WMV-HD - Dead on Arrival?

[bladesew]

I recently bought a LCD TV and have been looking for HD material to try out on the panel. I downloaded the clips from wmvhd.com but am massively disappointed at the lack of HD material in this format. After a little research I bagged some films on WMV-HD DVD-ROM from amazon.de and an IMAX film from the US, but everything else available on DVD-ROM is either a travelogue, nature doc or soft porn.

Three questions:

1) Given the size restrictions on a standard dual-layer DVD-ROM, I assume that WMVHD films will not have the bitrate of HD-DVD (even including the codec used)?
2) Is there some worthwhile HD content in DivX or Quicktime formats that I may have missed online?
3) Are there no signs of one of the studios, or even some independents, breaking cover and providing legal downloads of HD content for a small fee?

Why should we be forced to shell out hundreds of pounds on an unnecessary new format when the technology and infrastructure is there for PC users to download and play HD films today?

[m1ket]

All HD-DVD's are encoded using VC1 which is basically (WMVHD) so WMVHD is far from dead..

BUT WMVHD-DVD was never really pushed outside of germany for some reason..

[Noggin1980]

1) Given the size restrictions on a standard dual-layer DVD-ROM, I assume that WMVHD films will not have the bitrate of HD-DVD (even including the codec used)?

Thats right, Both HD-DVD and WMVHD use pretty much the same codec but HD-DVD has more than 3 times the space availible to it.

[bladesew]

Thats right, Both HD-DVD and WMVHD use pretty much the same codec but HD-DVD has more than 3 times the space availible to it.

So I can see that there are practical problems in providing HD content on a standard DVD-ROM, but surely enough people have the ability to download a 20Gb HD movie file through a stable, fast broadband connection and store it on an external HDD to provide a decent target audience for legal online download services?