Over the weekend, I had the joy of seeing video from both ends of the scale. A friend of mine has an elderly father who enjoys watching old war documentaries that he has on VHS and she had asked me to transfer a half dozen of them to DVD.

There are many solutions to this, but my option was to transfer to miniDV in my old but efficient Sony TRV 10E and then capturing those via Firewire into Sony Vegas. A bit of chop chop and all well and good. A render to DVD was around 2 hours per 1 hour of footage.

Next was taking some of my old footage of my European travels a few years back (shot on tape on my Canon XHA1) and transferring this to Blu-ray disc.

Finally was watching a Blu-ray video of “Paul” from Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. It’s a great and funny homage to lots of science fiction and other fillums (“My name is Agent Zoyle, but you can call me Lorenzo. Lorenzo Zoyle!”)

Without question, on a big screen TV (a Sony Bravia 52”) being driven by a Sony Blu-ray player, the image and audio is fantastic.

I now consider that Blu-ray is indeed the future, as much as there is one in this nutty industry. The big question is why on earth Microsoft won’t join it? That would make Windows Media Center the complete package and obliterate any opposition.

Can anyone at Microsoft get back to us?