I've had mine for a few months, took advantage of that Best Buy get 2 free movies + Heroes deal..... I'm just looking forward to uber-cheap movies. Hurry plz.

That pic made me laugh XD, thats why i love kotaku...

i wont ok

Yes sir, Mr. Wilson sir.

Good thing is if the 360 needs to go blue-ray it can. they can just make an add-on blu-ray player. Now if only microsoft would make it a slam dunk for blu-ray by releasing a player for the 360.

I was oh so close to buying an HDDVD player the other day..Boy am I glad I thought twice.

The fact that even HD-DVD owners are wanting the rest of the studios to just switch over and make this war end, rather than dragging it out and taking more of our money is not a good sign for HD-DVD.

plus i already have the ps3

I was tempted to buy one cheap for the sole purpose of seeing heroes in HD....aint gonna happen now though

I don't know... sounds like soon will be a good time to get it because you'll be able to pick it up for next to nothing with a ton of films. Gotta love fire sales.

=)

@tocatl:
I can't tell if he's unhappy because the platform is dying or because he's missing a nose.

Will every single HD-DVD out now be converted to Blu-Ray?

Yes? No? Maybe?

I'll pick one up used for $50 eventually.

Good bye HD-DVD.

I dunno. If they're doing a so called "last push" as you say, and you can get an HD-DVD player for 75 to 100 bucks (or less), and the movies themselves come down in price relative to the Blu-Rays, I think it'd be wise for people to start investing. When there are huge spikes in sales, Warner Bros. may come back. You never know. I'm not advising anyone to buy one, but I also think it's pretty lame to advise people not to buy one. Analysts are absolutely (almost) never right when it comes to consumer trends. Just like pollsters are absolutely (almost) never right when it comes to gauging the opinions of potential voters. Blah blah blah. If it gets to be way cheaper than Blu-Ray, it'll pick up in sales, whether you tells to buy it or not. And when that happens, companies that have chosen one format over the other are not under any contract preventing them from flip-flopping again, or pulling a double-agent and releasing movies on the newly-prevalent format. Get me? Anything can happen.

Betamax'd.

In before PS3 fanboys

How long until the Xbox blu-ray add on is available do you think?

I dont care what kind I have to buy, I'm just glad it was an add on and not part of the system. That would have sucked balls.

Gotta love the art of Kotaku.Ahh...I live for this stuff. lol

But seriously,HD-DVD is truely dead.Kinda saw it coming.Oh well,at least my fav color is Blue.Now I can buy blue discs! =D

I have both formats, was kind of pulling for HD DVD. Oh well. Now I'm looking forward to the bitchin' sales on the movies and people selling off their collections.

pretty honest post. the writing has defiitely been on the wall for the world to see. But Mr. Wilson, that will not stop the flaming in 5,4,3,2.........

I bought one when it first hit...

sits embarrassingly next to my PS3.. i regret every buying that add-on now.

But Ill keep it for my Bourne Trilogy...

then when the 360 goes the way of the shitcan.... well... i dunno

Sucks to be me. I bought it months ago. In light of recent events I'm just not going to buy any HD movies for a while, HDDVD or BLURAY.

Being on the losing side I can only hope that Toshiba/Microsoft continue to try and win what seems now to be an unwinnable war out of sheer spite.

Great.....just as I was re-building my lib. of dvd anime that I had already previously owned on VHS....better still....I get to pay $40 dollars a pop! yay innovation.....

If the price gets greatly reduced I would still pick one up. Maybe they will give away more movies when you buy it.

I love my $200 paper weight. Maybe I'll use it as a bookend for my Blu Ray movies.

I have a PS3 and a bunch of bluray movies, but I might buy a stand alone HD-DVD player for my bedroom if it's dirt cheap(no more than 60 dollars). I mean they can still play normal dvds and upscale them nicely. Plus I can get in on the firesale of HD-DVDs.

ahhhhhhhhhh! i just bought one of these at christmas. When that announcment came in it was hell.

Man Mark Wilson you sound like a fanboy. Will hddvds not be made by Universal or Paramount? Will the player not upconvert anymore your old dvds? Will all my old movies not work anymore? The answer is no. Will the 1000 already released titles not work? Will Live not be able to fill in the gaps with their download service?
Damn. Consumer Choise....

What is it with all these people who beg the world to do what they do and buy just and only what they buy. I bet this guy claims to be a nonconformist while wearing clothes bought at urban outfitters or old navy....

People buy what you like. Hell the HDDVD player cost less than some really popular games do right now.

@mydogisdexter: I'm the same way -- I'm happy with my HD DVD add-on for the 360. There are hundreds of movies out now, and I can watch all my upscaled DVDs without stressing my 360 or PS3 drive. Since I have both, it's no big deal ... but, I still buy HD-DVD movies that are out, especially with some of the deals going on now.

Awsome pic lol

I hate formats ending with a fanboy argument. Just kill it off and release a BR player MS and then we can focus on more important things, I have BR, I wanted it to win for many reasons besides the fact that I own a PS3 and several Blu ray movies, but at the end of the day just let everyone of us use BR no matter what system you buy.

Everyone knew it was a losing battle, I like HD-DVD cos it's cheaper but I like Blue ray because it holds more space (which is actually crap for movies since your paying more for the BR disc and getting almost no more extras but it is good for gaming). I chose to buy none because it's obvious one would die out so I've waited and BR is the clear winner so that's where I put my money.

Someone please convince Universal and Paramount to get off their corporate merry-go-rounds and jump into Blu-er waters.
Seriously, what are they waiting for?

@GameraTheGreat:

You can find tons of deals on amazon and other places. I've never paid more than 20 dollars for a bluray movie.

@ChinezePanda: Sell it to the innocent, uninformed souls that rely on eBay for a good deal. Then save that money for a Blu-Ray add-on or better yet, a Playstation 3.

Xbox HDVD addon = Nintendo DD

God I hate you Sony. Always have to break the mold and opt for a proprietary medium. Standards are what we need in a technological world. Screw Blu-Ray I'll wait until the next generation of mediums come out to upgrade from DVD. It'll be a cold day in hell before I endorse anyone who makes an effort to break standards.

/me prefers the complete format that doesn't forcibly antiquate early adopters with every new profile release used to catch up with the already complete format.

*sigh.

There will never be an xbox bluray player. The download service takes care of that. If they add a monthly fee for unlimited downloads then there is no need to ever add a bluray player. Now there may be a Bluray in the Nextbox but not this one. Not this cycle.

I havent chosen a format yet but when I do it will be when DVDs no longer come out for anything. Basically when girls gone wild and video professor go HD or BLU so will I.

@patatc: If it was part of the system, there would be 16+ million HD-DVD players sold. Not to mention it could be beneficial to the dev teams having increased disc space.

Just like the UMD (or if Blu-Ray failed), it may not have taken on as a standard format, but it still works for its purpose.

Man, I could have told you guys this would fail like... years ago. The biggest blow was that Xbox 360 didn't have one built in. Imagine if it was built in though, there'd be like what... 10 million HD-DVD drives sold?

Amazing how a console can drive a movie format.

I would agree that, at this point, there really isn't much reason to buy the HD-DVD add-on.

But it's pretty irresponsible to say that there is NO REASON at all to own an HD-DVD player at this point, because they could certainly still have appeal once they drop down around the $99 range.

It wouldn't be a good "main" player for your living room, but if you're someone who has an HDTV in their bedroom (like me,) and you're looking for a DVD player, this would DEFINITELY be a good choice considering they are really good upscalers, plus, last time I checked, HD-DVD discs will not stop working once the format officially "dies."

And of course, I give this thread about another 5 comments, or less, before it becomes the standard HD-DVD/Blu-Ray Fanboy Battle. Funny stuff.

@nintend0nick: So I guess you were pretty pissed when you found out the SNES wouldn't play your NES carts, huh? What about when you realized the N64 wouldn't play SNES or NES carts? What about when you found out the Game Cube used those proprietary mini-optical discs? Hmm.... I guess you've never been very happy with Nintendo, eh, NintendoNick?

I bought one when the free Heroes deal was going on and I'm glad I did. Not only did I get the full free 1st season of Heroes, but I got six other free HD-DVD movies as well. Heck, the thing paid for itself. And now I rent the movies through Netflix for practically nothing. I watched that Planet Earch the other night, which is really amazing, btw. So if it dies, no biggie, I'll buy the movies for cheap when the firesale occurs and continue to be happy. Sure, Blu-Ray is the better technology, but it's still crazy expensive. So I don't plan on buying into it soon.

If your finger was on the pulse of CES, sooner or later every tech writer for every major publication is going to announce the same thing on their respective blogs/sites/magazines/newspapers. The world will soon know that HD DVD is no longer a threat to the mighty Blu-Ray empire.

Now we just have to wait for the consumer backlash as millions find out that their Blu-Ray players weren't the final build and that if they want access to special features in the future they will have to buy a player that can update (ie the PS3). Can't wait!

href="#c3698523">tehmark: It's HD-DVD that failed, not the Addon. Point fingers towards the movie studios, NOT Microsoft.

@orionzdrm: Oh, I think there will be... Eventually.

I think you'd be mad not to buy one if it was on sale really really cheap.
I love my ps3 and Blu Ray, but damn, these things are going to be collectors items.

@orionzdrm: What about those who would not like to sit and wait 2 hours for a movie to download? Also what about those who like having a physical library of disks with package art, etc.?

@callahan09: I'm sure Warner Bros. can tell the difference between good sales numbers for HD-DVD, and a false revitalization by unsustainable firesales.

@orionzdrm: According to hidefdigest, Toshiba is starting to shift their marketing to point out that HD-DVD players will upconvert old DVDs. I see this as a problem because A)Blu-Ray players do that as well, and B)any customer that doesn't already know that the player is able to upconvert is likely to be a customer that won't see a difference between HD-DVDs and upconverted DVDs which will lead them to either buy an HD-DVD player without buying any HD-DVDs, which is not what Toshiba wants, or buy an upconverting DVD player for 1/5th the price.

@callahan09: ZING!

I honestly never saw the benefit of HDDVD over BR. They always said there was one, but BR was always a clearly better product IMO. Can someone tell me an advantage HDDVD has over BR?