About four years ago, the push for new television technologies first emerged, supported primarily by advances in LCD and plasma technology. Many of these new televisions supported high definition (HD) content, at least in the traditional 720p variety. While Europe is ahead of North America in this regard, we have slowly been migrating most of our North American television services to digital, and in most cases, HD. I believe the US has a target date of around 2013 to be completely digital. HD content looks, quite simply, amazing. Which is why Hollywood has spent the last few years humming and ...

7:36pm – So John and Brennen just arrived for the Friday night nerd-a-thon. We’re debating what movies to watch right now while waiting for pizza to arrive. We have a big list of geeky movies here, some of which are on HD-DVD. Right now the short runners are: The Matrix in HD Dark City Gladiator Desperado Heat Ocean’s Thirteen in HD So we’ll see how it goes. Jeff will probably show up in a bit, and I’m not sure who else. I’m guessing The Matrix will be first just to kick everything off with a bag of kick-ass. My copy of Dark City has seen better days, so I’m trying to rip it to ...

Well, it’s not very often I’ll write about TV shows, mainly because I don’t really watch a lot of TV. In an effort to get my expenses down a few months ago, I decided finally to pull the plug on cable, something that I haven’t regretted in the least. The only show I really watched last year was 24, and once that season ended, I just cancelled it all, saving myself $60 a month or whatever. A while ago, I went out and bought all of Heroes season one on HD-DVD. I thought it was a decent show, but there were a lot of characters I wasn’t interested in at all. The finale was pretty lame too, ...

This is an obvious play, but I’ve been waiting a long time for it to happen. Samsung has announced a new dual format (HD-DVD/Blue-Ray) DVD player, which basically means it will play everything on the market: Samsung’s HD disc player was going to be the first to do both HD DVD and Blu-ray completely right. But now, it’s perfect: Samsung just sent us an alert saying the dual-format BD-UP5000 Duo HD player will come hardware-ready for BD Profile 1.1—at least 256MB of internal storage, secondary audio and video decoders, virtual file system. You realize that the rest of the Blu-players ...

Today I went out for a nice walk, thinking I was going to get a few housewares for my place, and maybe pick up a new shirt or two. While out and about, I decided to swing by Future Shop and see what was new and exciting. When I walked in, I headed over to the DVD player area to see if anything was happening in the Blue-Ray or HD-DVD markets, since I’ve been looking to pick something up for a while. Last week, there was a sale on the highly regarded Toshiba HD-A2 DVD player for $399, and I almost picked one up. However, that was still a little steep for my liking, and I decided to pass on it. ...

I wanted to pen this entry really quick before bed. A few days ago, one of the main encryption keys for the HD-DVD platform was leaked, apparently by an insider within the video industry. Basically, having this key will allow anyone with access to the hardware the full ability to decode and decrypt every HD-DVD that has been manufactured so far. Oops. The key, which amounts to no more than a 128 bit string, has been circling the internet, pulling a string of cease and desist orders along with it. Many a webowner has tried to publish the key online, only to be given a legal letter demanding they ...