Blu-ray is currently the primary high definition optical disc, and no other competitors are on the market. It was not always like this, however. Before Blu-ray became the official medium, there was a competitor that competed for the same position.

The alternative to Blu-Ray was HD DVD, the format promoted by the company Toshiba. Sony and Toshiba fought for years for the high definition format. At the beginning of 2008, it was clear that Blu-ray would succeed.

This uncertainty was caused by the fact that major distributors and producers offered both mutual and exclusive support to HD DVD or Blu-ray. The industry market share was cut almost right down the middle.

Blu-ray and HD DVD players utilize the same kind of laser to read the discs. In this sense, the formats are quite similar. Blu-ray has an advantage of an extended memory, which means more features can be fit on discs of that nature.

In addition to memory, Blu-ray discs can achieve greater speeds than HD DVDs. This is because Blu-ray has a bit rate of about forty megabits, while HD DVDs only have a little less than thirty.

It was not the physical differences that determined the winner of the format war. In early 2008, Warner Bros. decided to abandon the HD DVD format, and since they control the largest portion of the DVD market, this severely hurt Toshiba. Other studios followed Warner Bros. example, and soon HD DVD was left with too few titles to compete with Blu-ray.

The final deciding factor was the incorporation of Blu-ray in to the Playstation 3. Since the game system was so wildly popular, the fact that it supported Blu-ray and not HD DVD was quite important. Of course since both the PS3 and most Blu-ray players are made by Sony, this was not surprising.

HD DVDs are no longer sold in stores, nor are HD DVD players. For the majority of people, this shouldn’t be a problem as Blu-ray is a superior format to HD DVD.