player, for instance. Another factor is that it is unclear what restrictions may be added to the specs in the future. But the reality is this is still a vast improvement. If we're to argue that DVD is better than DIVX because the DRM is less restrictive, then we can't argue that HD-DVD isn't better than DVD or Blu-ray over the same issue because of open source issues, because those exact same open source issues also apply to DVD. The point is that the DRM in HD-DVD is far less restrictive than it is in Blu-ray or DVD.

So one point to HD-DVD. To be fair, DVD's older (and less secure) CSS system has less restrictions on the physical devices the system can output to - AACS allows publishers to require a secure digital link to the output video device, implemented through HDCP on HDMI. DVD's history means it only applies these restrictions to "upconverted" content - 480i turned into 720p or 1080i/p. CSS does allow publishers to require Macrovision, but Macrovision is a poorly designed hack that's easy to remove from a signal. Whether this represents any great loosening of the chains is seriously open to question, but it is the case that a DVD can be duplicated pixel-for-pixel by sampling an HDMI feed from a DVD player set to output at the content's native resolution. For that reason, perhaps a half point is due DVD.

Final score and other factors

The score at the end of this round reads: DVD: 2.5, Blu-ray: 2; and HD-DVD: 5

Ok, so does Blu-ray or DVD have any real advantages over HD-DVD? Well:

• Some would argue BR's capacity per layer gives it an advantage. That's six of one, half a dozen of the other. HD-DVD discs are cheaper to manufacture, so two layer discs are pretty much standard. Ultimately, there aren't many movies in existence that can't be stored, in equally high quality, on a single HD-DVD or Blu-ray disc. Whatever advantage exists for Blu-ray here will disappear in time: HD DVD is about to support three, slightly larger, layers, to give a maximum capacity of 51Gb, according to recent revisions to the spec.
• Some would argue DVD's installed base gives it an advantage. Well, true, but if HD-DVD were to take off, it'd take care of that. At this point, I'm more concerned about a hypothetical future where all studios support the winning format.
• Some would get into an argument about Sony and Microsoft. Really, I don't care. Microsoft's fingerprints are over one aspect of the HD-DVD spec, the menuing system (Blu-ray uses Java, Microsoft threw a fit over that and thus HD-DVD uses an XML/HTML/Javascript/Web9.0 based system. I love Java, but, really, I can't honestly say I care that much when it's this kind of thing.) Sony's role in Blu-ray has been over-stated, the format is supported by a wide consortium; Microsoft's role in HD-DVD has been greatly exaggerated, and actually, it looks to me like Microsoft's role in HD-DVD might actually have been positive. But their role was relatively small.
• Some would reasonably argue that AACS is stronger than CSS and that the constraint token concept - that is, the requirement for a secured connection between the player and the TV set for penalty free playback - means that AACS can be more restrictive. While this is true to a point, the penalties for not using a secured connection when playing a disc that uses the constraint token still results in higher quality playback than DVD; and AACS is only slightly more secure than CSS with implementations of both being illegal if not done with the consent of the industry groups that control them. The major issue with the constraint token, and this is a point against both Blu-ray and HD-DVD, is that implementation requires a secure path that is simply impossible to implement in a truly free environment. That is, there will never be an authorized HD-DVD or Blu-ray player, free or proprietary, for GNU/Linux, because the secure path is impossible to implement without locking up key parts of the operating system. Whether this is an issue or not will depend upon the AACS LA. The DVD-CCA, the controllers of CSS, after some initial attempts to shut down development of the CSS decryption libraries that are a key part of most free-software DVD players, seem to have largely turned a blind eye to free DVD player software since then. That such organizations have that degree of control is a moral wrong, and it needs to be corrected at every level.
• Some argue that HD-DVD and Blu-ray's ability to "phone home", unlike DVD, means that future DRM schemes could be more restrictive and even allow for discs to be disabled after a certain number of plays, similar to DIVX. There's some validity to this, but it should be born in mind that while Ethernet connectivity hardware is a pre-requisite for HD-DVD and a supported optional feature of Blu-ray, neither guarantees an Internet connection will be available for the end user to make use of this hardware. Any restriction management system that relies upon phoning home will be a support (and PR) nightmare for the studios that make use of it.

I haven't addressed some of the funkier features of HD-DVD and/or Blu-ray, such as Internet-enabled content, community screening, and PIP, but while these are also points mostly in HD-DVD's favor (Blu-ray is catching up), neither are really compelling reasons to go for these formats over DVD.

Hard Copy vs Online Media

Also worth addressing is the idea that online downloads will render all three formats obsolete. This will not happen for at least five(?) years, not in the US anyway.

The problem is two-fold. First, I think virtually everyone who's set everything up to watch DVDs on their computers has, in the end, just not really made use of what they've set up. Well, virtually everyone is an over-statement, if I were a student living out of a room in a shared house, then, yes, using that set-up beats having a lot of equipment all over the place. But for most of us, our preferred way of watching movies, if we have the chance, involves sitting on a couch watching a largish screen across the room. We like the simplicity standalone DVD players offer. And right now, the set-top box way of watching movies is deficient.

Who, exactly, is making a cheap set-top box that can do all the downloading and showing, and what proportion of the population has an internet connection fast enough to use it? The AppleTV isn't it - it's not 1080, the HD content isn't there, and the device needs a computer to handle the downloads. Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm assuming Apple's working on it, but the downloads thing just isn't going to happen soon. The infrastructure isn't quite ready, and the equipment just isn't set up for it.

Another alternative is the DVR. Dish Network even goes as far as to download a selection of movies into your DVR that you can buy PPV-style. It's a nice feature but the selection is limited, and always will be.

Then we have the DRM issues. For all the faults of the DVD/HD-DVD/Blu-ray CSS/AACS/HDCP scams, when set up correctly and as intended (which doesn't give you a particularly bad system, per-se) the whole thing fits together without any problems. Once the Managed Copy systems come online, the most you might lose should the MC DRM fail, would be the ability to play a movie without the original disc. You'll still have the disc, and it'll still play.

At this stage, the same is not true of online downloads. A problem with DRM on your system can permanently wipe out your entire movie collection. The mechanisms to get around this are imperfect at this stage, both from the point of view of the end user and from the point of view of the copyright holders. The real solution is for online downloads to not use DRM, allowing end users to back-up their movie collections, but that's not going to happen. An alternative is to make the system even more transitory and price to suit - download the content in real time, never store it locally, and charge a price similar to a rental, and seriously, I suspect this is where online downloads are going to go, but the infrastructure is just not in place yet.

Online downloads will happen. The market has to find a formula that will work. The thing you and I probably want most of all, the ability to have our own movie collection and not have to pay each time we watch a movie we've bought and paid for, will almost certainly never happen.

I'm insane

So I added an HD-DVD player to my wishlist a month or two ago, back when they were selling for insanely low prices. If I don't get one this holiday season, I'll probably buy one. I'd like the format to succeed. Actually, I'm not that insane, at worst I'm going to be spending $100 more than normal for a good up-converting DVD player. But, in any case, I think if there is justice in the world (but, wait...) then HD-DVD will end up supplanting DVD as the major "solid" media format.

More realistically, one or both of the HD formats will end up being the Laserdisc of the consumer media world, with DVD remaining the VHS. If that happens, I just hope HD-DVD survives, even if it doesn't win.