While you will soon be able to view movies in high definition on DVD right in your living room, there is a fight shaping up between two competitive formats -- HD DVD and Blu-ray.

Toshiba leads the group committed to HD DVDs, which also includes consumer electronics manufacturers Sanyo and NEC. HBO, New Line Cinema, Paramount Home Entertainment, Universal Studios Home Entertainment and Warner Home Video are also in the HD DVD camp as are Intel and Microsoft, which recently announced that it has voted in favor of the HD DVD format.

Why is Microsoft supporting HD DVD?

Microsoft said it felt the 50GB version of Blu-ray was nowhere in sight, giving the 30GB HD DVD the capacity advantage for the time being. Microsoft also said HD DVD guarantees a feature they want called manage copy, which lets a computer user copy a high def movie to a computer hard drive to it can be beamed around the house.

Sony, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Pioneer and LG Electronics support Blu-ray. So do PC makers Dell, HP and Apple Computer; video game maker Electronics Arts; and entertainment companies Twentieth Century Fox, Vivendi Universal and Walt Disney.

These Blu-ray supporters say in response that 50GB disks will arrive in the spring, that HD DVD has no advantage in the manage copy area and it has a hybrid disk technology as well.

Who's winning this war?

At this point, neither HD DVD nor Blu-ray is winning the war. You, as a consumer, will have to gamble your investment in disk players and video collections on which format will prevail. Studios and video rental stores that will have to maintain duplicate high definition movies in the two formats worry that one format might have all the content consumers want. And electronics retailers will have to carry and explain the different formats.

It's sort of like Beta vs. VHS except, in this case, there may not be a clear winner for years.