Here is an interesting read about how the audio in HD TV is not keeping up with the video. People are buying 1080p TV sets. The networks are paying more attention to the quality of their video, but they are not yet doing much with the audio. Many movies recording in 5.1 are broadcast in 2 channels. ...

According to reports , Toshiba will soon stop manufacturing HD-DVD equipment. The writing has been on the wall since Time-Warner's January announcement that it would go exclusively to the BluRay format. More recently Netflix and WalMart have announced that they will go exclusively to the BluRay format...

Bill Crow, best known for his work on HDPhoto/JPEG-XR, has a great post about dynamic range and color spaces. If you are into photography or video, understanding this is important. As we try to aggregate video from more and more sources onto varying display mediums, color science is becoming every more...

Recently people have begun to declare a victor in the next-gen DVD wars. Because of the PS3, the number of BluRay players on the market are higher than the number of HD-DVD players and thus sales of BluRay discs are higher than HD-DVD players. From what I understand, the number of HD-DVD standalone players...

Interesting article over at Audioholics covering the subject of HDMI and what's wrong with it. They bring up the legacy of DVI which has a confusing number of options and doesn't handle distance runs well. "Most computer displays are mounted at most a few feet away from the CPU, so it didn't seem...

Here's an interesting article from AnandTech talking about the new GeForce 8600's video acceleration features. It features H.264 acceleration. The article analyzes the performance win from doing acceleration in hardware. It also gives some statistics on VC-1 (standardized WMV) acceleration. It compares...

Finally some real numbers showing how the two sides compare. In the first quarter, BluRay sold 830,000 titles and HD-DVD sold 335,000 according to Home Media Magazine. Those numbers look pretty bleak for HD-DVD but they are both so small in the overall shiny video disc market as to be insignificant....

Moving to HD is expensive. You have to buy a new TV, new DVD player, and possibly a new receiver. If you've ever wondered if HD-DVD (or BluRay) is worth it, this demo I found may be interesting. These are a series of pictures taken from the DVD and the HD-DVD or BluRay of the same movie. More than just...

Microsoft just released a Windows Media Player plugin for Firefox. This will allow people who use firefox to view web videos being broadcast in WMV format. I'm not actually a firefox guy but I know many that are. This is a cool development.

First it was VGA , then DVI , then HDMI , now we add DisplayPort . Engadget is reporting that DisplayPort was just ratified by VESA. DisplayPort is apparently compatible with DVI which is also compatible with HDMI. Why do we need yet another connector? I'm not really clear on that. It is apparently not...

Robert X. Cringely speculates in his latest column that Apple may soon be adding H.264 hardware decoding and encoding to its Macintosh line. Cringely is wrong more often than he is right so the truth of this rumor is unknown. I'm sure someone at Apple is at least studying the idea. More interesting to...

Once known as Windows Media Photo, Microsoft just released a new photo format called HD-Photo. Bill Crow has a good writeup on the benefits of the new format. Basically it allows for high-fidelity photo editing and storage. While those of us in the normal world do all of our photography in JPEG format...

The world of display adapter types is an alphabet soup of options today. HDMI, DVI, VGA, UDI, DisplayPort? Which will become the standard in the next few years? HDMI looks like a sure bet in the consumer electronics space but it is failing to make inroads into the PC world yet. DVI is the leader today...

I attended a Superbowl viewing party at a friend's house today. No, the screen wasn't larger than 55" so the NFL doesn't need to worry. I don't happen to have an HDTV at home yet so this is one of the few times I've seen the programming. What I saw doesn't make me want to run out and buy a set and upgrade...

I was in Circuit City the other day and they had a beautiful Sony SXRD television set up playing some BluRay content. I thought I was going to be blown away. I wasn't. The disc playing was a demo disc featuring snippets of lots of movies. Each one was somewhat washed out. The edges weren't crisp. It...

Our Vice President, Amir Majidimehr, gave an interview to XBox Live's Major Nelson . He and one of the program managers for HD-DVD talk about the market, the discs themselves, scripting, interactivity, codecs, and what makes HD-DVD better than BluRay. It's a very informative interview. Load it up on...

The ExtremeTech Podcast for last week was an interview with one of the DirectX 10 architects, David Blythe, and Chris Donahue who is on the Biz Dev side of the house. The interview covers the new graphics architecture in Vista as well as what has changed for DX10. There is a lot of useful information...

The first of the next-generation formats officially launched today. As of now, you can walk into a store like Best Buy and pick up an HD-DVD player and some discs. I know at least one person who already has one. I'm hoping to see what it looks like shortly. There are 2 DVD players available, the HD...

HDCP stands for High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection. It is the encryption and handshaking protocol used by DVI and HDMI connections to allow transmission of high definition video content between devices. In the future, this is the protocol that will be used to connect video sources like HD-DVD...

Working with video all the time, I should be an obvious owner of an HDTV set. Alas, I'm not. I've many times considered purchasing one but I just haven't been able to bring myself to pull the trigger yet. Why not? Let me explain why I'm not jumping in yet. First, no technology seems quite ready yet...

Another interesting podcast I've found, this time giving a lot of detail about HDTV. This comes from Major Nelson who is interviewing someone from Microsoft Studios. The interview composes the majority of the podcast. It is quite informative. This covers the differences between all of the formats (1080p...

This past weekend I went camping with some friends in a cabin near Chehalis, WA. Unfortunately for us, we didn't fully consider the implications of going camping on this particular weekend. You see, Friday was the season finale of Battlestar Galactica . Now, most of us have Media Center or Tivo and could...

A few months ago, HD-DVD was written off by many. There were no exclusive studios and most vendors seemed to have joined the Blu-Ray camp. Then something changed. HP decided it would take a more neutral stance. Microsoft and Intel came out strongly backing HD-DVD. The PS3 is going to be late and expensive...

I am please to announce something I find pretty exciting. Windows Media High Definition Video ( WMV HD ) is now able to take advantage of hardware acceleration. Cards from leading vendors such as ATI and NVidia can now assist in the decoding of WMV-HD files. Depending on the CPU and video card, you can...

Back in February I talked about how the D.C. Circuit Court seemed to question the power of the FCC to implement the broadcast flag. The court seemed upset with the flag but there was a bit question whether they would find standing (the right to bring a lawsuit) for the those bringing the suit. The broadcast...