HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray is the battle everyone's talking about. No one knows for sure who's going to prevail, talks regarding the possible unification of formats have reached a standstill, and each side has its own supporters which are now gathering for the showdown.

Actually, we won't have to wait too long to see who's going to win this battle. Although HD DVD players are expected to be in stores for the holiday shopping season, the backers of Blu-ray think they might still have an ace up their sleeve: Sony Corp. plans to include a Blu-ray drive in its hotly anticipated PlayStation 3 video game console. It won't arrive in the U.S. until next year, but the popularity of the PlayStation franchise might just prove to be sufficient for PS3 to be a smashing success.

But there's more to this fight than meets the eye, because the major Hollywood players are in on it as well. And the biggest problem is that they are splitting their support between the two formats, each of them boasting about the fact that their will provide richly detailed pictures and cinema-quality sound. Guided by opposite visions for the high-definition future, half of the studios have sided with HD DVD, and the other half are expected to back Blu-ray.

You might be curios about the reason why the studios have become active participants in this race. Well, that's because DVD sales and rentals accounted for almost 55% of the revenue from feature films in the U.S. last year, according to Adams Media Research. Even if the studios are not willing to disturb this major cash source, they also want to replace DVDs with a format that is less vulnerable to piracy.

And to think that all this fuss is about a thin layer of plastic above the metal surface on which data is written. An HD DVD disc calls for a 0.6-millimeter coating, while a Blu-ray disc requires 0.1 millimeters. However, these 0.5 millimeters might prove to be one of the largest battlefields in the history of formats.

And now, leaving aside all the technical details, who's backing who and the huge amounts of money involved, it all comes down to one thing and one thing only. The fate of the DVD wars is in the customers' hands, and the final outcome won't be decided in the corporate world, but in the stores.