First HD-DVD Hardware

This slipped by me for the first 2 months: Toshiba plans to release the first HD-DVD-capable hardware in the form of a laptop– the Qosmio laptop to be precise. Somewhere along the line the committee even came up with the following inspired logo:


HD-DVD ROM logo

The laptop sounds quite impressive, though. It can display a resolution 1440×900 on its 17″ screen. More interesting, though, is that the laptop functions as a portable entertainment center and is ready to be hooked up to an entertainment center with an HDTV and 5.1 channel sound. No price tag is listed yet. Who wants to be the first to bite, sparing no cost?

Then the tasks:

  1. get Linux installed on the laptop– how is Linux support on Toshiba laptops? I understand that Qosmio is a line of Toshiba laptops so there is probably some history of support or lack thereof
  2. get a commercial HD-DVD movie
  3. make sure Linux can access the raw sectors of the HD-DVD (via ATAPI?), maybe even mount the filesystems (ISO-9660? UDF?)
  4. figure out the AACS encryption scheme using the Windows player; find where the key lives and how to use it to get the plaintext content
  5. figure out all the weird and wonderful video codecs, audio codecs, subtitle formats, and navigation technologies employed on the disc
  6. … ??? …
  7. profit!, or achieve international notoriety

It feels good to have a plan, I know.