Well, the high-definition format war is over.

Today, Wal-Mart – the nation’s largest retailer – picked Blu-ray.

And not only is the chain backing Blu-ray, it has announced that it will not stock HD-DVD players or movies.

Game over.

While the writing has been on the wall for HD-DVD since Warner – once firmly in both camps – announced in January 2008 that it was going to begin backing only Blu-ray moving forward, Toshiba (the HD-DVD deleloper) thought they still had a chance.

The writing became more prominent earlier this week when both Best Buy and Netflix went for Blu-ray.

Wal-Mart is the killer, however. It is officially over.

About frickin’ time…

So, why did Blu-ray win?

I think it was partly due the Playstation 3 (PS3) – that got a lot of Blu-ray players in the home and hooked up to TVs. There’s no doubt about that.

But it also came down to studio support. Most studios backed either Blu-ray or both; once Blu-ray has been out a couple of months, it was selling roughly 60/40 or 70/30 percent in comparison to HD-DVD. Near the end, Paramount and Universal were persuaded (I say bribed) to go exclusively to the HD-DVD camp, but that just pointed to the desperation on the HD-DVD front.

And – for the most part – no one but the videophiles and early adopters really cared. DVDs are still fine; upsampled DVDs for the bigger TVs put things close to to HD quality.

So – for most of the world – there was no format war. Or there was, but “I can wait until someone wins before I might buy a player from the winner.”

Well, today there is an indisputable winner.

Blu-ray.

Update 2/17/2008 Reuters confirms that Toshiba has thrown in the towel.