Kiwimeat’s Kitchen

Anandtech posted up a good (and short) summary article about the current state of HD audio over HDMI for PCs.

It can be found here.

It’s very hard not to get immensely frustrated about the effort required for consumers to actually access the full features of the product they have bought due to the “consumer last” position of the media companies and their willing accomplices in the PC and HT audio industry.

A Very Belated Happy New Year.

Meh, I’ve got the flu (before my employer had a chance to organise this year’s flu vacination!) and after 3 days off work I’ve still suffering but at the green flem stage. Ugg.

Well January is done. The good news is that I only worked 9 days of the month – the bad news is that I was only paid for 9 days.

Christmas was good but over too quickly. Fortunately I only had 3 days of work before we went on holiday for two weeks.

We had an excellent time in Thailand. Bangkok is pretty much everyone has ever said and the traffic is legendary for good reason. The temples were fantastic and my wife and daughter enjoyed the shopping. The second week was spent in Krabi at the fantastic Pakasai Resort where we lazed by the pool except for 2 day trips out. I was very reluctant to return….but we did as the start of the school year beckoned.

So what of the High Definition Wars?

Obviously whilst I was away on holiday there were some significant developments in the Hi-Def “War”. The biggest was Warner dropping their format neutral stance and going Blu-Ray only. The news prompted many inside and outside of the industry to declare BDA the winner and HD-DVD dead. But wait…………..HD-DVD isn’t dead…yet.

As a result on the Warner decision, and after a period of shocked insensibility by the HD-DVD Forum and Toshiba, prices were slashed starting in the US and then Europe. Finally here in Australia we got the price cuts too and whilst too early to tell whether it is merely a “dead-cat bounce” HD-DVD players have apparently outsold BD players (including the PS3) 2-to-1 last week here in Oz.

I now have an Toshiba HD-XE1 player and it is indeed a very fine piece of machinery. It has the special region free firmware to enable it to play all regions of SD-DVD’s thanks to the ingenuity of a fellow forum member here in Australia. It has the excellent Silicon Optix/HQV Reon Video Processor which does wonders with SD-DVD processing.

I’ve ordered 20 or so more HD-DVD titles to do my “bit” for the struggle.

Onto February when we all perspire in the final, humid sweatbox that is the tail-end of summer and such lunacy as the start of the Super 14 Rugby Season will be upon us. For some reason the fact that whilst Rugby Union is traditionally a winter sport it is now played in late Summer/Autumn in Australia has yet to penetrate the heads of the manufacturers of rugby attire. So if someone sees me at Suncorp stadium without a rugby top it’s only temporary until it cools down and I can were a rugby top without melting.

Oh….HD-DVD still isn’t dead yet. Perhaps someone could answer me this?

I don’t understand why a lot of the so called “geek” community have decided to endorse the standard that has mandatory region coding (admittedly not an issue for the majority of American’s who struggle with their own geography let alone the rest of the globe), and mandatory DRM with the prospect of even more onerous checks in the future using BD+.

Picked up my HD-EP10 this afternoon.

Bonus #1 The free-in-the-box movie was “Chronicles of Riddick” Which actually the one I wanted (there is normally 1 of about 4 movies in the box).
Bonus #2 Was a special firmware CD from a DTV Forum user was in the Postbox . More on this in a minute.

It took a while to get kids sorted, help my son clear a path through the Lego to the Hi-Fi rack and do the usual shuffling, sorting and cable management.
There is only a single HDMI cable running to my Yamaha RX-V2600B AVR with both video and audio over the one cable.

Even at 1080i (limit of my Fujitsu 50″ Plasma) the image quality on Chronicles of Riddick is fantastic. I know it is reputed to be a good transfer but even so I am extremely happy. Can’t wait for the other movies to land.

The wife was vaguely impressed, kids more so, and the wife then enquired as to the price and actually seemed quite impressed by the price cut and bonus DVD’s.

A bit later I got a chance to run the firmware update from the CD sent to me, and now my new HD-EP10 is no longer region locked for SD-DVD’s (with the exception of RCE encoded disks which will likely take another update to resolve).

It’s one of the weird things about the HD-DVD players available round the globe that whilst the HD-DVD format is deliberately not region locked, HD-DVD players still enforce SD-DVD region locking. Fortunately here in Australia, our competition watchdog has ruled against region locking and with the efforts of some wonderful forum members we have region free SD-DVD playback (excluding RCE encoded disks - mostly Fox) for the Australian versions of the HD-XE1 and HD-EP10.

I’ve since processed my $100 cashback redemption and 4 bonus HD-DVD’s online too.

In light of my recent decision to purchase an HD-DVD player I have been reading and posting in the relevant sub-forums on a couple of my regular haunts.

Some of the stuff that goes on would scare many sane people away, possibly for good. Some of the fanboism exceeds acceptable bounds. Not only do you get verbatim spouting of press releases, and name calling and worse, it even causes some otherwise rational members (based on their other posts) to take temporary leave of their senses and even losing their cool.

What makes people do this? Last time I looked it was simply two competing formats for Hi-Def movies. At this time neither party can land a knockout blow and it looks like both will be around for a while. I imagine sometime after Xmas I’ll get a Blu-Ray player of some sort and then start having to educate the family about which machine to put the disks into.

Oh and my HD-DVD is due in at dealer tomorrow (Friday) and my order of HD-DVD’s from the US have most recently “Departed FexEx Location, Memphis, TN”.

Well after procrastinating for eons about whether to join the high definition wars, I’ve signed up to the HD equivalent of the Rebel Alliance - HD-DVD.
Sometime this week my new Toshiba HD-EP10 1080p HD-DVD player will arrive at my hi-fi dealer.

The recent price cuts from both camps have dropped the price of players down to what I regard as reasonable and the high Aussie dollar against the US dollar makes purchases of HD-DVD movies (region free by design) from the US a mightily attractive option.In addition Toshiba is offering a $100 rebate of the HD-E1 and HD-EP10 models as well as free HD-DVD’s by redemption. Depending on the model purchased you get 3,4 or 5 of the following HD-DVD titles - Superman Returns, Troy, Batman Begins, V For Vendetta, Perfect Storm, Syriana, Polar Express, Ant Bully.

Now my going HD-DVD doesn’t mean I won’t at some point get a Blu-Ray player, especially as the PS3 has a $700 version, but for the moment I’ll content myself with my with HD-DVD goodness.

Of course, it goes without saying that I will be ordering the current No 1 Best Selling HD-DVD and one of the reasons for the Blu-Ray Empire experiencing a setback - Paramount’s defection to the HD-DVD camp bringing with it Transformers!