I'm relatively new to HD and have not participated in any of the disagreements over the two formats. So I hope I'm not opening up a can of worms here, but I'm renting some movies that I can get in either format, such as Casablanca.

If I can play either equally well (via HTPC) is there a general reason to prefer either format for the sound or picture (most important to me) quality? I know Blu-ray has more available storage so it seems it has the potential to be superior, but is that potential actually utilized for the movie and sound? Or is is mostly used for more special features (not my top priority)? Should I look at reviews of each individual movie by format since there is no general rule?

I guess this also applies to purchases although HD is getting scarce (but cheap).

Not really. Most movies that are available in both formats are identical. There are some occasions where you will actually get better audio on an HD-DVD release than its Blu-Ray counterpart.

I would stay away from buying HD-DVD if only for future hardware concerns.

For purchases that sounds like a good reason.

That's interesting, I didn't know that. I guess it makes sense that they take the same transfer and just put it in a different format.

And the encoding isn't inherently significantly better or worse in either format I assume?

Not really, there are slight differences with codecs sometimes but the quality difference is minuscule if any (of course some exceptions apply, this is true for 99% of releases on both formats though).

It might come down to extras.

Weren't there some HD releases which had PIP which were not available on their Blu counterparts?

Virtually exactly the same. Anyone that tells you that they can see a difference is lying or a hardcore lunatic at AVS.

HD-DVD. Keep the dream alive.

If you're looking to rent a specific title, it never hurts to first look at the Blu-ray and HD DVD reviews here. If there are significant differences, I'm sure those will be mentioned in the reviews.

That sounds like a good reason.

Thanks for the replies. I thought there might be one that was technologically superior from what I had been hearing a long time ago, but I guess not.

That's what I'm trying to do. For instance, Casablanca...

http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/25296...lanca/?___rd=1
http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/35634...lanca/?___rd=1

Two different people rate the video a bit differently, one with 4 stars, one with 4 1/2 stars. So it's hard to really compare those.

For the most part, the HD and BDs are identical. Only a few times did a studio go back and do some "real" work. The Perfect Storm is a good example.

hd-dvd
http://hddvd.highdefdigest.com/498/casablanca.html

blu-ray
http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/923/casablanca_uce.html

Many of the early Paramount dual format releases are slightly superior on HD DVD, as they used "full bitrate" aka 1.5Mbs DD+ and VC-1 compression for the HD DVDs, but only 640k DD and MPEG-2 compression on the Blu-ray Discs....eventually they switched to AVC for Blu video (before they went HD DVD exclusive for those months), but still weren't doing lossless audio until the format war ended and they came back to the Blu fold.....

There are also still a few Warner dual released titles that have exclusive PIP tracks on the HD DVD release, such as 300 and Harry Potter 4 & 5.....

HD DVD - stick it to the man!

One Major downside to renting HD DVD is the lack of scratch protection, which Blu Ray has. If the discs have been mistreated your in for a terrible experience. 85% of HD DVD discs I ever got from Netflix were unwatchable at some point during the film.

Other than that, with a few exceptions titles on both formats looked pretty much the same.

How could this not lead to arguments about HD DVD and Blu-ray?

X, they're basically the same. One upside HD DVD has is that for owning media, you can usually get it on the cheap. But the downside is sketchy hardware support.

Now that sounds like a very good reason to go with Blu-ray rentals. I already had one bad Blu-ray that I had to exchange because it was unplayable half way through the movie and I hate that!

Because most of us are mature up not to get into a bickering fight since its a moot point bringing up a dead format. Though as mentioned above, there are still some HD DVD titles that are "superior" to Blu-ray. As long as we don't go back and fourth we should be fine.

^ and pro-b hasn't posted yet.