considering DVDA is the only actual DVD authoring tool to STRICTLY be based and built on the DVDForum's compliance requirements, i can only assume that it will support it, however i wouldnt count my chickens.. .

This of course depends on what format will be used for the HD material to be compressd to and whether or not furhter licenses would be required..
If HD DVD is just a WMV playback box, then forget it.....

Heres a question. So we are all hoping for DVDA4. Naturally I expect BD support if that happens. Any chance Sony refuses to support HD DVD in well, I guess it should be called HDVDA? I dont forsee Sony doing that but what if the wars come to that? Would be nice to have both options open.

Before HD DVD WMV could be implemented, Sony would have to implement the VC1 codec. Honestly, WM9 HD with menus authoring should have been available much earlier even though playback was restricted to PC.

Am I missing something... It would appear as if I am the only one who thinks that it would be a good move to wait for the holographic discs to come out (approximately 2 years). Probably by then, HD DVD and BD will just start to be cost effective so average consumers will start buying the product. If the holographic disc can hold a little over a terabyte, have great write/read speeds and will be available in about 2 years; why not hold out? What am I missing?

j razz

What am I missing?

Easy answer: In two years there will be something else that is only two years out.

That and its another format requiring a new drive to be able to play it back if I am correct. NO way in blue hell will Hollywood start shifting their eggs from DVD to the HD DVD/BD basket to turn around and shift them to the Holographic basket in such a short time. I think if Hollywood was at all serious about holographic use, they would have waited another two years and skipped the whole HD DVD/BD thing.

blue hell ha!

Holographic discs just seem to have so much more potential that it would appear that hollywood or whoever else, would wait. Some of the media companies though are already using this technology as it is already available to them. Again, I must be missing something- a downside to this disc or, like you say Patrick, Hollywood would stick it out. But wouldn't it be like CD's when they first came out. Consumers were not able to make CD's, but the music industry was. Then came the burner at a good old 4x! This technology is already available to the media companies and again, some are using it. It would seem smart to me to skip over BD and HD DVD and go straight to the holographic disc technology, but then again, I am not a big wig who can make that decision for an entire industry.

j razz

I expect that we have several hurdles to jump before most of us will make the jump to whatever HD DVD format finally gains market acceptance. A burner has to be available at a reasonable price. I expect blank disks to be $10 or $15 dollars each when they are first available, and work their way down to less than a dollor over a period of several years. I also expect that reliablity on an HD disc format is going to be a major issue. High capacity disks are cramming an awful lot of mechanical depressions into a really small amount of space. This is hard enough to do with a mechanical press, but with dye layers and lasers, this will be quite a feat. I can't imagine there not being massive quality issues with this dye/laser technology being used with this mechanical level of precision. I'm sure it will work in the long run, but I don't expect to be burning my own disks in either of these formats any time soon.

Then came the [CD] burner at a good old 4x

Ha-ha-ha!

I was the fastest guy on the block with my super speed ultra NEC 3x drive. The rest had 1x or 2x drives....

Now that was slow!

god i remember my first burner.. it cost me somethign like 1600 bux and was a scsi 4.x writer, and 6 speed reader.. lol
and u know what, after abotu 6000 burns in 8 years, the blioody thing STILL WORKS...