Should I buy an HD-DVD player or a blu-ray DVD player?

Will one or the other be obsolete in a year or so? Which has the better long range prospects? Thanks for any help.

Right now HD-DVD seems to have the edge:

- The players are less expensive--standalone players start at $500 (though I saw a first-generation HD-DVD player selling new at Best Buy for $300), and XBox 360 owners can buy an add-on drive at $200. The cheapest Blu-Ray player is the PS3 at $500...if you can find one.

- There are more titles out, because HD-DVD debuted months before Blu-Ray.

- The discs are often less expensive, because it was easier for DVD manufacturers to switch to HD-DVD technology than Blu-Ray.

- The players are already in their "second generation," with more kinks having been worked out.

- Reviews of the picture quality of HD-DVD's versus Blu-Ray have consistently been in favor of HD-DVD, if not tied. That's because, despite Blu-Ray's *potential* of holding more data than HD-DVD, the majority of HD-DVD's actually hold more data than the majority of Blu-Rays. Many Blu-Rays also use the older, more space-hungry MPEG2 codec for their video, while HD-DVD uses the newer, more compact VC-1 codec.

- Sony, the primary backer and developer of Blu-Ray, has been plagued with PR problems for the past year--the PSP hasn't been as popular as they'd hoped and the UMD format is flopping as a way to distribute movies; the company was found to be putting software in their Music CD's that install "rootkits" in computers that made the computers more vulnerable to hacking and viruses; and the disappointing debut of the PS3 has made Sony the easiest company to hate lately. And, as someone else said, given Sony's track record, it's easy to predict that Blu-Ray will fail.