Ryan Thomas Goodenough

This week’s free iTunes single is “Time to Pretend” by MGMT. The very beginning reminds me of a GoGo’s single, and I don’t think that association is completely by accident. As the song begins to pick up, it quickly jumps pass that 70’s all-female band and into a completely different territory. In fact, I’m pretty sure that the band is made up of two guys, if the album cover is any indication. The song itself is actually pretty enjoyable. It will definitely get a few listens from me and makes me wonder if the band has any other good songs on their album. That’s not to say that this is a great song–it’s not. But it has a different sound than most of the free singles and doesn’t make me wish that the song will end quickly. Not too shabby…

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I just got this email about the new Mac Pros. That’s a lot of power! 8 cores worth, in fact. Wow, I might actually be able to run Final Cut Pro in full speed on one of these.

In case some of you didn’t notice, there has been a war being waged between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, the two competing formats for HD movies. Having recently purchased a 32″ Toshiba HD TV, I have been following the war fairly closely and wanted to give you a report from the battlefield.

The Basics

Blu-Ray is certainly the superior format. It holds more information and those studios that have been releasing Blu-Ray movies have been using DolbyHD for the sound, as opposed to DolbyDigital for HD-DVDs. DolbyHD is a lossless codec and is far superior to DolbyDigital.

That being said, HD-DVD has offered more features on the discs, with more interactivity and online features (many of the players have ethernet jacks).

The Players

Seeing the obvious strengths of the Blu-Ray platform (there is nothing stopping Blu-Ray discs from having the same features of HD-DVD discs), many studios have started releasing their movies exclusively on Blu-Ray. The most recent convert is Warner Studios, leaving only Universal and Paramount as HD-DVD exclusives. Paramount is most likely committed to HD-DVD for another year, while Universal’s future is up in the air.

Key software/video game monoliths like Sony (who invented Blu-Ray) and Apple have shown their support for Blu-Ray, while Microsoft has released an HD-DVD player for the XBox. However, recent reports have shown that Microsoft may be more open to Blu-Ray than previously thought.

Buying Advice

Blu-Ray will most likely win the HD War, especially with the recent (January 5) switch of Warner Studios from HD-DVD to Blu-Ray. However, Blu-Ray players are still prohibitively expensive. My advice? Amazon.com has a great sale on HD-DVD players right now. You can get a good Toshiba (the inventor of the HD-DVD platform) HD-DVD player for under $200 plus 10 free HD-DVD movies valued at $20 a pop.

The HD-DVD player will upconvert your standard DVDs to HD-like quality (Blu-Ray does this too, but it is still an expensive alternative), you’ll get to see HD movies for cheap, and, if and when Blu-Ray wins, you’ll see huge clearances on HD-DVD movies. At that time, you can buy a Blu-Ray player that hopefully resolves some of the slow load times associated with current Blu-Ray players and use your HD-DVD player as a good, HD movie player in another room.