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Retail Leaks of HD-DVD Players, Discs Reported
An anonymous reader writes "Though the market launch of the first HD-DVD players and discs does not officially begin until tomorrow (Tuesday), the online DVD community is already buzzing with fan reports of early street date violations at some retail outlets."
These HD-DVD players being released right now do not support 1080p, only 720p for the time being. The Toshiba DVD players do not support the dual-link HDMI-B specification required for true 1080p output. At best, for all your money you'd be putting out you're only getting 4/9 or 44% of the resolution offerd by true 1080p. That's GARGBAGE!
Save you money. I watch 720p shows on the HD movie channels already, and its not -that- much better than a DVD. You can see the difference, but knowing that real -1080p- players are right around the corner, no way I'm being duped into HD-DVD.
We're all better off waiting until TVs widely support the HDMI-B specification for 1080p and the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray players support that output resolution as well.
The HD-DVD discs are encoded in 1080p however, and if watched on (for instance) a capable computer monitor the movies should show in true 1080p. Blu-Ray players, though non-existent, support 1080p output natively.
Premature? HDTV supports resolutions (NTSC) of up to 1920x1080. DVD does a resolution of 720x480. Thats quite a difference. HDDVD has the higher storage space to support a movie at the higher 1920x1080 resolution, with higher resolution audio to boot. Truthfully, I am surprised it took them so long to release it
Regular HDMI type A (you know, like the kind used by the PS3) can carry 1080p. Since movies are stored in 1080p24 on the disc, the player converts this to 1080i60 (which causes no loss of data), and then the TV performs a trivial inverse telecine to recover the original 1080p24.
The article fails to mention the where the AVS forums and reviews of the new players are at. They are here
Their HD-XA1 player (the more expensive player) has this, but the HD-A1 (the cheaper player) does not. Does anyone know what it's for? At first I thought it was for key revocation (in case it gets cracked, like DVD did) but since it's not on the cheaper player, I'm guessing that's not it.
Why would my DVD player need to be hooked up to a network? Are they planning on letting me stream movies between the boxes in my house? Or is this just to set the clock with NTP (a rather stupid reason to put the thing on there).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
At AVSforum pictures of the motherboard were shown and it has an Intel Mobile ICH4 southbridge. The CPU is under a heatsink but I'd bet it has a Celeron M CPU. Also it has an ATA HDDVD-ROM drive. Anyone up for a linux port?