If you’re confused about all the different DVD formats, don’t worry. You have a right to be. You might also be confused by the current high-definition format war, and again rightfully so–it’s a real ping-pong match going on.

First, Blu-Ray seemed like they had it sewn up, when the Sony PS3 game console was planned to provide the platform cheaply and widely, and more movie studios backed the higher-capacity format. But then HD-DVD lurched ahead with its hardware being released month earlier and at half the cost of stand-alone Blu-Ray recorders, and the Microsoft X-Box will ship with $170 HD-DVDs. Blu-Ray still seems to be ahead in general, but it is much more of a toss-up today. Both formats have a few dozen films selling already on their discs.

I went to a PC store the other day and noticed a Blu-Ray burner being sold. Both formats are about to hit the market in a fairly big way. And probably a lot of people will be hanging back, waiting to see who is going to win the Beta-vs.-VHS rematch. As it turns out, however, it may turn out to be less of a Death Match and more of an uneasy truce.

The clue, really, was in a different DVD war: the fight between DVD-plus and DVD-minus formats. It’s possible that you don’t know what I’m talking about, but there are two different fundamental formats for writing recordable DVDs, the kind you can burn on many computers today (and probably all computers a few years from now). There are actually so many DVD formats now that it could make your head spin: DVD-ROM, Video-DVD, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW, DVD-R DL, DVD+R DL, and DVD-RAM. DVD-ROMs and Video-DVDs can be played in almost any player; after that, there is the minus family (DVD-R/RW/RAM) and the plus family (DVD+R/RW), each family also having a dual-layered (DL) version. And if that’s not enough to make your head spin faster than the discs themselves, there are even more different varieties of recorders and players.

But the main fight was between plus and minus–until, of course, we got hybrid DVD recorder/players, commonly tagged “DVD±R/RW.” These drives could accommodate both families, thus more or less ending the format war. Oh, it still rages, in some ways–Minus tends to be ahead, but Plus got the dual-layered discs out earlier and gained a bit of an edge. For example, the drive I’m getting with my 24-inch iMac is a DVD+R DL / DVD±R/RW / CD-R/RW drive, commonly referred to simply as a “Super Drive.” If your drive is hybrid and plays DVD-RAMs as well, it’s a “Super Multi Drive.” And so on.

The point here is that hybrids came along and–at least for the consumer–made the whole “format war” kind of moot. And that’s what seems to be happening in the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD format war as well. Betamax and VHS couldn’t easily have had a hybrid to marry them together, but the DVD formats can, as they all use the same size media, and they are electronic in nature, which means the machines that read them can be highly flexible. A hybrid Blu-Ray and HD-DVD (not to mention standard DVD) is inevitable, and now Warner Brothers seems ready to make Sony (Blu-Ray) and Toshiba (HD-DVD) play nice, with a new technology that allows for the discs themselves to be hybrids–one disc, for example, could be either DVD and HD-DVD, DVD and Blu-Ray, or HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. (This follows Toshiba itself trying to make its own hybrid disk, combining HD-DVD and DVDs.) Eventually, I think you can count on seeing recorders and players coming out that can read and write all formats as well. But that may not come for a few years.

In the meantime, get used to more alphabet soup. HD-DVD is sticking close to standard nomenclature, calling their discs HD-DVD-ROM, HD-DVD-R, and HD-DVD-RW, in 15GB capacity (30GB coming soon). Blu-Ray, however, is redoing the naming, calling their disks BD-ROM, BD-R, and BD-RE (rewritable), available in 25GB and 50GB capacities.

In case you were wondering, here is the basic pricing for all the different formats, in Japan (Yodobashi Camera) and in America (Amazon.com):

The * denotes discs that were sold in single packs only; the rest were sold at discount in packs or spindles containing anywhere from 5 to 100 discs each. Note the interesting divide in pricing; standard DVD media costs significantly less in the U.S. than it does in Japan (following the pricing structure for electronics in general), but the Blu-Ray media is more evenly priced. I could not find any blank HD-DVD media being sold, but I did find one secondhand report of a Memorex 15GB HD-DVD-R disc being sold at Fry’s Electronics in the U.S. for $20–take it with a grain of salt.

I hope you are now perhaps slightly less perplexed than when you came in. Frankly, I think that the DVD industry should adopt a universal motto, that being, “Hail Eris!” Fnord!