Microsoft and Intel last week tried to swing the computing, consumer electronics and entertainment industry toward HD DVD in a format war to establish a higher-capacity successor to today’s DVD.

It didn’t work.

Toshiba yesterday confirmed its next-generation optical disc format, HD DVD, will not launch in the US until “February or March”. The technology had previously been expected to hit the market before the end of this year.

After quietly heating up over recent months, the battle over next-generation DVD formats boiled over Thursday, as Dell and Hewlett-Packard assailed Intel and Microsoft, which have lined up in the opposite camp.

Looks like Dell and HP aren’t happy with Microsoft and Intel over the latter two backing HD-DVD. The format war is starting to heat up. In this case I have to say that Dell and HP carry more weight – they are the two largest PC vendors in the world, and they control what goes into their boxes. If they ship BD and not HD-DVD, there is nothing Intel and Microsoft can do about it. Neither Intel nor Microsoft ship optical HW – other than Xbox. Microsoft has video playback software, but a codec is a codec – VC-1 is still VC-1 be it on HD-DVD or BD, etc.