Over the last four months I've built a dvd library of about 50 titles. But a friend of mine sent me a link to these new Sony blu-ray players, so I'm wondering if anyone has any guesses as to how long it will take the movie industry to re-re-re-release their libraries on HD DVD. I imagine it will be several years, just as it took a few years to get them to release stuff on regular dvd.

I have an HD-DVD player and right now there's a few problems:

1. Enormous cost for both the player and the titles.

2. Very very few titles for sale.

3. Poor backwards-compatability with old DVDs...some of my discs play fine, others don't play at all. It's a crapshoot.

Hopefully, all three problems will be sorted out over time.

Yeah, I guess I'm trying to decide if I should continue building my library, or wait. I'm happy with my Progressive scan DVD player, it looks good on my 64 in Pioneer Elite. HOWEVER, when I watch HD channels I still notice the difference. Wow what an amazing world it will be when EVERYTHING is in HD!

You mean one that upconverts to 1080i?

I'm sure Groucho is referring to the one he brought back from the future.

LOL... I have learned that whenever I see statements such as these, I immediately check to see if it's Groucho.

This is depressing....I hope the players are seamlessly backwards compatible or we've all wasted thousands of dollars

They have HD-DVD titles???

Based on what Disney has expressed concerning HD-DVD,
2007 will be the start of their distribution of titles into the marketplace. This of course can all turn on a dime depending upon market growth.

Nice one Groucho

They actually do have DVD players that upconvert to 1080i, and output DVI, so I thought he was mixin' things up a bit. Or mistaken with DVHS or something...

Damn that lack of a wink smiley in the post!

Yes - years ago Groucho's semicolon and right parenthesis must have stopped working on his keyboard, and unfortunately he hasn't had it fixed yet. So Waskydriver is right, if you read something that sounds outlandish - check for his username.

Anyways, I was rather curious myself about these DVD players that upconvert to 1080i. I realize its not true high def, but are they even worth it? First of all, does a standard DVD upconverted to 1080i look good? Secondly, if I can upconvert it to this, I would have to have a TV that supports 1080i. So couldn't the internal scaler inside my TV just upconvert it for me instead? So what's the big deal?

Widescreen Review magazine has an article of a hybrid HD DVD format called pHD made by a company called Pixonics. Basically, they take a regular 480p stream and add an enhancement stream (~3MB/s) to it. They claim that the quality is comparable to a native 1080p. The value proposition is that the pHD DVD can work on regular DVD player. A pHD player, can play both pHD DVD and upconvert standard DVD as well.

Depends on the PQ that's produced by this technology, and of course, the price of pHD players, this can be very enticing.

Has anyone here got a chance to check out the PQ on this thing. I think it's been around some trade shows for some time now.

From what I've read over at the Home Theater Spot from people that have bought them many seem to be returning them. The upconversion only works through a HDCP DVI and many people have the DVI part but without the HDCP part it won't work. One highly respected poster says that the only way to get the best upconversion through DVI to display is on a fixed pixel monitor like DLP, plasma or LCD. So if you're thinking about using it on a CRT or RPTV monitor it might not be worth it. I'd wait until the real HD DVDs come out or see if the next generation of these players work any better.

As for our existing DVD library becoming obsolete I don't think that HD DVD players won't be backwards compatible. I think I'll be quite happy with most of my existing discs and will only upgrade a select few. I'm planning on mainly buying new releases on the HD DVD format and keeping the current ones until I need to replace them unless some unforseen technology changes my mind.

I think HD DVD will take atleast a good 4 or 5 more years than DVD to catch on..for a few reasons...

1. "Joe six pack" has just bought a dvd player
2. Not everyone can afford a HD TV ..I really believe its going to be a long while before they are affordable to EVERYONE..
3."Joe six pack" has just been convinced that Widescreen is better than pan n scan...now you are going to try and convince him that a widescreen tv is better and the picture on HD DVD is better than regular DVD?

Oh God! I can see the thread titles now... "Spiderman HD-DVD to be released in P&S only! ARRRRG!"

I was watching HDNet last night and saw Lord of the Rings The Fellowship of the Ring movie trailer and all I can say is WOW!!!!
Lord of the Rings in native 1080i is AWESOME!!! I can't wait for true HDDVD to come out. The details of the background, the crispness of the colors makes for a whole new viewing experience.

Nah, but I bet when widescreen sets become the norm, 2.35 movies will be the new victim. Most likely you'll hear someone saying, "I bought a widescreen set and I still see black bars!!!! ARGH!"

hd-hbo already does this unfortunately