Here’s a synopsis of the/my arguments against Blu-Ray

1. Disc manufacturing is heavily prone to errors, some say the actual yield of good discs for a given batch is as low as 10%, meaning 90% are discarded. This leads to missed deadlines and high manufacturing costs. HD-DVD yields are as high as 90% on the other hand due to a simpler manufacturing process.
2. Due to the difficulty in manufacturing, this has led to a limited number of manufacturing plants, mostly owned and operated by Sony, hindering adoption. HD-DVDs can be manufactured in existing DVD plants.
3. Paramount and Dreamworks just switched from backing Blu-Ray to HD-DVD.
4. Discs themselves run a custom implementation of Java called BD-J (I think) which has proven to be difficult to program. The JVM is not standardised across devices either leading to high testing costs and buggy discs. The HD-DVD camp on the other hand has issued a "reference" device which all implementations must adhere to, regardless of manufacturer.
5. Disc manufacturing is rumored to have been subsidized by Sony to offset costs to the studios. These subsidies are now running out, causing studios to jump ship.
6. PS3 sales are grinding to a halt due to a lack of games. This is hindering sales of Blu-Ray players effectively. Xbox 360′s HD-DVD add-on player is a paltry $150 at the moment.
7. Dedicated players for HD-DVD are as cheap as $200 now whereas Blu-Ray players are still up around $400.
8. Consumers are growing unhappy with discs that hang or crash the player.
9. Interactive content on HD-DVD seems to be far richer than Blu-Ray. The ethernet port is mandatory on the HD-DVD spec, yielding more opportunities to link back to movie websites and drive revenue for the studios.
10. Blu-Ray is Sony and you can’t trust Sony. They’ve a long history of screwing formats up and the consumers along with them. Last year they were exposed as having deployed rootkits in certain CDs which would essentially hose your operating system. Have you forgotten Mini-discs, memory sticks, ATRAC and of course Beta-max?
11. What about those exclusive Blu-Ray only movies? Well did you know a large number of Blu-Ray only movies are available overseas in HD-DVD format? They play perfectly fine in US HD-DVD players since HD-DVD is not regional like DVD (I think).

Folks are saying ultimately downloads will win out over both formats. I’m sure this will be true but do you know how much bandwidth it’ll take to download a 15GB movie? A lot. More than you’ll have in the next 3 years.
So for now I’m hitching my wagon to HD-DVD.

I also got 2 free HD-DVDs (Batman & 300) from Best Buy for purchasing and there’ll be 5 more free in the mail via Toshiba.

Assume average movie length is 105 minutes and a screen resolution of 1080 x 1920.
That gives…
For video:
2073600 pixels in a frame
  1.25 bytes per pixel (assume 10-bit color)
2,592,000 bytes per frame
  24 frames per second
62,208,000 bytes per second
3,732,480,000 bytes per minute
3,560 MB per minute
3.476 GB per minute

365 GB per Movie for basic movie content

DTS-HD High Resolution Audio:
3018 kbps (kilobits per second) according to www.dts.com
368.41 kB/s (kilobytes per second)
0.37 MB per second
22.2 MB per minute
2,331 MB per movie
2.28 GB per movie for basic audio content

367 GB Total

That’s a RAW, theoretical worst-case number with no compression. Amazingly with MPEG compression this can typically be squeezed down into 25GB (14:1) or less with no quality loss leaving plenty of room for those menus or even an extra audio track.

We wanted to put the existing living room stuff in a large family room adjacent to the hallway. That family room was last decorated in 1970 and badly needed updating. I figured we’d tear off the wood panelling, get the thing dry-walled and be done in a couple of weeks.

I tore off wood panelling to reveal not studs but unfinished drywall. Time for some math:
An 8′ X 4′ panel (32 square feet) of sheetrock/drywall weighs 70.4 pounds.

The room’s about 20 x 14 x 8

280 square feet for the ceiling
160 per side wall x 2 = 320 square feet
112 per end wall x 2 = 224 square feet

That’s 824 square feet.

Divide by 32, that’s 26 sheets roughly, times 70lbs that’s 1800lbs of drywall. I ended up carrying out almost a tonne of drywall single-handedly. And the nails! My God the nails. Thousands of them had to be pulled before the new rock could go up.

So we re-rocked the walls/ceiling, put in new carpet. I then set about installing a new external door. That went quickly. I primed and painted the ceiling & walls (1+3 coats). We put in new carpet and last weekend I got around to installing the trim around the doors and windows.

All that remains really in that room is the baseboard trim. All that meant we could finally move our existing living room into this new room leaving the living room available for a new TV. Right?

Wrong: Before we get a TV, we need to buy a new entertainment center as the flatscreen I have in mind won’t fit in our existing entertainment center. To get a new entertainment center I had to paint the room. Before painting the room I had to clear it out and on and on.

I needed to bite the bullet and do this before Karen’s operation and Halloween and Christmas roll around when we’re going to have more than a full house. This sort of dawned on me last night Thursday. So I’ve spent the weekend clearing out speakers, removing and re-wiring the baseboard heaters, priming, painting etc.  There’s no rest for the wicked but it’ll all be worth it when we’re sitting in our finished house watching Spongebob Squarepants or The Wiggles in glorious 1080p.