Originally posted by: Fang Zei
DVD's have sorta been ruined for me ever since I found out about how NTSC transfers run a 24 frame per second movie at 23.976 frames per second. Yes, I know it's next to nothing, but now that I know it's there it'll bother me.

And regular 30 FPS is really just 29.97! And 60i is really 59.98! OMG!

Actually, Fang, those decimal numbers don't really mean anything. They are just pull-down issues from video fields. Its complicated but 23.98 is effectively 24 frames running by your eye per second.

As for HD-DVD, although there are many releases that have both formats, at the end of the day Blu-Ray has the support of seven out of eight of the big studios, and it's titles outsell HD-DVD by something like a 3-1 margin which is growing at an astronomical rate--that's 75% of the market and growing; so although the Matrix box set is available in both formats thats decieving--based on those stats, that would be a comparable 250,000 sales of the HD-DVD version of the film versus 750,000 sales of the Blu-Ray version of the film. To top it off a number of retailers, notably Blockbuster Video, the largest rental chain, have stopped carrying HD-DVD. The only thing HD-DVD really has going for it is that its players are cheap--but in fact its players are so cheap because Toshiba was so desperate that every time someone buys one they lose money--they are below cost! And because of this no third-party manufacturer can produce any. The only thing keeping HD-DVD afloat is that Microsoft, with its bottomless pit of money, keeps pumping funds into the format to cover the enormous losses it is taking. The goal was flood the market with players at a great fiscal loss in the hopes that it would reciprocate in software sales, but the software sales are doing terrible, and even the player sales are not very good. There's just so many factors that don't just indicate that Blu-Ray might win, but are actually showing that not only is it already winning but that the gap will continue to widen with the astounding speed that it has been since its release. Digitalbits posted a reall good editorial on the matter a month or two ago that really cuts to the heart of the issue but even this is a bit out of date now since Target and Blockbuster have stopped carrying HD-DVD and Blu Ray sales have increased even more.