It seems that Dell has chosen its side in the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD war. Right after they introduced the first Dell notebook that comes with an integrated Blu-Ray burner, Dell officials have declared that in the future they will only back up this HD format because they believe it will eventually win the battle with HD-DVD.

"Blu-ray optical drive technology has gained broad industry support and we believe it will become the optical drive standard of the future," claimed. Alex Gruzen, senior vice president, Dell Product Group. While this is a brave statement, it is not exactly the kind one would expect from a marketing mogul such as Dell. Especially since things don't look good for Blu-Ray.

Cymfony research firm has been monitoring several customers' discussions on large forums regarding the HD war. The study revealed that more people are impressed by HD DVD rather than by Blu-ray technology and the advantages of Blu-Ray over HD-DVD (I mean storage space among others) are not taken into account.

Between October 1, 2006 and November 23, 2006, Cymfony conducted a research project cumulating 17 664 posts from blogs, discussion boards and other sources. Discussion was equally divided between HD DVD (50% of posts) and Blu-ray (45%), the rest of the posting (5%) regarded technical aspects of the HD format or referred to individual products.

Positive feedback regarding HD-DVDs gained 32.9% of the talks, whereas among discussions of the Blu-ray there were less positive opinions (23.5%). At the same time, 23.4% of the talking about Blu-ray were negative, quite a lot compared with only 14.2% of the same discussions about HD DVD that have also generated negative reports.

At the moment, HD-DVD is still gaining ground with more players and movies being launched all the time. Moreover, the H.264 MPEG-4 codec nullifies the advantage Blu-Ray has over HD-DVD, because movies that are encoded using this standard come out half the size of their MPEG-2 variants and have the same quality. Evidently in case you want to play a full 1080p H.246 movie on the PC, make sure you have at least a Conroe e6600 and a Geforce 7 GPU. Otherwise, you might end up watching a slide-show.