Piracy?

[Aractus]

Ah, I remember the HD-DVD vs Sony bit. I was actually rooting for HD-DVD the whole time because of the reasons you stated. Such a sad time :-(

Don't feel too bad, D-VHS was completely state of the art technically speaking in 2001, and was only slightly outperformed by HD-DVD and Bluray in 2007. But they should have always known that by 2001 tape-based formats are for archival and recording, but not for general purpose viewing. You have to physically rewind/fast forward a physical tape - impractical if you want to "skip back" or "skip ahead" as the case may be in our modern times.

HVD was red/green-laser technology (cheap compared to blue laser), they had already demonstrated 100GB discs at the time that Bluray and HD-DVD were being developed, with room for expansion without the need for improved hardware (you just needed improved discs). In 2007 they produced a 200GB disc. Since that time, they produced a 1TB disc, and then a 6TB 12cm disc (the capacity of 120x dual-layer Bluray discs), still using just red and green lasers and not a blue laser. It's supposedly still in development so you never know it may one day eventually replace Bluray, however that would assume that there's a need for more than 50GB to store consumer-grade movies, and that's still a long long way off. 10GB is perfectly adequate for storing full 1080P or 2k material 2hours in length. 40GB is more than adequate for 4k material at least 2hours in length (there's 4x the resolution, but not 4x the detail).