vote/discuss!

Plan to buy one. I'm already blown away by the HD movie trailers and clips from Marketplace as it is. Just don't have the dough to buy it right now.

Choose the wait for the war to be over option, but I'll never buy the HD-DVD add-on, I dont need another hideous white piece of tech in my entertainement center. I need to buy a 360 shell, and Nintendo needs to release those black Wii's already!

I dont hate all white things, just white consoles
:cheers:

no need for the dumb hd add-on

ewww blue ray... what an ugly name for a HD format

I need a better hdtv before I get the hd dvd addon.

I love the HD-DVD player. Even as I type this my dad is watching MI3. The detail you get is just amazing. You could never buy a more quality product.

Yep I got one and plan to grab me another one in a few days here to drop in my Media PC.
I only have 4 HD-DVD's as of now but I will be getting more soon...

Would buy one.. if they were availible right now...

No HDTV=no HD-DVD necessity.
For now.

I don't usually purchase a large number of movies... only the really good select few that I just have to get. That being said, I'm waiting until there is a larger selection of movies available.

I just picked myself up one at GameCrazy at 9:30pm. Its badass on my 57" Hitachi UltraVision.

same here...

Cant wait till the day where u can backup a hddvd to your harddrive and just play it off that without a addon!

i voted "NO (other reasons)" ... cause as of now they just aint worth buying cause the differances will be minimal to none (in image quality) unless u got a super fancy HDTV... plus i think the biggest competition of hd-dvd/blu-ray is the standard dvd format itself since there aint no major leaps forward from standard dvd to say hd-dvd/blu-ray like there was from VHS to DVD... this is main reason i dont think the public will adapt to hd-dvd/blu-ray anytime soon... plus i think it will be many years (atleast 2-3years+) before the "average joe" will actually get a HDTV cause of prices are still overall to high ... so until that happens i dont think bluray or hddvd is even worth bothering with.... plus not to mention we dont even have a clear winner between the two format either.. and prices are still to high for them.

No - not until they start carrying just the drive for $100 or less. The stupid $200 bundle is a waste.

i got one, but i can't open it till christmas

my girlfirend managed to get it for $180 CDN with tax now i gotta get a collention of HD-dvd's started

plan on getting one, just as soon as i can afford an hdtv.

i want a standalone player. the 360 is too noisy for me to watch movies on.

I'd love to see an "internal" version so I wouldn't have to have a separate box beside the 360. Then they could sell it for $50.

No HDMI or 5.1 analogue outs for sound = no hi-def sound formats (DD TRUE HD or DTS equivalent ie. 24bit 96khz sound) = no sale.

simple as that.

this device gives you a high def picture but no high-def sound. Really wanted one before I knew this but I'll get a proper stand alone. Anyone with a decent sound system with either HDMI or (more likely) 5.1 analogue sound inputs should do the same.

No HDTV or 360 so no need for HD DVD addon . Not really taken in by all the HD hype so just saving my money.

No.. My 360 has been a doorstop for 2 weeks or so.

for $200 with the full sized media remote (which I wanted) and king kong on hd-dvd (which I hadn't seen yet)
I couldn't pass this thing up... must say no regrets at all, only problem is you can see some of the actress' bad
skin problems a little too well

I think i might buy one, but use it on my pc as i dont have a 360.

You could never buy a more quality product AND for under $300.

Waiting to see how the DRM situation works out. Right now I love that I have my 40-50 DVDs ripped to my HDD and streamed to my 360 (although wish I didn't have to convert them to WMV). Also, how many movies do I own that don't even take advantage of all that 480p has to offer? Do I need the Princess Bride in HD?

Until I can rip the new formats this incremental upgrade in quality ain't worth the price.

Well I would get one but I don't think it would look that good on my 31cm standard definition television.

I agree what's the point without hdmi or even 6 channel direct input for high-quality sound.



Pffft yeah right look here http://cgi.ebay.ca/New-Toshiba-HDA1-HD-DVD...bayphotohosting
New Toshiba HDA1 HD DVD Player Dolby Digital Plus 1080i even better for $214.50 US

one of these must appy to you
1- your blind
2-your broke
3-your not very smart
4-your old


cause i went to best buy and look at all 3 next to each other on dispaly
hddvd and blue ray are both amazing compared to dry ass dvd
i laughed at my dad cause when dvd 1st came out, he said -theres no difference between vhs and dvd until he came to my house and i showed him the difference .

blue ray is has a very small advantage to its counterpart hddvd but its so unnoticeible to the nacked eye we cant tell the difference unless your trained to noticed it..

as for me i learned my lesson with laserdisc & dvd +r/-r burners - i will never spend the money until it is consider the standard .

the only thing saving sony is that blue-ray is the ps3 standard medium
but i think really hddvd will win if microsoft truly acquires capcom inc.

it would have either been a wii or a HD-DVD player.

im not ready to restart my collection when there hasnt been a really good movie in years.

What are you guys talking about? The 360 has a fibre optic output in the back? What would you want crappy analogue audio outputs for? It's much better to keep the signal digital all the way to the amp for it to process into the seperate channels.
My 360 outputs DTS just fine to my digital amp/receiver? Is this a problem with the HDDVD standard you're talking about or am I totally lost?

My god, you guys are right, the HDDVD playback downscales the audio to DD5.1 no matter what. WTF???? So this now means standard def DVDs are going to have better audio on the 360 then their HD equivalent Microsoft are you F@&$ING STUPID!!?!? What so those three PPC cores aren't capable of not touching the audio signal and just parsing it through to the fibre optic output.

Quote from Teamxbox:
=====================================================================
However, rather than producing a Dolby TRUE HD or Dolby Digital Plus surround sound, the audio is mixed down to Dolby Digital 5.1 with the Xbox 360 HD-DVD.
=====================================================================
Read the whole review here: http://hardware.teamxbox.com/reviews/xbox-...-DVD-Player/p4/

Yep.. bought it, love it. The king kong hddvd that came with it looks amazing. You can see all the little details on kong and the sound is fantastic!! Really glad I bought it. Exellent deal too!! 213 shipped with next day shipping and I got the Remote, king kong and the player. Cant beat it! Anyway, I love it and I'm gonna end up spending an arse load on hd dvd's. Now I need to find some Hd-dvd pr0n with some hot lesbian action lol!!

To all you who cant find one. Just order it off amazon.. Thats where I got mine as all retail stores around my area are sold out and will be for awhile.

Yes I did.... and I returned it and purchased a Zune instead! The movie selection for HD DVDs (and blu-rays alike) is ridiculous... not to mention that new releases cost $37.99! I'll just stick to buying regular DVDs (which will definately go down in cost), and then rip them to my Zune to watch on the go! Either way, Bill still has my lunch money....

As a matter affect I heard from one of Major Nelson's podcast some time ago that MS's codecs allowed for better quality, and maybe it's just that I want to agree with them, but my own personal experience tells me that HD-DVD produces slightly better quality (a little brighter, more lifely) and I'm pretty sure they were close to the same tv (they were both sony lcds)

I bought it at future shop as they had a deal where it comes with the remote, King Kong the hddvd movie and King Kong the game.Then I went across the road and got $18 trade in credit for the game.Good deal I say!

How can you ask a question that's already been answered? And not by some guys oppinion, but by FACTS. Blue Ray is already the CLEAR winner of the two formats. Who wants a HD-DVD that can't output 1080p signal? No.. I don't bother the HD-DVD format... it will be gone before the Blue Ray takes the throne

And for you guys who say not everybody will have a HD-TV... it's just a matter of time. And the the people who have so clearly been fooled into buying just a 720p/1080i TV... it's just sad really, that the market can trick everyone so easy.

Note: From Sweden, so sorry for any spelling probs.

Yes I got the HD DVD player. There's no way to know which format will "win", since there is a shortage of BOTH types of players right now. I suspect that the two formats will eventually co-exist next to each other the same way that DVD-R and DVD+R do now. Universal players will be released that play both formats (a couple of companies have already developed decoder chips that support both), and the prices of the hardware will eventually come down.

For right now though, $200 is as cheap as you can get for HD movie viewing, and that makes the Microsoft player a good purchase to get you by. Some of you may be concerned by the fact that the 360 doesn't have HDMI, but I wouldn't be. The movie studios are not going to enable Image Constraint Token on any discs for awhile yet, not until the players are in wide availability and HDTV's are common in households. By then, the next XBox will probably be out already. So relax.

I see a lot a guessing and speculation about the advantages/disadvantages of the two formats in here. I work on development tools for HD DVD production (another division in my company works on the Blu-Ray side), so maybe it would be best if someone who knows what's going on "clears the air" a bit...

1. Video quality is better on HD DVD/Blu-Ray.
As far as I have observed, that is false. Both formats use the same 3 video codecs (AVC H.264, MPEG2-HD, and VC-1). Both formats also support the same audio codecs (Dolby Digital (AC3), Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD, DTS, and DTS-HD). Both formats put a cap on the data rate of the disc during single speed movie playback, at around 29.4 Mbps. If a studio (like Warner Bros) releases a movie on both formats, it's a sure bet they used the same source video when encoding for both formats. There is no discernible difference in picture or audio quality.

2. Blu-Ray is superior technology to HD DVD.
Spec-wise, Blu-Ray media can hold more data than HD DVD can (about 25 GB for a single layer release, vs about 15 GB for HD DVD). But Blu-Ray has a couple of significant disadvantages. One, it's new and largely untried technology. The physical disc size may be the same as standard DVD, but everything else about it is significantly diifferent. In contrast, HD DVD has many similarities to existing DVD tech, and authors have had little trouble adapting their methods and equipment for it. Two, Blu-Ray is alot more expensive and time-consuming to produce, at least for now. The tools for HD DVD production are more robust at the moment.

3. Movies look better on Blu-Ray than HD DVD because the discs hold more.
In actuality, that will only have the biggest effect in the short term. As stated above, the single speed data rate is 29.4 Mbps for both formats (which includes all video and audio streams). That puts the file size of a standard 120 minute movie at around 25 GB if max bandwidth is used throughout (unlikely, since most production discs use variable bitrate encoding, not constant bitrate). Both formats can already handle content that size.

Presently, most hi-def releases currently on both formats use MPEG2-HD encoding, which has the worst image quality of the 3 supported codecs. As a result, authors have to encode at pretty much the max bitrate all the time, to compensate for the inadequacies of the standard. However, usage of MPEG2 will soon start to decline.

Some HD DVD releases are now using Microsoft's VC-1 standard, which achieves much better compression while still retaining image quality. As a result, movie file sizes are smaller, well within the limits of both formats. Microsoft has been aggressively developing and perfecting the VC-1 standard, and you can expect many more HD DVD releases to start using it in the near term. To my knowledge there are no Blu-Ray releases that use it, for political reasons as much as anything else, even though it is supported.

But everyone is really waiting for H.264 AVC to take off (right now there are both encoding and decoding problems preventing its widespread use). That standard achieves the best compression of all, and the image quality is very, very good (much better and more lifelike than MPEG2, you'll see). So while an AVC presentation can be encoded to use the maximum amount of disc space, it's very unlikely an author will do this. The image quality is THAT good, and increasing the avg bitrate would not improve it appreciably. So therefore the amount of disc space used by the main feature will drop again, and the size advantage that BD has over HD DVD will be reduced still further.

Where Blu-Ray will have the biggest advantage is in video-based extras, which HD DVD can compensate for by simply including a second disc. But while both formats contain advanced interactivity features (specialized menus, scene selection, etc), the methods used are quite different. HD DVD uses iHD, which is largely a markup-based language similar to XML. Full interactive programming can be achieved by a programmer skilled in markup languages like XML, JavaScript, VBScript, etc, and the files themselves (being text-based) are pretty small. Blu-Ray on the other hand relies on BD-J, which is a Java-based language that requires a compiler to generate the binary files (these tend to be a bit bigger).

4. More studios support the Blu-Ray format. More studios means more movies.
Not necessarily. The main signatories for Blu-Ray are:
a. Twentieth Century Fox
b. Buena Vista (Disney, Touchstone, et al)
c. Sony
d. Warner Bros (recently joined)
e. Paramount Pictures (recently joined)

The main supporters of HD DVD are:
a. Warner Bros (and by affiliation, New Line as well)
b. Universal
c. Paramount Pictures
d. Lion's Gate

There are a lot of studios on the fence still, but lets start with these. Currently, Warner Bros owns almost 30% of the current-generation DVD market. That's right, ONE studio has about a third of all DVD sales. While they have released some Blu-Ray titles, the majority of their releases are on HD DVD right now. Universal owns almost 10% of the DVD market themselves. They they are only releasing titles on HD DVD at the moment.

Conversely, studios like Twentieth Century Fox have more bona fide system sellers in their catalog (Star Wars, anyone?), even though they don't sell nearly as many DVD's as Warner does.

So anyway, stop bickering. It's still way too early in the game. In fact the game hasn't even started yet. My advice is to watch the next 12 months carefully, because at least 2 things will happen:

a. The manufacturing problems plaguing HD DVD and Blu-Ray hardware will be sorted out, and more units will become available. It's hard to predict who will win a format war when neither side has many troops in the field yet. In the next year, more players will be out, prices will fall, and more movies will be available. Then we will see.
b. The prices on HDTV's will also fall sharply. As of a week or two ago, a major manufacturer announced that they were now able to produce 58" LCD panels with an acceptable QC failure rate. That means that the prices on smaller screen LCD panels will start to fall steeply (much of the high cost of very large screen displays is due to high failure rates during manufacturing). You should be able to get an LCD television of 46-50" for less than $2000 in the coming year. This downward price trend will put pressure on plasma TV makers to cut their prices as well.

Once more players are out, and more people have HDTV's in their homes, we will finally get the chance to see what direction the format war will go. Until then, it can't be predicted so don't even try. Sorry for the length of the post.

no reason-don't have an hdtv

i have ps3 and 360 hd player. Playing both on sony 50" sxrd. Both look great. Cant tell difference besides hdmi and coponent cables being the issue.

Actually I looked and your list states Lion Gates is HD-DVD but it's actually Blu Ray hugger. I wish it was HD-DVD though cause they are going to release Resaviour Dogs for Blu ray and Behind Enemy Lines. It sucks balls that there is such a crappy war. Just give me my movies damnit. Then Sony owns Fifth Element , Kung Fu Hustle, Lord of War, Talladega nights and Underworld so I really want Blu Ray but I have an xbox 360 so 700 bucks is just out of the question right now. I will probably end up owning a lot of movies in both formats by the time this is all blown over.

I'm still confused over the HDMI issue... Does it come with one? If not, is the picture still analog?

No HDMI so yes it's only analog either through Component or VGA although the difference in quality is at most minor.



I still don't see how people think they have to restart their collection just because it's a new format. I understand if it was like going from vhs tapes to dvd's but this is totally different you can still play dvd's on an HD-Dvd player. Vhs can't be played on dvd players so why would you need to restart your collection? Only buy new stuff in HD or movies you think you would enjoy better at such an extreme quality. It's not like anyone is pointing a gun to your head and telling you that in order to be a good little boy/girl you must buy all the movies you have on dvd in HD-dvd/BluRay.

Not until I can get a dual-format drive, or one format is completely eliminated.

Bought mine for a couple reasons. You cannot get a better deal on an HD-DVD drive. If I want Blue-Ray and HD-DVD movies, I can always buy a Blu-Ray player (preferably not a PS3). If you do not have an HD TV, do not waste your time, unless you have a kick but computer monitor that you watch a lot of movies on. Then It would be worth it. I'm wating to see a mod where someone encases theres. The Blu-Ray and HD-DVD war will not die out. Look at DVD-R and DVD+R. Both alive and well. Look at Beta and VHS...oh wait...
So you must choose, at least initially. Until they make an affordable multi-format reader (not cheap or available yet). I still wish they could would allow gameplay from the drive. Then people could use it as a replacement...

I love mine, and if you havent watched a movie in HD 1080i or 1080p, wait to comment...its pretty smooth.

You can hardly call DVD+/-R a war. All decent burners/players support them both.

While I want one, I need to save up for a decent HDTV first... Hopefully in early '07 I'll finally take the plunge as the prices on 1080p sets should start dropping faster.

I'm waiting to find a good deal.......but I probably will just end up buying one before the end of the year. Oh and if you have a Netflix membership, they've been carrying HD movies for a while now....so that's a definite plus.

I would buy one now if I could find one! Does anyone know where you can find one of the these drives on the 1 Dec 2006 (in the UK)? All the websites are sold out!