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Tuesday, January 10, 2006

CES 2006 Images from HD-DVD Booth

This is the screenshot I like to see most: HD DVD mandatory managed copy. Imagine streaming your content to anywhere in your home or transfer it to a portable device (handphone, compatible mobile devices, without having to purchase an extra disc like UMD for PlayStation Portable.) Blu-ray Disc Association is still struggling with finalising the managed copy specifications for its format due to the mandatory BD+ or SPDC copy protection mechanism on top of AACS copy protection already used in both Blu-ray and HD DVD.


Not that I'm a HD DVD convert yet, but I feel that too many DVD and Home Theatre sites are giving Sony and Blu-ray Disc too much compliments, consumers may be misled by these compliments. As such for this format battle, I believe in full disclosure of information and possible consumer experiences about either formats instead of overly criticising or complimenting these formats.

It was hard to find screenshots which HD DVD demo as quite a number of sites are giving Blu-ray more coverage than its due for so early in the introductory stage.

More of the above screen shots on demonstrating HD DVD players and iHD in action (using "The Bourne Supremacy" HD DVD) are available for viewing at this page.

Sunday, January 08, 2006

Full Specs for Toshiba HD-DVD Players are released.

Toshiba has finally released the full specifications of the HD DVD players it announced a few days ago at the Consumer Electronics Show 2006. These HD DVD players HD-XA1 and HD-A1 will be the first HD DVD players Toshiba will ship to retail stores in the United States by March 2006.

Specification sheet for HD-XA1 is available for download via this link.
Specification sheet for HD-A1 is available for download via this link.

(The viewing of the specification sheets required Adobe Acrobat Reader, which is available here)

If you're new to HD DVD and the whole HD packaged media concept, Toshiba has created a website dedicated to promoting the HD DVD (and it does offer a few insights of what to actually expect from HD or HD DVD in general).

Friday, January 06, 2006

High Defintion Home Entertainment Disc Formats


HD DVD Promotion Group headed by Toshiba Corp. has finally unveiled the finalised version of the HD DVD format at the CES 2006. Both player specifications and list of movie titles that will be released for the HD DVD format have been announced.

Debut date for both HD DVD player/PC Drive and discs: March 2006
Players announced:

>> HD DVD Set-top player from Toshiba: HD-XA1 and HD-A1

Specification Details: Here (Yahoo!) and Here (Toshiba PR)
Player Images: HD-A1 / HD-XA1
More Player images of HD-XA1 (1 - 2 - 3)
>> HD DVD Set-top player from Thomson: Official details yet to be released . . .

>> HD DVD PC Drive from Toshiba: Image here

>> HD DVD PC Drive from NEC: Image here

To find out more about the titles that will be released on HD DVD come March 2006, please refer to this page.