Category Archives: General

Round 1

People keep asking me which format I think will win the HD war, as if I’m some kind of authority on the matter. My answer: I don’t really care. I’m just interested in sitting ringside and observing the action like a drunken boxing fan.

HD DVD

vs.

 Blu Ray

Seriously, from my perspective, it has never mattered which format I actually like. The mission of a multimedia hacker is to understand and support as many diverse formats as various factions can possibly develop.

Early Adopter

The IMDb Studio Briefing reported today that “HD DVD To Debut Today”. So I ran over to Best Buy and picked one up. Seriously. Here it is:


Serenity HD-DVD

No, I don’t have a player yet. That never stopped me from buying PlayStation or Xbox games just for studying the multimedia (that was different because I still have computer hardware that can read the raw sectors). Best Buy also had players available but I do not intend to get any hardware until an HD-DVD ROM drive becomes available. Ah, the burden of early adoption.

Best Buy had the HD-DVD material in the high-end home theater department. I asked if they had any HD-DVDs in yet. The employee said the titles were behind the counter but then eyed me suspiciously and asked if I was from Toshiba. I’m not sure what that exchange was about but after I assured him that I was sincerely interested in a purchase he brought out the 3 launch titles– Serenity, The Phantom of the Opera, and The Last Samurai. I certainly wasn’t the only early adopter. At this same time, there were other customers entering the same department asking for the HD-DVD player and all 3 launch titles. Take another look at those 3 launch titles. Do you think that anyone would actually like all 3 of those movies? My guess is that these people were really interested in the purchase simply for the sake of having the latest technology.

Their demo HD-DVD players were doing duty with some sort of demo material with a split screen that contrasted high definition vs. standard definition. The demo struck me as — what’s the word — bogus. Come on– standard definition can’t possibly look that bad. Can you say “blur filter”?

Click [more] to see scans of everything in the case so you know what the next generation looks like.

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