Although you may dismiss these posts on a new DVD format war you do so at your own peril, for you will be affected by them. Whatever new format comes out will be applied to games consoles, DVD players, recorders, TV-DVD combo units, handheld DVD recorders, and if you don’t own one now there is the chance that sometime in the future you will.

So if there’s a format war you’ll be forced to choose sides, and it may be the wrong side meaning you may be left with obselete equipment. If you already have DVD in some form, you may be forced into choosing how to buy your new equipment and DVD’s, investing in one of the options and hoping it doesn’t loose.

The last piece of news we had was that Sony and Toshiba, the two rivals in the new formats with Blu-Ray and HD-DVD respectively, were in discussions to merge or at least to make them compatible before they started distributing the products and selling them to the consumer, thus forcing the choices onto them.

Just this week we find that the talks between them have failed and they are set to go their separate ways, it’s now up to us who wins. Eurogamer carried the news:

Speaking in a press conference, Kutaragi [SCE president Ken Kutaragi] said: “There’s very little chance that the negotiations will go through.” This follows Toshiba’s announcement last month that it would not agree to a unified format based around the Blu-ray disc.

Kutaragi went on to discuss Sony’s decision to adopt Blu-ray for the PS3, claiming that “product planning” had forced the company to make a choice early on.

Basically it boils down to this, whoever sells the most units and grabs the biggest market share wins, and that decision is up to us, to a degree. The decision is forced on us when one of the companies forces the DVD unit on us, in either the computer you’ve purchased, or the games console or even what studio produces the movie you want to buy on DVD. Different studios will be releasing their old and new catalogues on their chosen formats. Now we just have to wait and see who wins.