Depends on wheter you live in the US or not

To me the answer i give is pretty simple:

Live in the US and you can use either format, it does not matter much. Quality is about the same on both formats (although i have my doubts about BluRay using MPG2..).

If you are NOT living in the US or Canada you are better of with HD-DVD:

No region encoding (btw: regions are shifted now, Japan is no longer Region 2.. why? because Americans could not import Anime dvd's.. so Hollywood decided to take Region 2 from the Europeans and add it to Region 1, there are now 3 regions for BluRay in total, HD-DVD has no region coding).

Don't let people fool ya saying BluRay is superior, it is a medium with higher storage capabillities (25-50 opposed to 15-30 and soon 3 layer 45GB for HD-DVD).

A decent 2 hour Full HD movie with mutiple audio is about 20GB with the new MPG4 AVC or VC1 or H.264 codec so they fit on either format.

They both support the same codecs for audio/video, support the same resolutions, HD-DVD is cheaper to produce as it is an upgrade to dvd technology and production lines need not be altered much (BluRay needs new production lines but who cares: Sony does not allow any BluRay being produced outside their own factories).

Value documentaries and old movies? HD-DVD does NOT have mandatory encryption, so productions for the public domain do not need to buy a (for BluRay mandatory) 5000 usd encryption key per title.

BlueRay uses too much drm crap.. is this important? Well, let's say i'd like to see what happens on a scratched disc when the stream gets interupted and the BD+ virtual machine kicks in to grace you with a 'unable to play this pirated disc' message ;-)

Side note:

If your new HD capable mediacenter in the near future plays this content 75% of the decoding capacity is used for the drm and 25% is used to actually decode the stream. That's why we will need better cpu's..

I will never buy Sony again and since i am a European my vote is for region free HD-DVD (WTO, free trade anyone?)

Stupid situation.

I have a PS3 and I have a few blu-ray disks. What’s really grinding my gears is the fact that a movie I want (a couple in fact) are only released on HD-DVD. I find this an incomprehensible situation.

Until they can come to an agreement and release all movies on both formats then neither is a valid choice imho. Until then I’m "forced" to download HD rips of movies I want for free and stream them to the media server (ps3) and watch in glorious HD. Although 5 gig downloads hurt my bandwidth.

Additionally the quality of an up-scaled DVD (ps3 again) on a good HD TV is excellent, for that reason i would never replace a DVD with a HD version, but i would when possible, buy new releases on blu-ray (American version of course as they are cheaper and no region protection :-p ).

@Michael Tripper The elite does not have a hd-dvd drive. you have to buy it separately. Besides what’s the point if you don’t have a HD TV ?

I saw a light... but it was not blue...

Neither 10 nor 5 years will pass until DVD/CD format will succumb. The future is here, the flash memory and solid state HD have already conquered the market. In 2-3 years 32-64 GB flash will be obsolete. Come on, how long we'll have to pay premium for last decade's news?

as a gamer..

I just bought a XBox 360 "Ellite" hd-dvd system eventhough I do not have a HD tv...but as a gamer I'd say go with the X or the PS3 cuz the games rollout for the PS3 is pretty bad - looks like MS was correct to release early and reap an earlyy and sustained win in the library wars - much as ps2 did last gen.

BUT I AGREE ABOUT THE DEATH of physical media wholeheartedlly - I can't wait to get a 8 GIG MicroSD card for my cell phone later this yeart - the thing is smaller than most adult male fingernails and it holds 8 gigs? I mean c'mon, see ya later discardable plastic discs

I give it 5 - 10 years before the DVD/CD format is gone from the mainstream.

Alternative

I would seriously consider a Betamax player - then you wouldn't have this problem...