Since its 1997 debut, the DVD format has gone on to become perhaps the biggest success in the history of home theater and consumer electronics. But will the current king of the video hill still be number one by the time it hits its 10th birthday? In our little home-theater department here at CNET NYC, we knew it was only a matter of time before one of our well-informed readers asked us whether DVD would go the way of VHS, considering the rising chatter on Blu-ray and HD-DVD, the new high-def, high-capacity disc formats on the horizon. Sure enough, a couple of weeks ago, the anticipated query popped over the transom: "Hey, do you think I should start selling my DVD collection now?" wrote Vince from Los Angeles. "And which format do you think will win, Blu-ray or HD-DVD?"
 

Sony's BDZ-S77: One of the world's first Blu-ray devices.
In case you're new to the whole next-gen DVD discussion, Blu-ray and HD-DVD are two competing high-capacity disc technologies backed by various consumer electronics and computer manufacturers (yes, they are a computer storage media as well). On one side of the ring you have Blu-ray's captain, Sony, with a roster that includes Panasonic, Samsung, Dell, HP, Philips, and several other industry heavyweights, and on the other (HD-DVD), Toshiba, NEC, and a couple of other upstarts. Both formats use blue laser technology, which has a shorter wavelength than red, allowing it to read the smaller digital data "spots" packed a lot more densely onto a standard-size disc. HD-DVD is capable of holding 30GB or a full-length high-definition movie, plus extras, on a prerecorded double-layer disc (compare that to today's limit of 9GB for standard double-layer DVDs). Blu-ray will go up to 50GB at launch, and Sony is reportedly working on a quad-layer 100GB disc. Cake-box me a stack of those, please.
 
A couple of expensive Blu-ray players/recorders, the Sony BDZ-S77 and the Panasonic DMR-E700BD (around $2,000), have already been released in Japan. But expect the war to touch off on these shores at the end of 2005 or in early 2006 and for it to really heat up when Sony launches its PlayStation 3, rumored to include Blu-ray support. Before I give my take on whether you should stop buying DVDs and which format will win, here's a brief description of each, with their potential advantages and disadvantages.
 
Camp Blu-ray
Backed by: Sony, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, LG Electronics, Matsushita Electric Industrial (Panasonic), Mitsubishi Electric, Philips Electronics, Pioneer Electronics, Samsung Electronics, Sharp, TDK, and Thomson Multimedia.
 
Fight song: "We're better, you know it."
 
Advantages: Getting the early start, Blu-ray has enjoyed more mindshare than HD-DVD, as well as a conglomerate of powerful backers that rivals President Bush's "coalition of the willing" in size and scope. Technologically, the biggest edge Blu-ray appears to have over HD-DVD is that it offers 30 percent more capacity and is designed for recording high-def video. Rewritable BD-RW discs, with similar features to Panasonic's current DVD-RAM discs, can play back content while recording to the disc at the same time. Also, Sony owns Columbia Pictures and recently bought MGM, which gives it a leg up on releasing content. And PlayStation 3 certainly will carry a huge chunk of clout in the marketplace.
 
Disadvantages: Real or not, the biggest knock against Blu-ray is that the discs--initially, at least--will be more costly to produce than HD-DVD media (Sony claims otherwise). Until recently, the other knock was that unlike DVD-HD, the Blu-ray spec did not include support for more advanced video compression codecs such as MPEG-4 AVC and Microsoft's VC-1, in addition to the MPEG-2 codec. But the Blu-ray Group recently announced support for those codecs, so they're now on even ground on that front.