Universal announced their clear support of HD DVD as a format. They confirm that will release more than 100 title in 2007 in HD DVD format, with no plans to support Blu-ray.

More than 90% of the titles coming out this year will be in dual format supporting both DVD and HD DVD on the same disk.

Source: DVDTown.com

It's now official, we blogged about the BackupHDDVD hack a while back, now the official agency, the AACS has confirmed that indeed hackers have stolen the "title keys" and decrypted HD DVD titles.

Both Blu-ray and HD DVD are impacted by this.

The Adult Entertainment industry is known for leading the pack when it comes to multi-media formats and building a business around those formats. For example, one of the first industries to use streaming media as a revenue generator was the Adult Entertainment industry. It appears they are making another decision when it comes to media and that is HD DVD. As a recent article on TG Daily reports, all the companies at a recent conference for the industry are using HD DVD as their format:

"Blu-ray has superior quality, yes," said a spokesperson for porn studio Bangbros, "but HD DVD is easier to ...

Here's an article at High-Def Digest on the sales figures between HD DVD and Blu-ray. According to the figures, there are more Blu-ray players out there than HD DVD players, but as Hig ...

The SD-H903A for creating HD DVDs on your PC which still provides legacy support for your CDs and DVDs. With dual layer discs, HD DVD provides 30GB of storage capacity, which can accommodate up to eight hours of HD DVD movie content with extended cuts and interactive features, up to five full-length standard DVD films, up to 7,500 MP3 songs or up to 30,000 high-quality images.

Volume shipments of the SD-H903A are scheduled to start in February with OEM sampling in January.

Over at Doom9 Forums, Muslix64; the one who posted a video and information on comprimising the AACS DRM for HDDVD using BackupHDDVD; made a follow up post and provided more insight into his techniques. Some items he points out in his post:

Affirmation 1: You did not break AACS, just the player

My comment: I did not break AACS, but I find a way to decrypt movies and I have bypassed all the revocation system.
Not tha ...

No doubt that eventually someone would release a dual-format player capable of playing both Blu-ray and HD-DVD disks. PC World is reporting that LG Electronics is the first company to announce the availability of the player to be launched early in 2007.

More information is expected to become available at the CES next week.

Toshiba is expected to announce the release of cheaper HD DVD players at CES next week in Las Vegas. Yoshihide Fujii said recently:

 "At first I thought the price threshold is $499. Maybe coming next is $399 and after that is $299."

This leads speculation that lower prices will be announced at CES. Currently Toshiba players like the HD-A2 can be purchased at $399. Once prices go down to $299 we should see a larger demand by consumers.

The New York Times, being a leader in media is reporting today that the HD DVD encryption scheme was cracked using BackupHDDVD.

In the blogging world this is old news as we reported on last week. The main point here is not all live in the blogging world and this is new news to them. We can only wait to see what the impact ...

Best Gaming Peripheral for 2006 according to IGN.com was the Xbox HD-DVD Add-on. Why you may ask?

"...for gamers that already own a 360 it is one of the best ways to get into next-gen DVD."

The latest on the 'Net is that AACS DRM used by both Blu-ray and HD DVD has been cracked using BackupHDDVD tool.

Below is the video posted to YouTube.com showing the process:

We don't condone piracy here at RedmondGadge ...

In a previous post we discussed Cymfony's research on the perceptions of the Blu-ray versus the HD DVD. In the research, Cymfony concluded that HD DVD has more positive perceptions over Blu-ray when it comes to the Internet.

Cymfony has replied to some negative feedback they received from this research paper via the company's weblog.

According to a recent market analytical survey by Cymfony, based on information obtained by conducting searching on the Web, 46% more of discussions centering around HD DVD are more positives than discussions of Blu-ray. Over twice as many authors were "impressed with HD DVD" than of Blu-ray. Few posts discuss the higher storage capacity of Blu-ray and advanced interactivity.

Again the discussions on the Web refer to Sony's past problems with Betamax and MiniDisc (UMD). In addition, gamers did not like the included Blu-ray in the PS3 which increased costs of the console, thereby providing no choice or power over the cost of the console.

The analysis is in PD ...

Here's a write up on the Blu-ray versus HD DVD battle that is currently brewing. As I wrote previously, make no doubt about it, this is a war, for the next media player that is going to be sitting on your entertainment center in the years to come.

This article points out t ...

Yesterday at a press conference Microsoft and HP announced their collaborative effort on People-Ready Business Building. This covers many aspects of enterprise solutions from CMS, messaging, infrastructure, and other areas. This signifies a major partnership between the two companies.

Some History

About 5 years ago, Dell quickly rose to prominence in the server arena, before that the leader was Compaq (now owned by HP). Dell had offered an extensive and successful laptop l ...

The Washington Times ran an article today covering Blu-Ray versus HD DVD. Xbox users can purchase an add-on to get HD DVD support and Blu-Ray is Sony's version of high definition discs.

When considering my choice, for some reason Beta-Max and UMDs come to mind.

Read the article...