If you don't mind me asking, do you prefer VHS or Betamax?
... not what I was expecting when I saw the ask icon.
Unfortunately I missed the core era of the format war... we only had a VHS player, and so did everyone else we knew. In fact, I have not watched anything on Beta, and I think I only saw Beta equipment in a tech museum once. So I don't have much of a real opinion.
That said, in theory Beta having somewhat better quality sounds nice, though I don't know how much it was really noticeable in practice. But VHS having a longer runtime is certainly a handy thing. Ultimately hard to say were I would have come down if I had been alive and old enough to pay attention at the time.
I will say I wanted HD-DVD to win over Blu-Ray in that format war, both because HD-DVD was a consortium while Blu-Ray was mostly Sony and they had a bad odor at that time (due to the Sony BMG music rootkit), and HD-DVD had menus based on XML and JS rather than Blu-Ray's Java.
