The format war began this week in earnest with the release of an HD DVD player and a handful of disks. The HD-A1 HD DVD player by Toshiba was the first to hit stores last Thursday. An RCA knock off should be coming shortly on May 18th.
The HD-A1 has been reviewed in a few places, I haven't had a chance to see one myself yet but hope to have seen one this weekend. The word around the web from various reviews is that the picture and sound quality is spectacular, HD disk media will do everything promised.
What is HD DVD?
Let's look at exactly what HD DVD (and competitor Blu-ray) promises. These are new optical storage formats. They'll store data on optical disks that are read with a laser. Both Blu-ray and HD DVD will use blue lasers that get much smaller than the red laser of regular DVD so you can fit that much more binary information onto a disk. HD DVD can store 30 Gigs on a dual layer HD DVD disk. Blu-ray which is coming soon will hold 50 Gigs on a dual layer disk. Regular DVD will hold 8.5 Gigs on a dual layer disk.
The advantage to all that extra storage over DVD is it'll provide your HDTV with a resolution of 1980x1080 or 1080P video. There is a lot of talk as to whether or not that's true 1080P or not or if most of the so called 1080P HDTV sets sold today are really capable of 1080P but I'll leave that topic alone. Suffice it to say any HDTV capable of 720P or 1080i will get an image quality with some four times the resolution of a regular DVD.
The HD resolution is comparable to HD HBO or HD TMN (in Canada). It was suggested on one website HD Beat that if you can't tell the difference between HD HBO and DVD then HD DVD isn't for you. Thanks for stating the obvious - if you can't see the difference between a 720P and 480P then you needn't consider HD DVD. You should own an HDTV first before you consider HD DVD (or its soon to be competitor Blu-ray) because that's what they're designed for.
The advantage to watching an HD movie from a high definition disk as opposed to an HD movie being streamed from Cable TV or Satellite TV is huge. Cable and Satellite HD broadcasts are all compressed in Mpeg2 and suffer degradation on the way to your house. As good as it sometimes is problems like compression artifacts and macroblocking abound on broadcasts HD.
The HD-A1 will playback a variety of disk formats including standard DVD for which it will even up-convert video to a high definition resolution. Don't mistake this up-conversion process for high definition however. An up-sampled DVD looks a far cry from HD DVD. It'll also playback DVD-R/-RW/-RAM, CD and CD-R/-RW. No high resolution audio formats like DVD-Audio or SACD but it would be interesting to see if music is soon released on any of the new high resolution audio formats like DTS-HD or Dolby Digital-HD which should offer the same sound quality as DVD-Audio.
Audio
The audio is also improved. The new high resolution audio formats include Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby Digital-HD and DTS-HD. One thing I had been curious about is the type of connection required for these high resolution formats and apparently the digital coax or optical are just fine. The HD-A1 gives you the option of using an analogue 5.1 outputs or the S/PDIF connector. Apparently there is a small problem with the digital audio output not properly transmitting Dolby Digital Plus and will send it to your receiver as DTS instead. Toshiba promises to fix this through a DVD firmware update.
Limitations of the HD-A1
The HD-A1 will playback the small number of HD DVD disks that are out now. The trouble with the HD DVD format is that there are so few available and only two movie producers are planning on releasing any. This alone makes it a good idea to wait and see what happens.
Early adopters will have to deal with a loud and slow device. Apparently the system checks it makes as it boots up and then loads a disk takes quite awhile. There are watermarks for content protection that must be read and approved by the system's firmware. And the system is loud, there is a fan plus what's described as a general hum. If you're used to a whisper quiet DVD player this will be a bit of a shocker.
Downrezzing. As mentioned before the downrez Nazi's have won the war of HD disk formats. Both HD DVD and Blu-ray will (as the HD-A1 does) downrez video quality from 1920x1080 to 960x540 if you don't use the HDMI output on the machine. The HDMI output can be converted to DVI and should retain the 1080P image quality if it's HDCP (High Definition Content Protection) certified.
This is the End
My conclusion to this new release is not surprisingly wait and see. See if LG can really do what it says it can do and release a Blu-ray HD DVD combo player by the end of the year. Remember that's only six short months away to Q4 '06 and possibly LG's announcement of its first delay on the combo player. The first iteration of HD DVD is for early adopters only. As a computer-like device that takes so long to boot up with all its digital abilities you'd think some multi-media ability would be built right in. At $500 it's half the price of the Blu-ray player coming next month. A network connection and the ability to talk to Windows would have been nice. Expect future player to be wireless, Windows Vista compatibility and back up its movies using HD DVD's much vaunted Mandatory Managed Copy abilities.
For now, there just isn't enough movies out for HD DVD and its future is uncertain. It's competitor Blu-ray will have much more selection but will cost $1000 and even it will be eclipsed by a combo player if it's released. For now, the early adopters are playing a suckers game.