HD-DVD SINGS MY WAY

And now, the end is near; And so I face the final curtain...

So it was always the under-dog but HD-DVD has gave up the fight at long last. To tell the truth I'm surpirsed it lasted as long as it did, with very little studio backing it still managed to give us some great titles and In my opinion it was the best of the 2 formats (the other off course being Blu-Ray)

I was never a fan of Blu-Ray right from the off, I hate the name for a start, sure the discs were big and beefy but firmware problems, rubbish java and old school codecs made Blu-ray seem less than great.

HD-DVD on the other hand had a great name, it was High Def but it was also DVD, simple for even my gran to understand. The video codec was better and the extras were far better with pic in pic from the get-go and most important EVERY disc was region freee. Boo ya!

HD-DVD also cost far less to buy a player, I got my HD-DVD player for the xbox 360 for just over £110 with a free copy of King Kong, stunning picture quality and still one of the best HD discs I've seen on either format.

I'm sad to see HD-DVD lose because now Sony will up the price of both the players and the discs as competition will be non existent (until we have digital downloads that are quick and easy to get that is). There's also the fact that Blu-Ray just is not 100% ready yet, so unless you have a PS3 you might end up with discs that don't work when you get them home, also pretty much no region free. sure there's more than a few discs out there that ARE region free but not all like HD-DVD and as time goes by there will be less and less of those I bet.

I have very few HD-DVDs (over a year I've been buying HD), I did not want to invest in many because let's be honest, It never had a chance in hell of winning, but hey? It put up a pretty good fight and It gave me enough of a taste of stunning HD movies to keep me going for the next few years until everything settles down.

HD-DVD, you ill be missed..RIP

HD-DVD discs I have are -

Heroes season 1

Troy

Transformers (wow, amazing pic quality)

Mission impossible trilogy (this cost me £1..yep you read that correct, £1 :D)

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Serenity (one of my fave movies and looks stunning in HD)

King Kong.

A long way off my 1200+ dvds and I'll stick with DVD for a long time to come.

I'M BACK!!!!!!!!

Yep, I'm back!!!! Wooohooo right???

Feb the 15th already, how time flies when you're having fun. So this post is a bit of a catchup kinda of post and nothing more for now, I'm back for good though so I'll be posting stuff much more often again.

So why the long break? Well Dec and Jan were all about Christmas, you have the big build up and then the aftermath of it. I spent a lot of my free time over Christmas on the Xbox 360 playing amazing games like Call of Duty 4. Call of Duty 4 is probably one of the best 360 games I had played to date. amazing single and multi player, almost perfect in every way.

After my long gaming spell and eating spell (ah the joys over excess at Christmas) I've spent the past 4 weeks getting back into shape and I must say I'm feeling great, I think I'm more fit than I ever was as I've put myself through a strict exercise regime, part of this has mean no Xbox 360 and pretty much no PC for a while hence the lack of posts on this blog.

I've been getting right into my Photography hobby and it's more than taken over my love for gaming, in fact I've been thinking of selling all my gaming stuff and probably would have if it were not for GTA 4 (pre-ordered) and Fallout this year. Those 2 games are going to be the reason I keep my 360, that and the fact I have 2 years left on my 360 warranty. My passion for the 360 though has died to such a low though that I've not even thought about it for those 4 weeks. so you could say I'm semi retired from gaming as of now.

I had a cancer scare in Nov and got the all clear on Nov 26, a very life changing time for me, and one that I've grasped with both hands since. I used to spent a lot of my spare time indoors on the PC, on the 360 and watching movies when I was not working, but now I would rather be out and about, this is where my Camera comes in handy, it gives me a reason to head out no matter what kind of day it is and just look for interesting things to take pics off… I now stop and smell the roses so to speak.

I love movies/tv shows on DVD too much to give that hobby up though so the trade off I made was to pretty much give up gaming bar the odd session maybe once a month, you never know though, I might just sell all my gaming stuff and be done with it one day soon as I would like to make my gaming room into a gym.

So that pretty much sums up my break from here the past 2 months.

Until next time

Be safe.