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Friday, March 07, 2008 4:06 PM

What did you do in the Format War, Daddy?

My kids are 2 and 4 yrs old so have little concept of what Daddy does, though they do know the words DVD, Xbox, and Lightsaber. However in a decade or so they might be able to understand what Daddy did in the format war, so here’s how I plan on explaining
Posted by andypennell | 11 Comments
Wednesday, February 20, 2008 11:33 AM

Why HD DVD Really Lost The Format War

It's all my fault. I'm terribly sorry. Something critical happened in October 2007 that I forgot to add to yesterday's Diary posting . Before CES 2007 I was going to do it, but I was worried that something bad might happen at CES so I didn't. After the
Posted by andypennell | 7 Comments
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Tuesday, February 19, 2008 4:51 PM

Diary of a High Definition Format War

Here are my personal highlights (and lowlights) of the format war, from down in the trenches of the HD DVD team at Microsoft. To make it a bit clearer, here is a graph of the peaks and troughs of the last three years: April 2005: I join the Profession
Posted by andypennell | 16 Comments
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Thursday, January 17, 2008 11:57 AM

Come see HDi at the Sundance Film Festival

If you are attending the Sundance Film Festival, please drop by the Microsoft House on Main Street and say Hi to representatives of the HDi team and see some cool demos and movie screenings. I'll be there myself from the 24th to the 26th, and someone
Posted by andypennell | 1 Comments
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Tuesday, December 18, 2007 9:39 AM

Xbox 360 HD DVD Version List

Here I will try and document the various releases of the Xbox 360 HD DVD player, in reverse chronological order. Major releases are in bold (a major release either has new features or has a boat-load of changes, minor releases are pure bug fixes). To
Posted by andypennell | 35 Comments
Thursday, December 13, 2007 5:58 AM

Now Available: HD DVD Emulator for Xbox 360

As of this morning the product I have been focused on for much the last year or so has at last been released: the Xbox 360 HD DVD Emulator . This is based on the Xbox HD DVD player, but designed for content authors to test and debug their titles without
Posted by andypennell | 4 Comments
Thursday, November 15, 2007 1:31 PM

Vote for HD DVD

Its November and its time to place your vote. No, not for US Presidential candidates, but for the optical high definition format you want to be the winner in the format war, which of course for me means HD DVD. This holiday season might be the last chance
Posted by andypennell | 9 Comments
Thursday, October 25, 2007 4:00 PM

Xbox 360 HD DVD Drive: Movie Specific Known Issues

The purpose of this post is to highlight the most common current title issues and, where possible, supply work-arounds. For general troubleshooting see the previous post first : the most common problems are described there. Items will be listed in reverse
Posted by andypennell | 102 Comments
Thursday, October 25, 2007 3:55 PM

Xbox 360 HD DVD Drive: General Troubleshooting

I thought it might be useful to post about general troubleshooting on the Xbox 360 HD DVD drive. For issues with specific movies, see my other post , this one covers the more general case. (I use the term "title" which you can read as "movie", its a habit
Posted by andypennell | 25 Comments
Monday, August 20, 2007 9:38 AM

Tide is turning: Paramount declare HD DVD only

An important day in the next-gen DVD format war: Paramount have announced that they are going HD DVD only, an important change from their previous neutrality. "Blades of Glory", "Transformers" and "Shrek the Third" are the initial announced titles. The
Posted by andypennell | 2 Comments
Thursday, June 14, 2007 10:01 AM

HD DVD: Audio Mixing, and why you don't need HDMI

There has been much confusion over multi-channel audio and HD DVD, so I thought I would try and explain how this works. As a side-effect you'll see why you don't need HDMI for the highest quality audio, and why you certainly don't need HDMI 1.3 for audio.
Posted by andypennell | 19 Comments
Tuesday, June 05, 2007 8:01 AM

Terminator 2 on HD DVD

Thanks to the fact that there is no region coding on HD DVD, you can now get the Director's Cut of T2 on HD DVD, encoded with VC1. Previously the theatrical version was only available on Blu-Ray in the USA (in 20th Century MPEG2 format). As Canal+ were
Posted by andypennell | 5 Comments
Wednesday, May 16, 2007 10:03 AM

Why HD DVD is more technically advanced than Blu-ray

Since forever it seems that there is this idea that Blu-ray is "more technically advanced" than HD DVD. This was based on Sony's PR as far as I can tell, so now I feel it is necessary to call out the gaping holes in Blu-ray to prove how much more technically
Posted by andypennell | 28 Comments
Wednesday, May 16, 2007 9:43 AM

Fixing Letterboxed Widescreen content on HD DVDs

HD DVD obviously rocks on HD content, but the SD content on the discs often grates me as it is displayed as widescreen content with black bars on the top and the sides. This happens because the original content (usually Extras) came from old fashioned
Posted by andypennell | 3 Comments
Saturday, May 12, 2007 1:56 PM

Xbox 360 HD DVD Update Now Available

[Player version list now moved to separate post ] As of 2am this morning, the latest software for the Xbox HD DVD player is now available via Xbox Live (and will be posted on xbox.com in due course). The three teams involved (HD DVD, Xbox and the Codec
Posted by andypennell | 82 Comments
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