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this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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Asklemmy
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That's cool, I never heard of this! I remember following the HD-DVD format war at the time.
Funnily enough the format war is why I know about it, since I decided to do a good long look into the pros and cons of each format, especially in terms of backwards compatibility and format support. HD DVD actually had an advantage in that regard: Blu-Ray only supports 480p and up, whereas HD DVD mandated support for damn near every resolution used by an existing disc-based format (VCD, SVCD) from 240p up. HD DVD players were also supposed to support content burned to CDs as well, meaning you could fit a fair chunk of lower resolution highly compressed HD DVD content on a CD and have it play in any HD DVD player, with subtitles and the like even.
Not really that relevant now obviously, but at the time I was kinda bummed that HD DVD didn't win the format war.
I thought Blu-ray was technically superior? Due to having higher capacity and more features.
I don't see supporting 240p as a big advantage, and I doubt you could fit much HD content on a CD.
HD DVD was 15/30 gig versus Blu-Ray being 25/50 gig storage, yeah. For mainstream use that was far more important, so that played a large part in why it won, though a lot of it was also Sony making the PS3 Blu-Ray-based and giving adoption rates a huge boost as a result. In terms of actual video codec support though the two were identical: H.262 MPEG-2, H.264 AVC, and VC-1.
As for how much content you could store on a CD, there were a lot of video resolutions supported in between 240p and HD, and H.264 can compress video quite a bit while still looking decent. For the die-hard video enthusiast, not much of a draw. For someone wanting to distribute stuff on the cheap, especially in poorer areas and "emerging markets" where SVCD players were (at the time) still commonly sold? Huge draw.
EDIT: Also of minor note was that the video (but not audio) formats from previous CD-based formats were completely compatible with the HD DVD standard, meaning in a pinch someone could just take the existing video from an SVCD/CVD release and drop it into a HD DVD. Of course why one would do that is a valid question, but nonetheless the standard was set up to allow it. For whatever reason.