It's the audio and video standards that will matter
My guess is that both HD-DVD and Blu-ray equipment will perform extremely well. The capacity of the discs will not be an issue because recently both camps have shown dual layer and above capabilities.
The key factors in my mind are going to be the video and audio codecs used on the software and what type of extras the studios can use to entise us to buy their movie. If this format war gets going, the studios are going to have to pick a side, which most already have, and that means you may have to pick a side based on the side which has more movies you like. Unless of course all studios decide to release their movies in both formats, which is far from certain at this point.
Still, the video quality comes down to the video codec adopted. Mandatory for both groups are: MPEG-2 (currently used for most DVD's-and hopefully not used much for blue laser stuff because it isn't up to the task), MPEG-4 part 10 (a.k.a. H.264, AVC, and whatever else it's being called this week), and VC-9 (windows media version). Hopefully as little compression is used as is necessary, but one never knows what will happen. It will be interesting to see how these codecs perform, and whether the chipsets used to decode them will be good performers initially.
I'm sure that the audio performance will be ignored by the majority (You must realize that us at Audioholics are the minority
). However, great improvements can be made on the audio side a movie as well. Dolby Digital and DTS soundtracks are compressed formats, and can be improved upon. There are new madatory audio standards for the blue laser discs - Dolby Digital +, and DTS-HD. There is no reason why a movie soundtrack can't sound near as good as a DVD-audio or SACD disc (MLP is also a madatory format).
Anyway, should be interesting. My point basically is that it won't be whether blu-ray or hd-dvd is the superior format. It will be what audio and video codecs and extras are adopted for the majority of the movies on each side and whether or not there is a noticable difference between the two (my opinion, of course).
