Greg Wiegand

I am normally an early adopter. I jump on things probably before I should. I bought my HDTV way before LCD. It is a CRT monster that takes several grown men to move. I bought one of the first TiVo DirectTV units (which I had a great time hacking and is still running!). However, I have not purchased either a HD-DVD or a Blu-Ray player. I lived through the Betamax vs.VHS video player war and this sure looked to be the same scenario—Sony being the a player in bother of these and they lost the first round.

So, after the pre-CES announcements about Warner moving to Blu-Ray http://tinyurl.com/3aud74 , did Sony win this one? Is HD-DVD still kicking? http://tinyurl.com/2kx73j

I want this to be over. I want one High definition DVD format. Everyone should. Look at the DVD-Video format. Although there are plenty of flavors with the recordable/RW (+, -), almost every player will play every format nowdays. The result: I bought a DVD Video player over the holidays at Meijer for $17.99. Granted it’s not much, but compared to $499 Blu-Ray player, I’ll take it. We need one format, one standard.

I also don’t want to have to buy a movie in two different formats. My library of movies is large enough as is. Take a look at digital audio. iTunes can’t play DRM WMA files and Windows Media Player cannot play DRM AAC files. I don’t want to have to break laws and crack audio files to have a library I can play on multiple platforms and devices.

Please tell me there is a winner here. I really don’t care who it is, but as Highlander says “There can be only ONE!”