This has been a difficult decision, and it's one that we pursue with a full realization that the outcome of the war might fall either way. We feel it is important for us to take a heroic stand in this battle, and to unfurl a banner declaring our allegiance.

No, seriously: We're really not just trying to press-release whore to get our name in the blogosphere and meme sites. We're not making a belatedly ridiculous obvious statement about the industry, grapling over the corpse of HD-DVD to make a "stand". We really think that we're telling people something that they don't know, and that anyone anywhere actually cares how we feel about this.

The above was my sentiment after coming across this article from Engadget on the front page of Digg. Some unknown, miniscule marketshare media server company is telling everyone what we already know, rushing out to declare their feelings on their topic. It's a bit ridiculous anyways, given that any media server worth buying would have already supported both.

Niveus is the guy announcing their support for their allies in 1946 (only in this war it was the Nazis that won...whoa...[invoke Godwin here]).

Of course I can't really blame Digg given that virtually everything posted on Engadget somehow gets front-page press on Digg. Engadget is milking this attention — An HD-DVD deathwatch? Guys, HD-DVD was terminal after the Warner announcement, with a miniscule chance of surviving in a two-HD format world. After the fire sale failed to ignite an HD-DVD revival — not surprising given the astounding incompetence of HD-DVD's PR, and the half-hearted support of the remaining two studios — it was apparent to all that it was done.

HD-DVD was toast.

The war was settled, and everyone was burning the dead when Netflix and Best Buy added their kerosene to the fire. Even their announcements were rather irrelevant.

Here comes Engadget to tell us that Walmart — itself a Johnny come lately, probably feeling a little burned that Amazon was getting all of the HD-DVD corpse looting action — had gathered the ashes and was cement casing it, and just maybe that might merit inclusion onto the deathwatch list.

Seriously?

HD-DVD is dead, and has been for several weeks now. Before that it was gasping for breath.

It's even possible that the firesale wasn't even an attempt at reviving the brand as much as it was to simply clear out the inventory (Toshiba was quite honest in selling the unit as a high quality upscaling DVD player, on which you can play the Bourne series. They didn't promise much more).

Which is sad. It's sad because it was a better value proposition all around, without the abuse-potential of BD+. It's sad because competition is a good thing And seriously the claims that DVD sales have declined because of the high-definition war are ludicrous. DVD sales have declined because we have a lot more media options — just having a PVR has made it more likely that the few moments I have will be filled with a Dexter or new-to-Canada playing of Extras — but more importantly because it's kind of silly to have a media collection nowadays when you can choose from 10s of thousands of DVDs on services like Netflix or zip.ca, getting them in a day or two, soon getting them digitally delivered instantly.

The idea of a shelf full of your collection seems somewhat obsolete.

Who Killed HD-DVD?

The HD-DVD group is entirely to blame for its demise.

Not only were they grossly outmatched when it came to sequencing public announcements for maximum impact, worse still they couldn't even competently respond to the Sony group's public relations brilliance without doing more harm than good. When the Blu-ray group started handing out free players with HD sets, stacking the NPD metrics for the end-of-year kill move they coordinated with Warner (NPD metrics only include a couple of big box stores, excluding major outlets like Amazon), the HD-DVD group could only mumble vague statements about the inaccuracy of the numbers. How about doing some dirty work and getting some real metrics? Something has to be better than repetitiously incanting the attach-rate spell.

All the while Microsoft sat on the sidelines pretending that it didn't really matter which way the war went, which is an astounding perspective: The PS3 just gained a colossal advantage over the XBox 360. Even if Microsoft could build a Blu-ray add-on, who wants some wanky add-on when you can get it built right into the competitor? This is a disaster for Microsoft's game division.

Acceptance

I suppose us HD-DVD supporters have progressed through the Kübler-Ross model -

Denial: The superbowl ad is going to reinvigorate HD-DVD!
Anger: Someone needs to call the FTC! Warner needs to be fined! I'm never buying another Warner movie again! Screw you, Harry Potter!
Bargaining: Why can't we all just get along in a dual-format world? Maybe blu-ray on one side and HD-DVD on the other? How about it?
Depression: Bah. Who cares about any of 'em. The future is all about digital delivery anyways. They all fail.
Acceptance: Time to go buy a Playstation 3.

I accept this new reality, and will soon buy a PS3 for the sole purpose of playing movies (the PS3 is hilariously the cheapest, and the best, blu-ray player).

After Warner’s cataclysmic announcement at the Consumer Electronic Show — where they announced that they were abandoning their platform-neutral position and going steady with Blu-ray — things looked pretty grim for HD-DVD: With Warner’s defection (most certainly a very big-dollar bribing on the part of the Blu-ray consortium), HD-DVD would now be targeted by only 30% of releases, versus Blu-ray’s 70%.

HD-DVD's fate seemed to be sealed, made worse by a flurry of misinformation and FUD following Warner's announcement, spreading rapidly across the “got-my-news-from-a-little-birdie” blogosphere (rumoring that Universal, Paramount and the apparently all-important adult industry were going blu, though of course that hasn't come to pass...yet, at least).

HD-DVD seemed to be a short-lived format doomed to die a “Betamax” death.

[Psssst...a little birdie told me that 20th Century Fox is on the verge of switching sides, abandoning Blu-ray in favor of HD-DVD. Don't tell anyone I told you!]

Ebay filled with early adopters trying to unload their gear before buyers got wise.

Maybe those people are right and their pennies on the dollar was the best economic evacuation they could hope for. Maybe HD-DVD really is doomed.

Or maybe they're wrong. It wasn't that long ago when Universal's decision to go HD-DVD was declared a "death blow" for Blu-ray, and of course we know that the blu lived to fight another round.

How We Got Here

Let’s take a step back and look at the whole picture for a moment. The following is a rough graph of current market penetration for the various formats.

The point of the above pie chart is simply to demonstrate that the vast majority of consumers haven't even made the switch yet.

This is a significant point when considering claims that consumers have chosen one format or the other, as was Warner's guilty plea when asked to explain their actions. 

A small group in a small subsection of the market with a skewed demographic would decide things for everyone.

That's where the high-definition video race is right now: A million or so HD-DVD players, plus the add-ons to the XBox360, along with the millions of PS3s with their built-in Blu-ray, along with several thousand stand alone units, would decide the market for every Joe LateAdopter across the land.

Of course that's a ludicrous way for it to play out, though it seems to be the course the industry is taking.

Which brings us to an obvious question: So why haven't consumers made their vote, given that the contest has been going on for a couple of years now?

DVD Is Good Enough For Most Users

The answer is obvious - to most consumers, DVD is more than adequate for their movie viewing needs. Not only is DVD adequate, it's generally the high-point of their visual experience. An experience that is dominated by pixelated overcompressed online videos and cable companies that hyper-compress hundreds of channels onto too thin of a pipe, with so many visual artifacts one expects some tomb raiders to bust in and steal their set.

DVD is pretty much head and shoulders and torso above the rest of the crowded class of commonly consumed video options. Recently Apple has made strong inroads in the digital video delivery market, pushing out so-called high-definition at far lower than DVD bitrates. Few are complaining, so obviously they've passed the bar that most consumers consider good enough.

This is why sales pitches based upon high bit rates and 6x the pixels just aren't compelling to most consumers, and most just sat on the sidelines unsold on the advantages. When you're watching standard definition 4:3 television — often hilariously showing letterboxed content in a hilarious pseudo-high definition attempt — stretched out on your 52" 16:9 TV, running the sound through some low-quality "virtual surround sound" speakers, the Mbps of the media just isn't compelling. Add the fact that most high definition media is only high definition media, which is a no-sale to consumers that want to play the same disc on their laptop, their computer, the old entertainment unit in the basement, and the SUV (though this is one of several areas where HD-DVD has a pronounced advantage -- the only high-def discs I've purchased have been combo discs, a purchase criteria having nothing to do with faith in the longevity of the format)

So who did put on the battlegear and takes sides in the high def war if most consumers sat on the sidelines?

Legions of Freecenaries

On the Blu-ray side the army is largely made up of accidental enlistees, and it has been a brilliantly played strategy on the part of Sony-

• Playstation 3 gamers — the PS3 has been a failure for Sony from a gaming marketshare perspective (if software makers dumped platforms based upon marketshare in the gaming market, the PS3 would be in much worse shape than HD-DVD), but it's been an incredible triumph in securing dominance in the next generation optical media battle, lending to the fact that the market is so immature right now that smaller numbers can make a big impact. While millions of PS3s are small stuff in the overall gaming world, it is a huge boost for Blu-ray media even if only a fraction ever decides to try out the player. Not only did the PS3 sneak Blu-ray into millions of homes, many adopters put on the colors of their adopted hardware and went forth to battle for Blu in message boards across the land.
• Technology zealots and advocates in various camps — Apple simply had to declare a non-committal lean towards Blu-ray for the Apple camp to almost universally start rallying for Blu-ray, which is a bias that oozes out of every Apple-focused blog or advocacy group.
• A small group of -philes who really are convinced that Blu-ray's higher per layer and maximum bitrate advantages are important.

Who's fighting on behalf of HD-DVD, then?

• Toshiba enthusiasts — err... Toshiba is a big, square electronics company that steadily produces excellent electronics and computer hardware, but they garner little passion among their users.
• Microsoft enthusiasts — err... Microsoft's half-hearted support of HD-DVD is more likely to earn it detractors than supporters.
• Xbox360 games — Not really. It's an add-on that only a very small percentage has purchased, so it holds little influence in the community.
• Intel enthusiasts — err...

HD-DVD was, from the outset, at a massive disadvantage from an advocacy perspective, lining up partners with few zealots or "fanboys". Sony, on the flip side, played it absolutely brilliantly, getting cheap words of support that would garner them automatic armies of supporters.

Whenever a debate about the formats broke out, legions of supporters and fanboys would appear to cheer on the blu, opposed by an ambivalent, "meh" squadron of "let's balance things out" HD-DVD defenders.

Get enough of the low-level buzz and eventually you'll get to someone higher up the chain, such as the curiously lauded Michael Bay, producer and director of films such as Pearl Harbor and Transformers, who came out swinging against HD-DVD. Later he recanted, declaring that he'd been under siege by a gaggle of blu-ray fanboys over a nigh of drinking, to the point that he capitulated to their advocacy. It should be mentioned that as a hilarious twist Transformers is a fantastic HD-DVD disc, demonstrating all of the great features that HD-DVD has had for years, that Blu-ray might possibly get...maybe...sometime in the future. (Check out the Transformer's HUD)

It's a strategy that technology companies should watch and learn from.

The HD-DVD camp just hasn't played it well at all.

How HD-DVD Can Get Its Groove Back

Nonetheless, there's still a very small chance that they can turn things around, so here's my software-architect-playing-consumer-electronics-guru perspective on how the HD-DVD camp can win things.

• Make HD-DVD players disposably cheap, which is something that Toshiba just did. You can now get a fantastic HD-DVD player that doubles as an insanely good upscaling DVD player for about $150. Even if Paramount and Universal abandoned ship tomorrow, you'd still be able to choose from 1000 or so available HD-DVDs (buying them cheap on ebay after the exodus that would occur), and have a much better experience with your existing DVD library. You can even burn your own mini-HD-DVD disc on DVD9 discs with products like Nero 8, taking advantage of MPEG4 and some of the cool interactivity features of HD-DVD.
• Make it hackable. The Toshiba HD-A3 is a very powerful little unit with built in Ethernet, TCP/IP, dual MPEG4/MPEG2 video stream decoders, HDMI and optical outputs. This thing would kill if I could use it to browse and play from iTunes servers and uPnP media devices in my home (or online...give me an internet radio player). The flash update ISO for this thing came it at over 40MB, so it clearly has a lot of capacity for expansion. With a healthy contingent of hackers and modders on their side, HD-DVD would have a lot more influence among early adopters, and would be a sure-win multipurpose member of the home entertainment stack.
• PUSH FEATURES MORE LOUDLY THAN QUALITY. The reality is that Blu-ray does have a slight lead from the quality perspective (with more storage per layer, and a higher max bitrate), albeit at an unreasonable cost (namely much more expensive hardware and media, coupled with less flexibility, such as the lack of blu-ray combo discs), but that really doesn't matter — it is doubtful a fanatic could tell the minor theoretical difference between HD-DVD and Blu-ray, but that ignores the point that most buyers can't even tell (or rather don't care to tell) the difference even between DVD and the HD formats.
  
  This is why the features of the format should be the focus. Not just because HD-DVD soundly trumps Blu-ray in this department, but because that would really sell to the average consumer: Overlaid menus during playback, picture-in-picture special features, popup information — this stuff is gold, and most consumers still know absolutely nothing about these advantages, instead being pounded about 6x the pixels and "crystal clear" sound.

If Toshiba has the bank balance and stock to supply the market at these incredible prices (let me repeat that the HD-A3 makes an amazing upscaling DVD player. Upscaling is like those cheesy police movies where they take some grainy convenience store video and "process" it to the point that they're analyzing the culprit's retina pattern. Only here in the real world it's not quite as ridiculous, but the HD-A3 still manages to eak out an HD-like image out of the limited DVD-data, doing much more than simply pixel multiplying or naive aliasing), then HD-DVD might just have a chance.

Their public rationale for exclusivity was that the "consumer has clearly chosen" one format, given that more Blu-ray discs were sold than HD-DVD, though of course that is unsurprising to anyone at this stage in the competition. The PS3 was the trojan horse that got Blu-ray into 10 million households (basically early-releasing a beta version of a format that is still in flux), while Microsoft blinked and released the XBOX360 with only classic DVD, only adding HD-DVD later as an add-on. The thus far minute high definition sales required little more than an experimental purchase or two by a portion of Playstation 3 owners.

Of course by the historical sales justification, the consumer has chosen to never switch to high-definition content at all, given that DVD sales dwarf both formats combined this early in the game.

Clearly it isn't about the current state of things, it's all about trends, and the trend was that as consumers were finally starting to make the switch, a strong majority had been choosing HD-DVD.

The reason for HD-DVD's leadership among people intentionally choosing a format, rather than accidentally embracing a format through a game unit, is obvious: to paraphrase an old saying - It's the economics, stupid.

HD-DVD players, in all forms (standalone, laptop drives, PC drives, etc), tend to be less expensive. Often much less expensive. Not only are the players themselves less expensive for various technology and licensing reasons, but the consumer gets a secondary win in the form of "combo" discs that support both DVD and HD-DVD on the same disc — an easy, inexpensive feat with HD-DVD, but an expensive, thus far unseen option for Blu-ray due to technical details of the format. With the magic of combo discs you don't have to buy all of your media twice (or upgrade all of your players simultaneously), but instead can play the same disc on your vehicle's DVD player, your laptop's DVD player, that old PC, and yet still enjoy the content in high definition on your entertainment unit.

Having both formats — old and new — on one disc allows the purveyor to give the user this convenience without worrying about cannibalizing their own sales (you can't give the DVD side of the disc to your brother and keep the high-definition side with a combo disc, which is why you won't find both formats on separate discs in a single package).

Technology wise the difference between the two formats is irrelevant for the desired purpose: Blu-ray holds 50 GB on two layers. HD-DVD holds 30-something GB on two layers (contrast that with DVD's 9GB. The difference is greater still given that the new formats use the vastly superior VC1 codec instead of DVD's MPEG2, putting much more information in less space) recently finalizing a third layer to boost total storage to 51GB.

Clearly Warner had no economic difficulties supporting both formats. Tto draw a parallel with the web world, it's like supporting multiple browsers on your website — the core content is identical or can be automatically encoded for each client type, and you're left with relatively minor discrepancies to iron out. Or as a better example, to transcode to multiple codecs — if you don't have Windows Media, I'll feed you Quicktime. If anything the HD-DVD discs tended to be less expensive.

So what reason would Warner possibly have to declare an allegiance in this war, given that the public justification is farcical (as are assumptions that they're motivated to hasten an end to this war — if anything the media companies would be motivated to continue the format war as long as possilbe, waiting until you've built a media library and then making you buy it again. People haven't stopped buying DVDs during this battle, aside from the natural slide in sales as people spend more time online).

Only a few reasons logically stand up to any scrutiny-

• They were paid off or incentivized to support only one
• They have been fooled into believing that the DRM of Blu-ray is unbreakable

Ultimately the biggest loser is the consumer. Warner's choice almost certainly means that you will be effectively taxed hundreds of dollars to support the next generation of high definition content.

Expect the already expensive Blu-ray players to increase in price in coming weeks.

Edit: Some of the reports of Warner's decision are extraordinary bits of misinformation. Take this gem that declares "But in recent months, executives at Time Warner Home Video have seen a dramatic shift in consumer interest towards the Blu-ray format". What an odd way of reporting the fact that HD-DVD sales took 10% more of the market over the past 12 months, at the expense of Blu-ray. Even better is this entry in the misinformation game which states "Warner was also reportedly offered monetary incentives to continue to support HD DVD but declined.". What an interesting way of reporting on the fact that Warner was offered incentives by both sides, but apparently the Blu-ray group was willing to offer even more (you don't have to be Kreskin to understand what it means when Warner refuses to comment about what the payoff was for them to "choose" the Blu-ray side, instead making vague, abstract comments about the future).

The device appealed to me not only for its bountiful storage capacity at a price that's lower than an internal 500GB harddrive alone generally goes for, but also for the promised direct network connectivity, theoretically allowing file sharing to multiple PCs without the need for a server.

I had been having late night guilt pangs about the 130W+ pseudo file server running around the clock for the odd time that a file needs to be accessed from one of the laptops or PCs, so this unit at first glance seemed like a perfect, inexpensive solution. Web searches yielded no information at all about this unit, though, with all internet roads leading back to the Future Shop.

Alas, 500GB for $119.99...not much to lose there so I went ahead and ordered.

A few days later it arrived in the mail (literally in the mail, delivered by Canada Post).

Opening the box revealed the following contents:

• A ~9' long power supply
• A driver disc (which includes a disclaimer that it is not necessary in Windows 2000 and up when the drive is used in USB mode
• An ~3' USB cable
• An ~3' Ethernet cable
• A drive enclosure with drive inside

Close inspection made it readily apparent that Comstar had strategically placed their own branding stickers, skewed and haphazardly, atop the original branding of the enclosure.

I peeled them off and discovered the original enclosure maker, which is ximeta, with the enclosure being an NetDisk Enclosure.

Thus far, still quite happy getting a 500GB unit for so little.

So I hooked it up to a speedy client-device with a USB 2.0 connection.

Powering it up, my trusty Kill-A-Watt showed it consuming 9W in idle mode, up to 11W under heavy access. Reasonable power consumption levels, given that the hard disk alone accounts for the bulk of the consumption. Noise was low and barely perceptible.

Windows XP and Vista clients immediately saw it as a connected hard drive, recognizing 500,014,133,248 bytes of free space on the NTFS formatted volume.

Without boring you with benchmarks from Iozone and SiSoftware's Sandra, I can say that the device as delivered gives very impressive performance via USB, with a sustained throughput of 30MB/second (solid across the span of the disk). While the built-in drive on the test PC, which I measured to gauge relative performance, gave a higher initial throughput, it actually fell behind later in the test.

During the testing, I identified that the drive in this particular model was the Seagate Barracude 7200.10 500GB.

Next to test the network attached storage functionality...only to discover that this isn't really a NAS unit, but instead is more of an ethernet attached SAN (read more about NAS, SAN, and iSCSI).

It doesn't make itself available via any standard protocol (CIFS/SMB, FTP), instead using a proprietary oddball of a protocol called LX/NDAS. Ximeta heralds this technology, touting several benefits (device spanning into virtual drives, less overhead, etc), however it has some significant downsides.

• You have to install a driver on each and every client PC that will use it, presuming that a driver is available for the client you want to access it from.
• The non-routable protocol used is not necessarily friendly with the rest of your network. In trials I can say that it managed to fubar my wireless (on a Dlink DIR-615) successive times.
• The driver itself is not the pinnacle of ease of use or stability. With the latest release version driver I encountered machine lockups and other oddities (mounted drives that weren't mounted, for instance).

Using the NDAS driver over a wired 100Mbps network, with one switch between the client and the unit, performance dropped to a consistent 8MB/second (versus 30MB/second via USB. Not entirely unexpected given that 100Mbps ethernet has a maximum realistic transfer rate of ~10MB/second after excluding overhead).

The network functionality allows for rudimentary sharing of file access among select operating system versions, but overall the purported benefits don't justify the protocol.

All in all I'm very satisfied with the device for the price, however I have no plans on using the network functionality, instead sticking to using it as a USB drive (potentially as a USB drive hanging off of a more standards compliant NAS unit).

While I don't think it's worth the supposed original price of $250, it is a steal at $119.99 (though only if you're willing to stomach the loss if the device goes south. Being an unknown vendor basically sticking a hard drive and an enclosure together with some of their stickers to cover the branding, it seems dubious that there's any long term support backing you up if it fails during the 1 year paper warranty).

Pros

• Fast when connected to USB 2.0, with a solid hard drive inside.
• Inexpensive at this price.
• Quiet, with low power consumption.

Cons

• Unknown, potentially fly-by-night vendor that only seems to sell to the Future Shop with shoddily re-labelled OEM hardware.
• NDAS is of suspect usefulness -- if you want a NAS, get something different.