I came across this rumor and deemed it too far fetched to post. Well, Paramount made it official today. Paramount and Dreamworks are going HD DVD exclusive and dropping support for Blu Ray.

Brad Grey, chairman and C.E.O. of Paramount Pictures stated "I believe HD DVD is not only the affordable high-quality choice for consumers, but also the smart choice for Paramount". This decision means that holiday blockbuster releases Shrek the Third and Transformers will only be released on DVD and HD DVD. Paramount also owns Nickelodeon Movies and MTV Films. The exception is that Spielberg films will still be released on both formats. This is a big victory for HD DVD in a format war where Blu Ray has held the dominant position since the beginning of the year. It also shows that Toshiba, who recently announced a third generation of HD DVD players isn't planning on throwing in the towel anytime soon and is taking steps toward strengthening their position. Universal and Paramount both HD DVD exclusive.

The format war just got more interesting. This just in, the official press release.

Both sides in the Blu Ray-HD DVD format war are passionate and vocal about their format being better. Here are 5 reasons why HD DVD is the superior format:

1. HD DVD software was ready from the launch of the format. Blu Ray, on the other hand, is still waiting for it's encryption scheme to start being utilized. Also, at launch and for several months after, Sony was incapable of making a dual layer disc. Early Blu Ray discs have less storage capacity than HD DVD.

2. Interactive extra features. HD DVD has alternate audio tracks, like DVD, but on HD DVD they have picture in picture of the commentator overlaid on the screen. Another implementation is picture in picture windows that pop up in certain scenes that contain relevant making of clips. The interactive features of Blu Ray are still missing in action, so this is a big plus for HD DVD.

Ultimate AV has a new article regarding how HD DVD and Blu Ray players send multi channel audio tracks to av receivers and processors.

All HD DVD and Blu Ray players have onboard decoding of Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital +, and DTS. All HD DVD players feature lossless Dolby TrueHD decoding, it's part of the mandatory HD DVD specification. TrueHD is optional for Blu Ray, and only a couple of Blu Ray players have the feature. DTS-HD (DTS' equivalent of Dolby Digital +) is capable of better bitrate than the old DTS codec, but still lossy. Like it's lossless counterpart, DTS-HD Master Audio, it's still missing in action. HD DVD players advertise DTS-HD(core only), which means that they extract the standard DTS track present in all DTS-HD tracks for playback. DTS-HD and DTS-HD Master Audio will finally debut in the forthcoming third generation Toshiba HD DVD players.