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The Register: Toshiba has judged its HD DVD strategy correctly, according to consumer research from price comparison service Pricegrabber. What’s stopping punters picking Blu-ray Disc is not the risk of backing the loser in the format war as the high price of players.

A 2185-respondent customer survey carried out by Pricegrabber online in the US found that 56 per cent of respondents interested in going Blu said they won’t make the move until the price of players comes down.

Only 19 per cent identified the format war as the mean reason they’re not buying straight away.

Out of the whole sample, 24 per cent said they were going to buy Blu-ray in the next 12 months and 21 per cent said they would go for HD DVD. To the Blu-ray group you can almost certainly add many of the 14 per cent who said they plan to buy an “integrated video game console”, since the Blu-ray equipped PS3 is currently the only such device with a hi-def player built-in.

Still, 11 per cent identified a new DVD machine as their choice of HD disc player, presumably because they’re satisfied with higher-end players’ upscaling abilities, or they’re among the 54 per cent of respondents who don’t own an HD TV.

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TrustedReviews: Optical drives aren’t the most exciting of devices and with on-demand music and video downloads becoming ever more popular it could be argued they’re going to become increasingly irrelevant too. Still, if you are going to get one why not go for the fastest…

LG’s ‘GGW-H20L’ was unveiled towards the end of last year but has taken an age to make it over to the UK and only now has the company given it the go-ahead.

With the ability to write Blu-ray discs at a previously unprecedented 6x (even if others have since hopped on the bandwagon) as well as read HD DVDs and write to CDs and DVDs, the GGW-H20L arguably has all bases covered.

“With the increased volume of data available today, the need for alternative storage options is rising rapidly,” said LG’s marketing manager Fiona Landsberg. “Not only are we choosing to store more data, such as digital images, music files and video, but we also continue to be bound by record keeping regulations, all of which take up precious space. LG’s revolutionary new 6x optical storage drive, the GGW-H20L, allows users to not only store massive volumes of data compactly, but it also does it in lightening speed. Our new 6x technology is set to transform the way we interact with data.”

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Sky News: National Geographic has revealed that it too will drop HD DVD support in favour of Blu-ray releases from now on.

Distributed under the Warner umbrella along with New Line Home Entertainment, HBO Home Video and BBC Home Video, National Geographic has released only one high-def film so far, the aptly titled “Relentless Enemies”, on both Blu-ray and HD DVD.

The Blu-ray version of “Relentless Enemies” is currently number 2411 in Amazon’s Movies & TV rank whereas the HD DVD disc is a more lowly number 25,756.

A company spokesperson confirmed to HighDefDigest that they are not making an official press announcement, but that they will no longer release titles in the HD DVD format.

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Gizmodo: LG’s BH200 Super Blu player, which is an upgrade to their original HD DVD/Blu-ray player, sounded like a great idea on paper. However, with the state of HD DVD being what it is (dying), it’s probably not a great decision to pay a premium on a player that does one good format and one useless one. Nevertheless, this BH200 is actually a decent piece of tech, with 1080p resolution at 60Hz or 24Hz (if it detects the right display support) and pretty good image quality.

The problems come when you get to the HD DVD support, where the “sluggish HD DVD menu navigation” get points docked off. There are some other quirks like not being able to manually select the 1080p/24Hz mode if you know your display can handle it, but all in all it’s a fairly decent player for the price. That said, with HD DVD all but deceased, you should probably just buy a Blu-ray player at this point and skip out on these dual-mode machines.

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Electronista: British store chain Woolworths yesterday revealed that it will switch exclusively to selling Blu-ray for its movie discs, becoming the first large-scale retailer to drop HD DVD entirely from its shelves. The decision comes after holiday sales where Blu-ray titles outsold HD DVD by a factor of ten to one at the UK chain and is credited largely to the Sony PlayStation 3, which Woolworths says gives Blu-ray a major advantage in terms of a viewer base. As many as 750,000 homes in the country own at least one device that can play the discs, far eclipsing the statistics for HD DVD, according to the retailer’s estimates.

The change takes effect in March and will see all of Woolworth’s 820 stores offer at least the top-ranked Blu-ray titles in their stores. Larger outlets are also expected to carry a significant number of extra titles. No American retailers already carrying HD DVD have said they would drop the format themselves, though some chains have said they would shift towards Blu-ray or start offering HD movies solely in that standard after Warner Bros. announced that it would switch to offering movies solely in Blu-ray versions by June.

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Electronista: The move by Warner Bros. to produce only Blu-ray movies is already beginning to push HD DVD out of stores, says a report from Video Business. Several retail chain owners, including Trans World Entertainment and Video Buyers Group, have revealed that they will either emphasize or introduce Blu-ray in their stores in response to the larger library of movies that will be available for the format.

Video Buyers Group in particular notes the lack of confusion makes it “safe” to bring an HD movie format to as many as 800 of its roughly 1,600 stores for the first time, according to chain president Ted Engen.

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Product-Reviews: Reports from Japan’s Business Computer News are showing that over the last 3 months Blu-Ray has been crushing HD DVD, it looks like the high definition war is over in Japan looking at the figures.90% of standalone player sales were Blu-ray and that does not even include the Sony PS3 (which we know makes up many more people with Blu-ray).

This was a major study which included over 2,300 electronic stores across Japan, it revealed a lot about the state of the next-gen format war and that Toshiba’s HD DVD players accounted for just 4% of the sales.

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High-Def Digest: Over six thousand HD DVD supporters have signed an online petition urging Warner Home Entertainment to reconsider its decision to abandon the HD DVD format.

First posted on January 5th, the petition takes issue with Warner’s earlier press statements that the “consumer has clearly chosen Blu-ray,” pointing to the HD DVD format’s lower hardware prices and “better technological capabilities” as more consumer-friendly than its high-def rival.

Supporters hope that the petition will convince Warner to reverse its decision, and that it will help prove to HD DVD-backing studios Universal and Paramount that the format still has supporters.

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Engadget: Tucked away in the HD DVD booth, Imagion AG — creators of the first HD DVD with internet connectivity, the first European HD DVD and the first Blu-ray Profile 1.1 release — was showing off its end to end tools for creating next gen interactive features. Despite being a Blu-ray exclusive movie in the U.S., Imagion is working on the Terminator 2: Ultimate HD Edition release for Europe, which will let fans view the script and/or storyboard during playback, share special edits of the movie via the internet, and track their interactive Blu-ray and HD DVDs via tuneHD.net, powered by their dynamicHD tech. With simplified access for publishers to update online features through a web interface and community features connect fans, Imagion is continuing to push the edges of next gen disc formats. Check out the gallery for a look at what tomorrow’s HDi and BD Live discs can do.

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PC World: Despite rumors to the contrary, Microsoft did not unveil an Xbox console with HD DVD capabilities built-in at CES, and has no plans to do so in the future, according to an executive in Microsoft’s entertainment business.

“Absolutely not,” said Jeff Bell, corporate vice president of global marketing for interactive entertainment at Microsoft, when asked Monday if an HD DVD Xbox was in the works.

Microsoft has been pushing HD DVD over Blu-ray as the format for high-definition video, but HD DVD suffered a significant setback last week when Warner Bros. said it would drop support for the format in favor of Blu-ray.

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ihotdesk: The battle for Blu-ray to succeed the DVD will depend on movie giants Paramount and Universal, say industry experts.

Screen Digest, a source of business intelligence, research and analysis on global audiovisual media, claims that after Warner Brothers’ decision to publish its films solely on Blu-ray discs it will now be down to Paramount and Universal to decide whether or not to follow suit.

Helen Davis Jayalath, a senior analyst with Screen Digest, said: “We could see that for Warner to make a decision one way or the other would be a way of persuading consumers that they should in turn make their own decision.

“[This] obviously hasn’t increased Blu-ray’s share of the market, but it will have substantially decreased HD-DVD’s share, in terms of the content available.”

She added that Toshiba is HD-DVD’s main backer and noted that the firm is unlikely to “simply walk away from this battle”.