Yes, the format war has come and gone. HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray. Better implementation vs. More space. Sadly Blu-Ray came out as the winner and we all have ended up the loser.

I read an interesting article over on the Inquirer and they detailed a lot of the follies of Blu-Ray. I was already aware of the versioning change (where version 2 made all older players instantly out of date), but I wasn’t aware of some of the other things they mentioned.

Both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD have a “virtual machine” environment for the sickly high level of anti-copy “protection.” The HD-DVD implementation was actually quite “good” (although no implementation would have been better). Blu-Ray, on the other hand, was thrown together at the last minute and sucks royally. The idea that just to watch my movie I have to wait for a Java Virtual Machine to start up and do whatever it does is saddening.

I remember they said Blu-Ray was “uncrackable”–that no one would crack the protection for over 10 years! That’s great, except not!

This “Profile 2.0″ thing where you can jump online with a disc? I’ll pass. It’s bad enough that Blu-Ray discs update your player and do things in the background without your permission. It’d be even worse that they could jump online and pull things then (or send things back).

Blu-Ray was a bad idea then, and it’s a bad idea now. I’m glad their sales are low, and be rest-assured that you won’t see a Blu-Ray player in my house. Unless the Xbox 360 gets one (and I hope not!)

~Jaker