hd dvd on technabob...

According to a report over at PC World, Toshiba may be announcing new HD DVD players as early as next week’s CES show in Las Vegas. In addition, price drops may be coming soon.

When asked about the possibility of upcoming price reductions, Toshiba CEO Yoshihide Fujii was quoted as saying: “At first I thought the price threshold is $499…

The folks over at Home Theater Blog got their grubby little mitts on a Toshiba’s second generation HD DVD player, the HD-XA2 and we’re pleased to hear that the horrifically slow load times of the first generation HD-A1 and HD-XA1 appear to be a thing of the past…

In this post by Shaheen Gandhi, an engineer on the Xbox 360 Platform Team, a massive amount of code went into the HD DVD playback system for the Xbox 360.
As a result of the complexities of decoding HD DVD audio and video content, as well as providing a user interface and DRM, over 4.7 million lines of code went into the HD DVD software…

This amusing commercial for the Xbox 360 HD-DVD add-on has found its way to YouTube:

Now is it just me, or is the dancer who does the DVD dance better than the main HD-DVD dancer?

swfobject.embedSWF(”http://www.youtube.com/v/8S5CZpNd904&color1=0×2B405B&color2=0×272B2A&rel=1&fs=1″, “vvq4929522c89073″, “520″, “434″, “9″, vvqexpressinstall, vvqflashvars, vvqparams, vvqattributes);

The folks over at HP have shown the first of what is sure to be a number of HD-DVD drive add-ons for your PC.

Hewlett Packard’s HD100 is an external HD-DVD drive that plugs into your PC’s USB 2.0 port and can read HD DVDs, DVDs and CDs. Read speeds are 2.4x for HD-DVD, 5x for DVD and 14x for CD…

In line with earlier predictions, it’s now been confirmed that the HD DVD add-on for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 will launch in the U.S. in mid-November for $199 USD.

The drive will include a HD DVD copy of Peter Jackson’s King King remake for a limited time, and also comes with a universal remote control. European pricing was also confirmed at

In another blow to Sony’s floundering Blu-Ray format, Universal Pictures has announced that it will be dropping support for the disc format. For the forseaable future, the will solely release high definition discs in HD-DVD format.

With all of the problems with Blu-Ray laser supplies affecting the PS3 launch, I’m beginning to think Sony’s got another Betamax on their hands…

Kotaku has revealed information from a reliable source that Microsoft will announce a November 22nd launch for the Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive accessory in Japan.

Pricing is expected to be a Blu-Ray killing 19800 yen (appx. $168 USD!) in Japan, but it’s likely to run about $199 in the US, since Microsoft is pushing extra hard to gain Japanese market share…