Taking the HD-DVD Plunge
In case you missed it Wal-Mart sparked a price war on HD-DVD players a couple weeks back as a Friday morning "surprise sale." The Toshiba A2 player was on sale there for only $98. Since I live about a mile from a Wal-Mart I decided to trek over and see what was going on. By 8 AM when the sale was to start there were about 50 people in front of me. Soon the rumor quickly spread that the were only 8 players available anyway. So I decided even if there were 20 I wouldn't be getting one. Best Buy and some other stores did some price matching so some folks were able to pick one up there. Best Buy also had the new Toshbiba A3 player on sale that weekend for $199. They also ran out fast but later that week I decided to see what Amazon had the A3 on sale for and it was $218 there with free shipping. Do the math and $218 is the same as $199 with California state sales tax. So I ordered one.
Originally it was supposed to ship on the 14th and arrive by the 21st (the day after tomorrow) but they actually shipped on the 9th and it arrived on Monday the 12th. The player came with two HD-DVDs "Bourne Identity" and "300" plus Toshiba has a 5 free disk rebate program too.
The A3 was easy to set up as I just swapped the component from my JVC D-VHS deck which doesn't get that much use these days as well as the optical audio cable. The results were spectacular. The A3 has the best HD output of all my components and it is the least expensive of all of them. Yes it even looked great on my 7 year old Pioneer SD-532HD set (which doesn't have HDMI).
At this stage of the game HD-DVD players are really little Linux boxes and I was surprise how many people speculated it was a Linux box but all they had to do was read the rather lengthy license section in the back of the manual and under "included software" they would have found "Linux kernel" mentioned. But who reads manuals these days, right? Anyway that means the player takes over a minute to boot up when you turn it on and the remote runs a little sluggish. Some things depending on the disk you are playing run differently than a regular DVD. Instead of the stopping the disk when you want to take a break you put it on pause which brings up a progress bar and if it sits there too long a screen saver. Apparently some disks can save the place in a disk but none I have do that.
One of the reasons I purchased the player is the local Hollywood Video just began renting both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray disks. On their MVP program these rent the same as regular DVDs. Most of these will be major releases as smaller indie films and B-movies will take a while until there are more players in the channel though that weekend sale moved 90,000 players.
I also tried my hand at making my own HD-DVDs with Ulead's VideoStudio 11 Plus. The first thing I learned was the audio setting if I didn't change it would be LPCM instead of Dolby Stereo or 5.1. LPCM takes up much more space and tended to make the video and audio drop out trying to keep pace. Next I set it to Dolby which was better but still some dropouts. My source material was from my Sony HC1 in HDV format. The encoding output was set to 1920 x 1080 at 25 mbps (same as HDV). I figured the A3 couldn't keep up with that bit rate so tried 18 mbps which didn't change the look much. Note that all the commercial HD-DVDs I have are encoded with VC1 which is a variant on Microsoft's WMV. That codec is not yet available in Video Studio so you can only author about 20 minutes of video in MPEG-2 format on a DVD blank. The disk format is also different so even though I authored it on a regular DVD burner that burner couldn't recognize it, only an HD-DVD ROM drive can. If VC1 or MP4 were available as an encoding option then one could probably put an hour's worth of video on a disk and possibly two dual layer.
This is also my second high def DVD player as my first was the AVeL Linkplayer2 which is a network DVD player with a Sigma Graphics chipset that can play MPEG-2, DivX, WMV and MPEG-4 files and streams as well as regular DVDs. I use it a lot as an HD player for streams I record to my computes using my QAM tuners. IOW my own multiple tuner DVRs. It also upscales regular DVDs over component though the manufacturer took that away in later firmware which I of course did not update to. The Toshiba though it plays HD over component does not upscale regular DVDs over component and if you play a regular DVD flashes a message that upscaling is prohibited over component and is switching to 480p. My guess is that Hollywood execs who got boondoggled into the no upscaling over component thing are a little embarrassed nowadays. Rumor is that HD player will never downrez HD-DVDs or Blu-Ray disks or if they do not until 2012 when most people will have replaced their component only sets.
Originally it was supposed to ship on the 14th and arrive by the 21st (the day after tomorrow) but they actually shipped on the 9th and it arrived on Monday the 12th. The player came with two HD-DVDs "Bourne Identity" and "300" plus Toshiba has a 5 free disk rebate program too.
The A3 was easy to set up as I just swapped the component from my JVC D-VHS deck which doesn't get that much use these days as well as the optical audio cable. The results were spectacular. The A3 has the best HD output of all my components and it is the least expensive of all of them. Yes it even looked great on my 7 year old Pioneer SD-532HD set (which doesn't have HDMI).
At this stage of the game HD-DVD players are really little Linux boxes and I was surprise how many people speculated it was a Linux box but all they had to do was read the rather lengthy license section in the back of the manual and under "included software" they would have found "Linux kernel" mentioned. But who reads manuals these days, right? Anyway that means the player takes over a minute to boot up when you turn it on and the remote runs a little sluggish. Some things depending on the disk you are playing run differently than a regular DVD. Instead of the stopping the disk when you want to take a break you put it on pause which brings up a progress bar and if it sits there too long a screen saver. Apparently some disks can save the place in a disk but none I have do that.
One of the reasons I purchased the player is the local Hollywood Video just began renting both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray disks. On their MVP program these rent the same as regular DVDs. Most of these will be major releases as smaller indie films and B-movies will take a while until there are more players in the channel though that weekend sale moved 90,000 players.
I also tried my hand at making my own HD-DVDs with Ulead's VideoStudio 11 Plus. The first thing I learned was the audio setting if I didn't change it would be LPCM instead of Dolby Stereo or 5.1. LPCM takes up much more space and tended to make the video and audio drop out trying to keep pace. Next I set it to Dolby which was better but still some dropouts. My source material was from my Sony HC1 in HDV format. The encoding output was set to 1920 x 1080 at 25 mbps (same as HDV). I figured the A3 couldn't keep up with that bit rate so tried 18 mbps which didn't change the look much. Note that all the commercial HD-DVDs I have are encoded with VC1 which is a variant on Microsoft's WMV. That codec is not yet available in Video Studio so you can only author about 20 minutes of video in MPEG-2 format on a DVD blank. The disk format is also different so even though I authored it on a regular DVD burner that burner couldn't recognize it, only an HD-DVD ROM drive can. If VC1 or MP4 were available as an encoding option then one could probably put an hour's worth of video on a disk and possibly two dual layer.
This is also my second high def DVD player as my first was the AVeL Linkplayer2 which is a network DVD player with a Sigma Graphics chipset that can play MPEG-2, DivX, WMV and MPEG-4 files and streams as well as regular DVDs. I use it a lot as an HD player for streams I record to my computes using my QAM tuners. IOW my own multiple tuner DVRs. It also upscales regular DVDs over component though the manufacturer took that away in later firmware which I of course did not update to. The Toshiba though it plays HD over component does not upscale regular DVDs over component and if you play a regular DVD flashes a message that upscaling is prohibited over component and is switching to 480p. My guess is that Hollywood execs who got boondoggled into the no upscaling over component thing are a little embarrassed nowadays. Rumor is that HD player will never downrez HD-DVDs or Blu-Ray disks or if they do not until 2012 when most people will have replaced their component only sets.
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