To go along with their HD DVD rebate promotion, the HD DVD camp is making a big push and releasing popular titles this week. The list:
The Complete Matrix Trilogy, 40-year-old Virgin, Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima, Mission Impossible 1 + 2, Freedom Writers, the Skeleton Key, Smokey and the Bandit, and the Ultimate Matrix Collection.
So when you get in on HD DVD with the $100 rebate, you actually have some nice movies to watch.
Blu-ray's not lying down either.
They've got Apocalypto, Closer, Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima, Mission Impossible 1 + 2, Pirates of the Caribbean 1 + 2, Closer, and Freedom Writers.
It seems like some good new titles are finally making their way onto HD formats, which may mean some higher adoption rates and even more movies for those of us who made like Angelina Jolie and adopted early and often. – Jason Chen
HD DVD Digest
Blu-ray Digest

Filed under: Handhelds, Laptops
AMD just let loose a few details on their upcoming "Griffin" and "Puma" mobile platform technologies due out in 2008. The Griffin codename denotes 65nm processors bent on increasing performance and battery life of our beloved laptops and mobile devices. These third generation Turion 64 X2 dual-core 64-bit processors also bring support for DDR2-800 memory. Puma then, is the name given to the overall platform built initially around an RS780 chipset featuring a DX-10 class graphics core, Blu-ray and HD DVD acceleration support, and output options for DVI, HDMI, and DisplayPort. According to AMD, the combination of Griffin with the RS780 chipset will provide "significantly better" performance-per-watt-per-dollar than their existing platform. Be sure to click through to Hot Hardware for the detailed techno-gore.

[Thanks, Dave A.] 
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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum Sys...

Filed under: HDTV, Portable Audio, Portable Video, Storage

S.Korea's DViCO just made it a bit easier to take your HD video collection on the road. Meet the ¥27,800 ($229) TViX HD M-4000SA which combines a 3.5-inch SATA disk enclosure with 1080i output. The player pumps WMV HD, MPEG-2TS and DivX HD video and MP3, Ogg Vobis, and WMA audio out a selection of jacks including DVI, component, and S-Video along with optical and coaxial digital audio -- sorry, no HDMI. It even features a USB-host port to quickly suck media from DAPs and digital cameras with Ethernet providing a link back to DViCO's TiVX series of home media servers. Now don't be shy, go ahead and slap in some hot 1TB disk action for all your self-ripped HD DVD or Blu-ray Disc titles. Then get Kerouac and take your mad, beat media on the road.

[Via Impress] 
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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to li...

Filed under: Gaming, HDTV, Home Entertainment, Storage
Alright folks, the merry-go-round on this one is apparently grinding to a halt, as recent reports are finally clarifying a statement made way back in January of last year by Peter Moore in regard to Blu-ray making nice with the Xbox 360. Mr. Moore's insinuation that Microsoft's latest console had "the flexibility to adapt to consumers' needs" was purportedly taken way out of context, as a post on the firm's Gamerscore Blog boldly proclaims that these reports were "completely incorrect," and further crushed any remaining hope by stating that Redmond is "fully committed to HD DVD and has absolutely no plans to support other optical formats." Hey, at least you can pull the trigger on that standalone BD player you've been eying now, eh?

[Via GamesIndustry] 
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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Blu-Ray will dominate the industry in three years. Or maybe it will be HD DVD. The general consensus is that whoever wins doesn't really get a lasting victory, since they're both in the last physical video format ever. That sentiment has largely been the consensus of the press and leaders in the tech industry.
The end of physical formats for movie and TV shows could be called digital convergence, a happy, wonderfully singular, unified digital world. Content moves seamlessly from your multifunction portable device to your TV, between your computers, and to every monitor and audio system and random networked appliance in between. To have that happen in a stream of bits floating effortlessly on radio waves, without physical discs or specially designated boxes, would be truly wonderful.
But an end to physical video formats doesn't mean an end to format wars. In fact, once film and television content are no longer bound by physical media, we're in for the mother of ...

Besides that pesky little required DRM update, there's a neat trick hiding underneath CyberLink's just-announced new version of its PowerDVD Ultra playback software: it can now unlock the power of NVIDIA's next-gen PureVideo HD VP2 architecture, which gooses Blu-ray and HD DVD playback to the extreme. This means that for the first time, NVIDIA's GeForce 8500/8600 series graphics cards can handle most of the processing for decoding and playing back HD DVD and Blu-ray's 1080p videos. All that number crunching is offloaded to NVIDIA's GPU processor instead of bogging down the PC's CPU.
We saw a demo comparing the last generation of NVIDIA's PureVideo HD tech used in its 7600 series to this newest PureVideo HD VP2 (video processor 2) inside its 8500 and 8600 series graphics cards rolled out in April. When they unleashed this VP2 beast, were we impressed?

Check out these numbers, which we saw happening with our own eyes. The slowest playback (blue bar on the graph be...

If you’ve been keeping an eye on the high definition market to se how the format war between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray will pan out, you may have noticed one thing. Prices for both formats have come down ...

Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment
var digg_url = 'http://www.digg.com/software/Newest_AACS_circumvented_The_Matrix_Trilogy_set_free'; Just in case you didn't already piece it together, many (if not all) of the new HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc titles set for release on May 22nd will feature the latest revisions to AACS. Right, the update hinted at by those forced user updates to the WinDVD and PowerDVD software. Yeah, well no worries... it's cracked. That's right, a week before the disks have even hit the shops, the kids over at Slysoft have already released AnyDVD HD 6.1.5.1 (beta) which kicks AACS MKB v3 swiftly to the curb. Thus you can continue to rip all your newly purchased HD DVD and BD flicks for playback any damn way you like. The update has already been demonstrated to work with an early-shipped release of The Matrix Trilogy on HD DVD and will likely work for Pirates of the Caribbean - Dead Man's Chest when it arrives on Blu-ray. Come on AACS LA, you're gonna have to a...

Filed under: Home Entertainment

It seems that every week we hear about a price drop from either HD DVD or Blu-ray, and this week it's both. First Panasonic announced their DMP-BD10A for $600 and now Toshiba is announcing a $100 in-store instant rebate -- our favorite kind -- on any HD DVD player purchased between May 20th and June 16th. Assuming no other discounts, you can now get a stand-alone HD DVD player for that magic price of $299. This combined with the free movies promotion, removes any (price-related) excuses for not picking up an HD DVD player, and enjoying the Ultimate Matrix Collection on HD DVD. 
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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

The big speculation on television product is the upcoming relesae of the NBC hit Heroes. The freshman series will arrive in August on DVD and HD-DVD in August. The first season will contain all the ...