DVD Hardware - HD DVD Blu-Ray DVD Writers DVD News

PS3 format selling double the units of its rival in the US.

Three months or so after the Toshiba HD-XE1 hit the UK, they've announced that the beefed-up HD-XE1 HD DVD player is now available.

The HD-XE1 boasts full 1080p and the latest HDMI version (1.3) which offers Deep Colour and an increased range of audio codecs.

It also boasts high definition quality analogue picture processing, with a four times over-sampling 297MHz/12bit video DAC.

Suggested retail price is £649.99. Link

For millions of consumers who bought high-definition television sets over the holidays, there has been one major disappointment: DVD movies often look worse than they did on their old TVs.

I call it the “plastic surgery” effect. It’s an artifact of converting a movie from a medium designed for the best picture possible on standard TV screens, with 480 horizontal lines of resolution, to HDTV sets, with 720 or 1024 lines. Whatever you call it, the process may actually eliminate some detail, particularly from human faces, making them look like they’ve had one tuck too many.

Now that consumers are used to the high quality of true HD broadcasts, they’re getting tired of subpar movies and asking if it’s time to upgrade to the new generation of high-definition DVD players.

The answer is "No."

Certainly not until the industry resolves a stupid war over competing and incompatible high-definition DVD formats - a fight that’s playing out like the Betamax versus VHS videotape battle of the 1980s.

For the time being, you can spend a lot less and improve the display of your current movie collection by picking up an inexpensive, standard DVD player that performs a trick called "upconversion." More about that later.

Just so you’ll know who’s on the current DVD fight card, in one corner is a group led by Sony and Matsushita (the parent of Panasonic). It’s backing a high-definition DVD standard called Blu-ray. This gang includes all of the major movie studios except Universal, which means they all plan to release DVDs in the Blu-ray format - although not always exclusively.

In the other corner is a group led by Toshiba with the backing of such computer-industry titans as Microsoft and Hewlett Packard, among others. They champion a standard called HD DVD. You’ll find lots of movies in HD DVD format, too.

In fact, I predict that most movie-makers with any brains will start releasing titles both ways, as Warner and Paramount are already doing. Some plan to put both versions on the same compact disk, but it will take a while for that to play out. Link

Q: My wife bought Pinnacle Studio to burn home movies to disc. I am attempting this on a Dell Dimension computer outfitted with a CD burner. So far I have been unable to burn DVDs and obtain poor quality burning to CD-Rs.

Do I need to buy a DVD burner, and if so what would be the best quality burner for this application? Is the Pinnacle Studio a good system for converting home movies to disc? If not, what system would you recommend?
DAVE RASCATI, Pittsburgh

A: You do need a DVD burner to make DVDs. What you are creating on CD-Rs is Video CDs, not DVDs.

Video CD is a format that preceded DVD and achieved some popularity overseas, but not in the United States. It provides the convenience of a small disc-based storage medium with image quality approximately the same as VHS, which is far below that of a DVD.

It all comes down to storage space. A blank CD-R has about 700MB of free space. A blank DVD-R is 4.7GB, of which about 4.3GB is free space. Fitting an hour's worth of video on the CD requires a different digital storage format, MPEG-1, which limits video quality. DVDs use MPEG-2, a much better format used for HDTV and digital satellite broadcasts.

The easiest way to add DVD burning capability to your computer is with an external DVD burner. An external DVD burner connects to your computer via a USB 2.0 or FireWire connection, so it can be used with almost any computer. I have found them to be among the most useful peripherals you can own. Besides their basic usefulness, they can be kept and used as you upgrade computers.

I have had good experience with Lite-On external burners, which are available in many retail locations. If you are willing to purchase via mail order, my overall favorites are the Mercury Pro units from Other World Computing, located at www.macsales.com. The $129.95 Mercury Pro DVR-112 can be used with both Apple and Windows computers and offers incredible speed and reliability, and can record to the new double-layer DVDs, which offer 8.5 GB of capacity. Double-layer DVDs are great for storing double-length movies or a tremendous amount of data such as documents or digital pictures. Both FireWire and USB 2.0 connections are provided and it includes a thoughtful bundle of software, cables, and blank DVDs and CDs to get you started. Other Mercury Pro units are available, starting at $99.95 Link

Since the week ended Jan. 7, Blu-ray sales have ranged from a low of 63.3% to a high of 69.6%, VideoScan said Tuesday. On the week ended Feb. 18, the latest figures available, Blu-ray accounted for 65% of the market, compared with HD DVD's 35%.

VideoScan declined to draw any conclusions from the numbers, but starting about two weeks after the release of Sony's PlayStation 3 videogame console, which includes a Blu-ray DVD player, the high definition format steadily grabbed market share from HD-DVD. Sony, which created the Blu-ray format, released PlayStation in the United States on Nov. 17.

Between the weeks ended Nov. 26 and Dec. 17, 2006; HD DVD sales remained ahead of Blu-ray. But starting on the week ended Dec. 24, Blu-ray pulled ahead with 53.3% of the market, VideoScan said.

Sony is in a high-stakes war with HD DVD supporters to influence consumers, as well as manufacturers of high-definition DVD players. The battle is often compared to the VHS-Betamax battle that ushered in the VCR era. Sony lost with Betamax, but hopes to avoid the same fate with Blu-ray by leveraging the popularity of its PlayStation console.

Many Hollywood and consumer electronics manufacturers are taking sides in support of either Blu-ray or HD DVD. Goldwyn-Mayer, 20th Century Fox, Walt Disney Pictures, and Sony are exclusively releasing DVDs in Blu-ray, while Universal Studios is distributing only in HD DVD. Among player manufacturers, Sony, Hitachi and Philips favor Blu-ray, while Toshiba and NEC support HD DVD. Toshiba led the effort in the creation of HD DVD. Link

Thankfully, navigating the suite's sizable ensemble has been simplified with a centralised application browser. This slick interface extends to the applications themselves, although the heavy reliance on icons can lead to some impatient mouse hovering.

The meat of the suite lies in its video capabilities, where the basic but efficient PowerDirector Express lets you edit footage and experiment with the automated effects and transitions - although you'll need to upgrade to access the full array of filters. On the upside, the suite is both HD and Blu-ray friendly.

The suite's PhotoNow application offers little to get excited about. But providing you're not expecting Photoshop functionality and can live without such features as layers, there's enough to keep you busy.

Unsurprisingly - given that this hails from the Cyberlink stable - a copy of the justifiably popular PowerDVD 6.0 is thrown in for viewing masterpieces in all their glory. Another highlight is the inclusion of PowerDVD Copy, which allows 1:1 copying of DVDs and comes with the handy ability to shrink content from 8.5GB DVDs on to 4.7GB discs. Link

The company would target customers opting for 37 and 42 inch LCDs. However, the company declined to reveal the price of the product but indicated that it would be in the high-end segment.

According to statistics, the global market sales for DVD players and recorders is 370 million units at the end of December 2005 and in Japan, the penetration ratio of DVD players and recorders reached 49 per cent of household at the end of March 2005.

Toshiba commercialized the world's first DVD players in the Japanese market in November 1996 and brought its first products to the US market in March 1997. Link

Sony’s announcement this week of a new Blu-ray device in time for the Summer season in the US is more about stopping people going out and buying a HD DVD player, than making more sales of its existing device.

In pictures shown of the device on various gadget websites, it’s like someone took the original and just shrunk it without changing any of the features, and it is already beginning to look more like a DVD player rather than one of those ancient VHS monstrosities.

The price will go to $599 and this could already have the immediate effect of slowing the HD DVD campaign to a crawl. Blu-ray has been winning the disk war by a ratio of about three to one recently, up from the two to one it achieved in January: Sony has overhauled a considerable lead by the Toshiba and Microsoft-led HD DVD faction by the simple expedient of putting a Bu-ray player in every Playstation 3.

All of this has been achieved despite Blu-ray players costing twice that of HD DVD players at $1,000. But cutting 40 per cent off them with the launch of the BDP-S300, the disk format war could be nearly over. The only way to keep the alternative format devices shipping is if they go for yet another price cut, and already there are fears that the HD DVDV devices are shipping for less than the price of the components. Link

In what many industry insiders believe is a direct result of Blu-ray not having a games console to play its discs, the format is being outsold in the UK by HD DVD.

The official UK charts company indicates that with the support of the Xbox 360 (which can play the HD DVD high definition format discs with an optional drive) HD DVD outsold Blu-ray by a factor of about 4 to 1 in the period leading up to Christmas of last year.

Blu-ray was launched a month earlier than HD DVD in October 2006 and struggled with a paltry 148 discs sold in that month.

November figures were better at 492 and a more impressive 1,194 discs were sold in December 2006.

Meanwhile despite the arrival of HD DVD players a month later than Blu-ray, but bolstered by the availability of Microsoft's Xbox 360, 673 discs were sold in November and a much healthier 7,527 in December. Link

Between the weeks ended Nov. 26 and Dec. 17, 2006; HD DVD sales remained ahead of Blu-ray. But starting on the week ended Dec. 24, Blu-ray pulled ahead with 53.3 percent of the market, VideoScan said.

Sony is in a high-stakes war with HD DVD supporters to influence consumers, as well as manufacturers of high-definition DVD players. The battle is often compared to the VHS-Betamax battle that ushered in the VCR era. Sony lost with Betamax, but hopes to avoid the same fate with Blu-ray by leveraging the popularity of its PlayStation console.

Many Hollywood and consumer electronics manufacturers are taking sides in support of either Blu-ray or HD DVD. Goldwyn-Mayer, 20th Century Fox, Walt Disney Pictures, and Sony are exclusively releasing DVDs in Blu-ray, while Universal Studios is distributing only in HD DVD. Link

The device key in question was found using the software playback program WinDVD 8. The poster who claims to have found the device keys is registered under the name "ATARI Vampire," and says that he has been "actively sitting in the shadows for the last six to eight weeks" following the efforts of other hackers, specifically muselix64 and arnezami. The former created a software program called BackupHDDVD that decrypted high-definition media content, but did not supply any of the necessary encryption keys to do so. The latter found a method of extracting the Volume ID signatures from any HD DVD or Blu-ray disc. ATARI Vampire found that he could work backwards using these two methods to extract the device keys from memory while WinDVD 8 was running.

As shown in arnezami's revised block diagram below, this completes all the necessary elements for cracking and decrypting any Blu-ray or HD DVD disc and creating an unprotected version of the content. One caveat, however: the method arnezami used to find Volume License Keys must still be used for each new disc. The true "last piece of the puzzle" that would allow anyone to crack any disc without using any memory scanning methods is to find the Host Private Key that is used to turn the Volume ID on each disc into the Volume License Key. The hunt is now on for this last key, but it has not been found yet.

Does this latest crack mean that AACS has failed? Not exactly. The creators of the AACS encryption predicted that keys would leak out, which is why they added a provision to the spec for revoking the device keys of any player that had been compromised. The Host Private Key can also be revoked under the spec. New discs manufactured after this revocation will simply refuse to play on devices that have been revoked. For a software player such as WinDVD 8, this is particularly easy, as the software can simply demand an update over the Internet. Link

Blu-ray Disc (BD) has been regarded as the winner in terms of capacity since the beginning of the next-generation format war. However, the 51 GB HD DVD would slightly overpower BD, which currently has a maximum capacity of 50 GB. Previously, HD DVDs were only available in 15 GB and 30 GB capacities.

Feasibility is a big question, though. It's unclear if the addition of a third layer on an HD DVD would significantly increase mass production costs or time. Link

The notebook also has Bluetooth 2.0 and 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi, Samsung said. Windows Vista Premium is pre-loaded onto the laptop. Link

A three-layer HD DVD disc with enough room for about 7 hours of high-definition video is still under development and hasn’t been submitted for approval to the DVD Forum, the standard’s governing body, despite reports to the contrary, Toshiba said Thursday.

The disc, which has a capacity of 51GB, was first unveiled at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in January this year. It attracted much attention not just because it substantially raises the maximum capacity of an HD DVD disc but also because it beats that of the rival Blu-ray Disc format, albeit by just 1GB.

In the last few days a number of Web sites and blogs have reported the format has been submitted for approval to the DVD Forum and some have said that approval has been received, but Toshiba says nothing of the sort has happened.

“We’re puzzled ourself by where these reports came from,” said Junko Furuta, a spokeswoman for the company in Tokyo. She said Toshiba hasn’t made any further announcements about the disc since CES, and it wasn’t submitted to any steering committees during this week’s DVD Forum meetings in Tokyo.

When Toshiba first announced the disc in January, it said it hoped to get approval for the disc some time in 2007. Link