I chose BluRay over HD-DVD mostly because I can find and afford a BluRay Burner if I need to self-distribute.

Full stop.

I don't like Sony, I really don't. I think they're so obsessed with creating vendor lock-in that they're shooting themselves in the foot - and if BluRay wins the High Def war, pretty soon you'll have BluRay players only able to play Sony movies on Sony television sets connected to Sony speakers.

Blu-ray

Full length movies with menus are possible and I can use my PS3 to test, as that is the most common high def player available in any format.

I did video on CD before I did DVD and don't want to do that makeshift solution for high def videos on regular DVD's again.

Besides I think that the BD-r coatings make them more durable than the HD-DVD-r discs.

Thomas,

As far as I know, although both HD-DVD and BluRay support same codecs (MPEG2, AVC - a.k.a. H.264, and VC1), BluRay player architecture supports transfers from the laser via data bus at higher rates than HD-DVD. It means that authoring houses could potentially use higher bit rate for any of the encoding schemes.

Does the unreliability of dual-layer DVDs come from your own experience? At what stage they are unreliable: during burning or after delivery? I use dual-layer DVDs regularly and so far had two incomplete burns (this hurts because disks are expensive and they are slower, so burning takes forever), but finalized disks work well.

Does it require to set a specific region, or region info is optional like with DVDs?

I've had brand new mainstream (Hollywood) DVDs which exhibit severe playback problems at a point which appears to correspond to the need for a layer break. I figure if Hollywood can't get this right with all their millions of dollars in equipment I'm not going to try, and it's common sense that the technical complexity of a dual-layer disc is more prone to playback problems than single-layer discs. Plus my finished videos frequently run to 90 minutes or so in length, which means that even a dual-layer DVD-R disc isn't going to work for delivering HD-DVD projects using MPEG2 encoding -- and other encoding options take too long. If I had a customer who really wanted HD-DVD I'd try packing my content onto a single-layer disc or using two discs before attempting a dual-layer approach.

since HD-DVD standard is accepting the HD on plain DVD-R, this will probably boost people to burn HD content on their DVD burner (almost every PC user got one today). Then they will look for players (coming soon, since most of DVD players blueprints can be easily upgraded to play HD content).
Prices for bluray now had better to go down very fast to keep up with this.
expect for Xmas to see lots of chinese player with the new standard.
that is probably a bad news for DivX either, since they were the only ones to promote HD on vanilla DVD.
Sony seems not to learn from previous failure (minidisc, microMV, portable playstation discs, mp3 players...)
overprotected, overpriced media kill the business.
I would be a Sony top manager, i would flood the market with cheap bluray burner even at loss.
after all sony has no benefit in burner, only on the special coating involved into bluray disc.

The layer change problem you experienced with dual-layer disks may be in fact your player's problem.

http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/volum...y-10-2000.html

Couple of results for 2004:
Denon - DVD-2200 -- 0 sec (seamless layer change)
Arcam - DV-78 -- 2 sec

Couple of results for 2007:
Toshiba - HD-XA2 -- 1.75 sec
Samsung - BD-P1200 -- 0.75 sec
Oppo Digital - DV-981HD -- 0 sec (seamless layer change)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21095732/

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/home-ente...vds-307067.php

But if the players I'm buying are typical of what my customers are buying, I don't want them experiencing the same layer break problems I'm seeing. As far as I'm concerned multi-layer discs are a complexity to be avoided, for either SD or HD delivery.

I don't know what kind of problem you have with double-layer disks. If you player freezes forever and requires turning off and on, this is severe but very rare problem. If it simply freezes for 1-2 seconds for layer change, this is normal and I don't see this as a problem. What is more, most cheap players from Walmart don't have this issue. They may have issues with cadence, chroma or overscan, but they usually don't have issue with layer change because otherwise customer would have been returning them.

I think that your position against dual-layer disks is unreasonable.

Perhaps, but as I said before it's common sense that adding the complexity of multiple layers to a DVD is inherently less likely to be reliable, and making reliable DVDs is enough of a hassle without that. Plus there's no cost-savings for using one dual-layer disc versus two single-layer, other than reducing time for the initial setup. In any case, I'm glad that a single-layer Blu-ray disc can hold a lot of HD content in a format which is quick and easy to render, so I'll prefer that over trying to pack HD material onto a red-laser disc.