With more and more companies announcing to go Blu-Ray exclusive it is only a matter of time until Blu-Ray will be announced the winner of the battle of the high definition war. I really could care less which format wins the race because I have no intention to purchase either of them in the near future but if you plan to purchase a HD player you probably should buy a Blu-Ray player.
The HD war is not over yet
If you thought that the HD war was over with the switch of Warner Studios from supporting both HD formats to just Blu-Ray then you might want to observe the market a little bit longer. The effect that Warner has left the HD DVD supporters will not be visible to consumers later this year when the contract expires (May 2008). From then on Warner will only release movies on DVD and Blu-Ray.
Howto copy Blu-Ray and HD-DVD movies
Well well well. The industry tried their best to make the new competing high definition formats blue-ray and hd-dvd as secure as possible so that no one would be able to view them with insecure hardware or would be able to copy the movies. The files themselves are protected by AACS which stands for Advanced Access Content System. HDCP (High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection) makes sure that high definition playback is only available if the output device (television, monitor) is HDCP capable, if not the movie will be downsampled to 960×540p.

