My Media Players!

I am now enjoying my media room! And my wife is both happy and unhappy, she is happy because I always want to be at home, unhappy because I could lock myself inside the room for hours just being a couch potato (my wife can only withstand 2 movies in a row). Anyway, I have been revisiting my old DVD collection and boy-oh-boy does my collection look much better now when I play them on my Pioneer DV-600AV, its an upscaling DVD player, which turns your old DVD (480 line resolution) to 720p or even 1080p resolution making it very close to HiDef, it does it by upconverting the dvd standard image thru interpolation. Its a very nice player.

But of course, the purpose of me wanting my very own media room is to take the HiDef plunge and I willingly did so by choosing HDDVD, as I mentioned a few articles back, its a dead format but its damn cheap right now, so Bluray has to wait. My player is the Toshiba HD-A3 player which I got from a Pinoy DVD member for a song! And I am very happy with it, bought a lot of HDDVDs from Amazon (its always on sale) and sometimes from the pre-owned market here in the Philippines, would you believe I got the KingKong HDDVD for only 300 pesos! That's what you call a bargain, and the PQ (picture quality) and SQ (sound quality) is just awesome compared to your standard definition DVDs (upscaled or not).


And to round up my stable of players is the Popcorn Hour A-100 Network Media Tank. Its categorized as a media player, but its basically a computer hardware that plays all kinds of video and audio files straight from a hard disk, or even a usb flash drive. Its an awesome piece of equipment. For its small form factor, you could never thought that it can do all the stuff it was advertised to do. One of the "in" thing now is to turn all HiDef materials into HiDef files and they put all this content into an AV container, and the most popular today is the Matroska container or .mkv behind the AV files they are containing. And these HiDef .mkv files plays flawlessly from my Popcorn Hour A-100. The PQ is excellent, the SQ is still the same as old DVDs with its Dolby and DTS sound, but in general its acceptable.

The funny thing is out of the three media players I have, the Popcorn Hour A-100 is the most often use device in my media room right now. You can get it locally from http://myhdworld.mutiply.com/ you can talk to the guys there and they are very accomodating and their service is fantastic! I will try to post some screen shots as my next article to show you the difference in Picture Quality among the different media players I have. As a fellow Pinoy DVD member says "I am now in HD Nirvana!"

HD-DVD versus Blu-Ray

As the title goes, its about the next generation video format. And I have to say it was confusing at first. On one side is HD-DVD (High Definition DVD), a format that is supported by Toshiba and was the natural evolution of the dvd format. While on the other corner is Blu-Ray which is a format being supported by Sony.

Just to put things into perspective, what is the real big deal about the formats, as a lot of people were saying format wars were never good, because it is always tough to choose and usually confusing. And this one was no different, it started quite heated with a lot of movie studios supporting each side, Paramount and Dreamworks on the HD-DVD side while Sony Pictures et al were on the Blu-Ray camp. Warner Bros. was fence sitting by releasing movies for both formats. Sony was really in a fighting mood because they have gone into format wars before and were usually on the losing end (remember Betamax and MDs), so they went into this with a lot to lose, and it made them more focus on winning, and finally after less than two years, February 2008 to be exact, Toshiba conceded defeat and announced that it will discontinue HD-DVD by stopping its player production. So how did Sony do it?

This is my personal opinion. First, they made their very strong PlayStation 3 console Blu-Ray capable, by doing so, they have the cheapest Blu-Ray player in the market, imagine having a Blu-Ray movie player with a next gen HD game console to boot! Even though initially slow in sales as a game console, losing to XBox 360 and Wii it definitely outsold the stand alone HD-DVD players in the market. By the end of 2007, Sony has roughly around 9 million PlayStation 3 sold to roughly less than 2 million of HD-DVD players globally. With the player population secured, Sony went to work with content. That for me is reason number 2 on how the war was won, before 2008 started, both camps were even steven in terms of studio support. But come 2008, Warner Bros surprised everybody by declaring themselves Blu-Ray exclusive and with that one announcement (believed to be worth $400 million on Sony's part), spelled the eventual death of HD-DVD camp.
I am writing this on my blog because I am initially from the start a PS3 Fanboy, and as such, have hope from the start that Blu-Ray must win the war. But now that its over and I know that it has already won, what's the first thing I did? I bought myself a Toshiba HD-A3 HD-DVD player, you might think that I am nuts to this, but I got the player for a song! And movies are selling for cheap too (locally, around 700-1000 pesos and on Amazon, as cheap as $10 per title). I know it won't last long, but that is the point, I am trying to get all the HD movie goodies I can get before the format totally dies and when it eventually dies, that is the time I will shift to Blu-Ray as my de facto HD movies standard!

And what happens to the player? as I said, it will be for my HD-DVD back catalog movies and the nice thing is this Toshiba HD-A3 player upscales ordinary DVDs to 1080i glory (HD). Not bad, rather than getting an upscaling DVD player which I would have paid the same money for. So for now, I am format neutral but buying HD-DVD content. Sorry Blu-Ray, my monies with them first, see you by the end of 2008!