You can create BOTH blu ray and HD DVD disks on normal red laser dvd media with a normal dvd burner.
Although this practice is not an official spec of Blu ray... it is with hd dvd... and it is called 3X DVD.
The red laser bluray disks use avchd as a format, while HD DVD use mpeg2, VC1 or AVC
There are at least 3 programs out that will do this: Pinnacle studio11.1, Ulead Movie factory 6, and Ulead Video Studio 11
They will not only playback in the respective players but Nero now has a HD DVD/BD plugin that will allow these didks to be played on computer
I have done both types of disks but prefer HD DVD more because you can't "smart render" avchd and as a result lose a bit of quality in the final result. On the other hand, you can get more on the disk with avchd. (With mpeg hd dvd you can get up to 40 minutes at a bitrate of 25000k, on a double layer disk.
Regardless to the format that you choose though, the end result is absolutely stunning! I burn a lot of HD DVD's from home movies coming from 3 hi def camcorders that I have... and play them back on my Toshiba A1 hi def player. When you sit there and watch it... it's almost like you're looking through a window instead of watching tv!