Several years ago, when home video recording was in it's infancy, there was a struggle over which format would become the accepted standard, Betamax or VHS.  Well, as we all know, the marketplace made that choice and VHS won out as the better product, which it was.

Recently, we have all witnessed round two of the home video wars with the struggle over which format of DVD would become the industry standard for High Definition televisions, HD-DVD or Blu-Ray.  This past week, the creator of HD-DVD, Toshiba, threw in the towel and announced that they would discontinue making HD-DVD, quickly followed by Microsoft announcing that they would cease making the HD-DVD player for their Xbox game consoles..

Now, like a lot of folks, my wife and I have been waiting for the smoke to clear before we committed to which player to get when we upgrade our TV later this year, but with one exception.  When we went the the theater presentation of  “The Menagerie,” we decided to go ahead and purchase season 1 of the original Star Trek when it came out in the remastered formats, HD-DVD on one side and standard DVD on the other and take the chance.    

Where does this leave all of us with disks and players with HD-DVD?  Basically out in the cold as, while Toshiba will continue warranty support for the units, it will become next to impossible to buy movies in the format before much longer, as now all of the studios have committed to Blu-Ray, with Paramount being the last to commit on February 21st.  Now, it looks like anyone who has a HD-DVD player (unless you bought the Samsung player which plays both formats) will have to go and buy a Blu-Ray machine to see future movies in HD on a disc.  Once your HD-DVD player burns out, that will be the end for your HD-DVD disks.

One good thing for owners of the TOS season 1 disks is that we can play them on standard DVD players.  The bad news, however, is that now we will all have to buy Blu-Ray disks to play on the new Blu-Ray players to see the remastered Star Trek in HD, whenever CBS Paramount decides to release them.  One can only hope that The Powers That Be in the company might not charge as much for this set as they have for Star Trek titles in the past.  Now, the price on the HD-DVD/DVD set of Season 1 was understandable when you take into account the combined formats, but the prices for Voyager and Enterprise when they were first released were not reasonable.  A simple comparing of prices shows that the only DVD sets that have come anywhere close to those prices are BBC sets (Doctor Who and Torchwood) and certain PBS videos.

So, come on, guys.  Can you give us a break on at least Season 1?

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