New line is not an exclusive HD DVD backer. As its one of Warner's studio, most like we will see LOTR on both HD DVD and Blu-ray (the only problem is there is a speculation that Peter Jackson has a say one where his movies goes and the announcement of the collaboration between Jackson and Bill Gate for Halor Wars worry some Blu-ray supporter). Star wars on the other is under Twentieth Century Fox, most probable, we will only see it on Blu-ray.

Mediaplex's HD XA1 should have already been updated with the latest firmware, if they just received it. The firmware has been out for quite a while. For the functionality of the both A1 and XA1, the load time, remote control have been criticised to death .. The Generation two player, HD A2 has better functionality (works more like a DVD player). All three models only support up to 1080i (though if you HDTV is smaller than 50in and you are watching the TV from 10ft away, you wont see any difference as compared to 1080p).

Worth mentioning is as the Pioneer made Sony Blu-ray Player, and Pioneer's Elite BD player that can do a native 1080p24 on Blu-ray title, Toshiba's second generation HD DVD player HD XA2 (should already on its way to retailers by now), will do native 1080p24 (albeit via firmware update). The player will do 1080p60 out of the box. Both the Sony and Pioneer player however currently do not support lossless DD TrueHD and DTS-HD Master and do not play CDs too. Pioneer has stated that an firmware updated is need to enable their Elite player to decode the advance codecs.

This post has been edited by g5sim: Dec 21 2006, 05:47 AM

And people, please check how cool Universal's U-Control is on Tokyo Drift .. let us know what you think

You are basing your video comparison on a cartoon - It is a consensus on early adoptors that BD is better in cartoon.

BD is already 50GB. Click is 50GB. U-Control is a trademark of Universal Studios. Its basically a rebadge of the HDi capability on HD DVD (developed by Microsoft). Studios that produce HD DVD titles can choose to include or exclude this feature. BD equavalent feature is called BD-J (Blu-ray Java) developed by Java. Studios will have different names for the feature. However, you will only see that the earliest in June 2007. There are "speculations" that the current BD players can not support BD-J well atleast BD-Live ..

aiyo .. watch too much Nip/Tuck