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Explain to me how it is a loss for Microsoft when a major league player in consumer electronics breaks with Sony to enter the HD-DVD market.

Unlike LG's currently released "Super Multi Blue" player, Samsung's deck will have full support for HD DVD's much-touted Interactive Features. LG's player, by comparison, gave the impression of a Blu-ray deck with HD DVD playback included as an afterthought, without full support for HD DVD menus and other "in movie experience" features. Samsung goes format neutral

What Microsoft most wants in an HD drive is mandatory managed copy:

the right to burn backup copies to disk, save HD content to hard drives for distribution through home media servers, download low-res copies to portable players and so on.

It gets the win by keeping Sony's feet to the fire - it gets the win if A-list titles from Disney and Warner begin to enter the market with minimal restrictions.

Fast And The Furious, The: Tokyo Drift (HD-DVD) is region code 1. You're wrong. While most HD-DVDs are currently "all region" discs that won't last for long. The current Toshiba hardware isn't checking region codes but there certainly are region codes in the media and it will become standard.
The DVD Steering Committee is making every effort to include region coding in the next HD-DVD standard too.

Unfortunately for the early adopters, HD-DVD is a format that is going to die quickly. Sony has seen to that already. This also shows when you look at Amazon sales figures. The top eight selling HD-DVDs are not selling as well as the top eight Blu-Ray discs. Sorry to say, but your format was dead before it took off. HD-DVD is the Beta of this decade.

You mean you've never seen 'Airplane!'?

You will be missed

Yes. I was about to point that.

See, for instance, http://dvdtimes.co.uk/content.php?contentid=10823

If you can read french, see http://www.dvdfr.com/news/news.php?id=2595 and http://www.dvdfr.com/news/news.php?id=2597

I have the boxed tex avery dvd set, and I can tell you that all the jokes with black people have been erased.

Bastards. I bought those to have the full set of tex avery for my childs. I could have downloaded them from the net, but I really wanted to give them money. Of course, they just forgot to tell that the 'Integrale' was not 'Integrale'.

Bastards. Bastards. Bastards.

I'm not so sure he'd be listening to U2. Probably something more like Johnny Abdul. Are you ready to rock?

cLive ;-)

Errrr, actually... they've already been there and done that:-
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0310288/
(see the trivia section)

There's a review here:-
http://www.dvdtimes.co.uk/content.php?contentid=33 52

At first I thought DTS was VBR, but it turns out DD is the one who is VBR....
So my post doesn't really make sense when I say I'd use DTS and VBR... :p

VBR works on computers that can handle 2 - 50x the avg bitrate....
Well, since DD is already a VBR format, I guess your point is moot. ;)

So let's all use DVD-Audio and everyone will be happy. Some other poster pointed out that it is better than DD and DTS, so why not use that instead?

additional link ;)

However, I found this link.

And this site says that just 1000 copies worldwide would be released. :-/ Hope they got their facts wrong.

OK, look at it this way:

You have two eyes, both with a field of view - take the field of view of each eye and you end up with a horizontal rectangular shape (approximately). That area is about the same shape as a widescreen picture, which is probably why it's prevailed as the cinema format of choice.

Besides, anyone who make a movies these days are thinking ahead to video and TV playback. They make sure they can fit what's important in a 4:3 area, while the rest of the scene is useless fluff or scenery. If they can't fit it all in, they play that clever trick where they squash the scene to make more of it fit in the same horizontal space.

Why should a director have to be thinking in terms of 4:3? If they wanted to limit themselves like that, why don't they just forget widescreen and go with 4:3 from the start?

Take a look at what you're missing - there's a good "Widescreen Unravelled" feature at DVDTimes (sorry, can't link direct to pages)

It's not a no-win situation - in the UK, we have widescreen TVs at decent prices (I've got a catalogue here with a 28" widescreen TV for 350UKP), DVD players are coming right down in price and a good stock of Widescreen videos and DVDs (especially in the retail market). Much of our TV content is screened in 14:9 widescreen as well.

In the UK, people are seeing sense and buying widescreen sets at a fantastic rate. When will the Americans catch up? :)

qube