Now I am not as technical as most of the posters on here but enjoy reading all of the news and discussion on the format war. With the news of Warner and what seems like the win of BR, what about China's desicion to use CH-DVD (a HD-DVD based format). Will CH-DVD live on and allow existing HD-DVD users to keep using their format or will China switch it's decision and use BR.

I was wondering about this myself. CH-DVD could be a way for Toshiba to still get some amount of return on their HD DVD investment, even if it falters everywhere else.

However, the titles won't be compatible with HD DVD players.

At this point I couldn't care less. We still have a few decades before China obtains total world domination. ;)

I think the success of this is pretty much independent of anything Hollywood does. Depending on the demand over there, economies of scale could allow HD DVD playback to become just another feature of low cost players. There would be nothing to stop them from being imported with different firmware. Small content providers could target them. Could be used for HD DVD9 camcorder playback if that product gets developed. HD DVD collections would retain there value. Seems like the DVD Forum should be exploiting this potential.

CH-DVD will help them make and sell bootlegs of Blu-Ray discs. ;) I'm only partially kidding here. If you've ever been to China, the number of bootleg DVDs for sale is mind-boggling. I've even seen a single DVD disc with 10, count 'em, TEN movies on it... all re-encoded to VCD quality and 2 channel stereo so they'll fit. If that doesn't make baby Jesus cry, I don't know what does! :p

I think China will go with what ever HD format wins in the rest of the world and remember what happened to EVD which was also an official Chinese format. Also how many Chinese CE companies are making their own stand alone HD DVD players? Last I checked even Venturer was selling a rebadged Toshiba HD-A3.