I'm about to give up and go looking for a HD VCR.
it is known as D-VHS
My point? I think it's best for the industry to offer all content in all formats.
no there is not
If it's digital, it's not hard to make perfect copies to multiple media formats at the same time.
not at all. If someone makes a video that has peaks of 37mbps, then that will not work on HD DVD, the studio will need to redo all the work to have an HD DVD movie. On the other hand a studio could make a bad transfer at lower bitrate to work on both but why should the BD be gimped to HD DVD specs?
Even at that the specs of both formats are different so there is no "perfect" copies. BD and HD DVD use the same video codecs a bit differently. BD can do DD@640mbps HD DVD can only do DD@480, DD+ and DTHD are different on BD and HD DVD. On HD DVD the DD core is incorporated in the DTHD and DD+, on BD they are not, so their structure is a bit different.
Even if HD-DVD is "behind", there are still enough already sold to make for a viable market for media producers.
right now there is not enough to guarantee viability for any format. Beta had sold many tens of millions, how does that compare to HD DVD which is no where 1m? VHS was king at some time with way over 100M sold, and studios today are not releasing on it. What you are missing is that you need WAY more people and all of those people need to have no other way to buy (or rent) the movies. If every person with a VCR also has a DVD player a studiop loses nothing by only putting out DVD, The same here if most of the HD DVD owners have BD then they can buy (or rent) the BD and the rest the DVD, a studio loses nothing.
How about all future players agreeing to make their decks read both formats with all features of each format fully enabled? Oh yea, and sell these decks everywhere for about $99.
because that is illogical. Supporting both greatly increases the price. There are a lot more royalties to pay, you also need a much more complicated machine.
Why do you think the dual format players are much more expensive then one of each?
You are also missing the obvious even if most players are dual, studios have no wish to support two disk formats and neither do retailers. Even if dual players do become the norm studios will release the movies on the format that has more single format players and that is and will be BD, so you will most likely be just as screwed for having gotten coned into buying an HD DVD player
