Now that the high-definition war is over, I've finally decided that it was time to explore Blu-ray. I've seen both HD-DVD and Blu-ray. I never thought that one was technically better than the other. Then again, technical excellence has never the deciding factor for which technology wins. It has always been about marketing. Remember VHS versus Beta? Of course, very few people remember about Betamax now. This time Sony wins big with its high definition format.
So I got a Blu-ray drive for my computer. My laptop had the HD-DVD, but I never got any movies in that format because I've never found a good movie player that worked well. So I gave up on it awhile ago. This time I figured there must have been tremendous progress made. I remember reading about this article (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001197.html). So I tried the AnyDVD program. Sure enough, I was able to rip a Blu-ray disk to my computer. I even got venturous and tried to rip a HD-DVD from my laptop. I then purchased a copy of WinDVD HD. I got a copy of PowerDVD along with the Blu-ray drive, but it doesn't support HD-DVD. The other problem I had was that I was using Daemon Tools to try to mount the blu-ray ISOs. Doesn't work with the latest version because it was reporting to Windows that the ISO is an HD-DVD. Weird. So I went to SlySoft and found that they also had a virtual driver. This one reports all ISOs as Blu-ray discs even HD-DVD ISOs...
The solution I ended up with is that I have to use both ISO emulators, one for Blu-ray and the other for HD-DVD. I don't mind switching and remembering which is which. The picture quality is absolutely amazing! I remember this feeling when we first got HD cable. That was 1080i. This is 1080p!
Oh, did I mention that the HD-DVD ISO were about 25Gigs in size? Or that the Blu-ray ones are 50GB?
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