Category Archives: Multimedia PressWatch

Random articles relating to multimedia technology.

HD-DVD Available In Japan

Today’s IMDb Studio Briefing contains a quick notice that Toshiba has started selling HD-DVD, but only in Japan at this point. The HD-XA1 is expected stateside within a month. Toshiba’s official press release on the new unit provides a lot of juicy technical details. Nice to know that it supports just about every kind of optical disc that came before it.

The player spec page contains scant mentions of a new HD-DVD-ROM computer drive. I have not seen anything new on qosmio.com about that new laptop that should be equipped with the new technology.

Blu-Ray Media Before Blu-Ray Players

Today’s IMDb Studio Briefing reports in “Sony To Release Hi-Def Movies — With No Players” that, well, Sony plans to release movies in Blu-ray format before — well before — players are available, as in, movies in May, players by November (optimistically). The most incomprehensible part is that I will probably be one of the first consumers to procure such a disc just because I just have to have a sample of every kind of multimedia out there. My biggest question is whether or not there will be computer drives capable of reading Blu-ray discs.

Blu-Ray Even Further Behind

Not to be outdone by the recent delay of HD-DVD technology, Sony has also delayed Blu-Ray consumer devices. Today’s IMDb Studio Briefing reports “that [Sony] has been forced to delay the launch of PlayStation 3 until November”. The reason cited is most curious: “to upgrade the copy-protection feature of its Blu-ray technology.”


Blu-Ray logo

The last I heard, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD were both supposed to leverage Advanced Access Content System (AACS) for content protection. Maybe Sony went off the reservation by implementing a separate DRM scheme? Or possibly there is much more to the story than can be fit in a 2-sentence news brief.

It has been a long time since I looked at that AACS stuff, there wasn’t much to look at. Let’s look again: Now, the site’s specification page contains 7 different PDF documents. Their FAQ page is still conspicuously empty, which is too bad since the #1 question I have is, “How is this scheme ever supposed to fly?” I can’t wait to read through all of the PDFs.

HD-DVDs Delayed

It came across on the IMDb Studio Briefing today that Warner Bros., who had planned to first out the gate with HD-DVD movie titles on March 28, won’t be: Warner Home Video Delays High-Def Releases. The brief article doesn’t indicate when Warner Bros. intends to go ahead with the releases. Thus, for those of you ordering your new HD-DVD-capable Toshiba Qosmio laptop (when Toshiba slaps a model number on it and announces shipment), you have a little more time to make sure Linux runs on it before you try reading a next-generation optical disc.

What are the launch titles supposed to be? According to Wikipedia’s entry on the matter (is there anything the grand oracle Wikipedia can not tell?), Batman Begins is one of the handful of titles slated. Figures. I just got that on DVD a month ago. Now I will have to re-buy it on HD-DVD.

About that Qosmio laptop, Linux on Laptops’ Toshiba page lists entries for models E15, G10, and G20. The 2 Qosmio models available at ToshibaDirect.com are the G25 and G35. The specs of the G35 sound similar to what’s on offer with the new, HD-DVD-equipped, model-number-not-yet-announced Qosmio.