HD-DVD will be out in early 2005 in Japan and Late 2005 in America. Thats a six month head start to Blu-Ray. Also MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 are not video standards just compression standards. MPEG-1 can produce high definition picture is given enough bit rate. MPEG-4 can hold 6x the picture quality at only twice the bit rate. 3x as much information into the space. With that the lower capacity HD-DVD holds 30% more information. Also HD-DVD has already finalized MPEG-4 and VC-9 into the spec. The motion to adopt a better codec was denyed by the Blu-Ray group last year. They will be voting again on the issue earlier next month. With way it will go don't know. As of now with HD-DVD officially backing these better codecs and Blu-Ray currently not I am all for HD-DVD.