I’m not sure if HD-DVD would have fared any better than Blu-ray over the long term. Ultimately, broadband speeds would still have got faster, streaming services would still have started up, and consumers would still have preferred the convenience of movie streaming. And in the games industry, publishers would still have wanted the lower cost of digital distribution and the way it enables them to kill the second-hand games market.

Looking back, I see that if the industry had adopted HD DVD, we might have extended the lifespan of physical media; it was cheaper to implement and cheaper to manufacture—both the players and the discs.

Of course, Blu-ray came along to revolutionize the market and seemed like alien technology when it first appeared, but from an economic standpoint, HD DVD might have been the better long-term option.

I have DVDs with bitrates under 4500 kbps, while others almost hit the 10 Mbps limit; regarding audio codecs, I have live concert DVDs with a mix of AC3 and DTS, and others that even include uncompressed PCM tracks.

Nowadays, I have all my DVDs digitized on my PC and converted to H.264/AAC (using AC3 for 5.1 tracks).