Put down your guns — the war is over! The drawn-out “format war” between two competing standards for high-definition home video, Blu-ray and HD DVD, ended with a dramatic chain of events over the past two weeks. Blu-ray has been outselling HD DVD by two to one for some time, but retailers had been reluctant to take sides — until now. First, rent-by-mail chain Netflix announced that it would stop stocking HD DVD movies; later the same day, mega-retailer Best Buy said that it would stock both, but would instruct salespeople to recommend Blu-ray whenever asked. Toshiba, the company behind HD DVD, refused to accept these decisions as a death knell and rushed out a press release insisting that its technology was still the best choice for consumers. But even Toshiba had to recant after Wal-Mart, the make-or-break store for mainstream acceptance, decided that it would phase out its HD DVD stock. Toshiba officially threw in the towel, and within days Universal and Paramount, the two movie studios still backing the format, announced that they would soon start releasing films on Blu-ray. Everyone involved admitted that the ongoing confusion created by competing formats was keeping consumers from upgrading and that the only sensible thing (especially in the face of new movie-download technologies) was to establish a single option and promote it heavily. If only everyone had realized this a couple of years ago, before so many millions of dollars were thrown away by consumers, advertisers, and retailers. So, for those of you with regular old DVDs, they will work on either a Blu-ray or an HD DVD player. But if you’ve shelled out money for HD DVDs, they won’t work on a Blu-ray player, and Blu-ray discs will only play on Blu-ray players.