QVC debuts Venturer HD DVD player

re. fess up

I watch QVC on cable, it's quite interesting and often has some nice bargains. I see nothing to be ashamed of [and it also makes me feel sooooo superior ;) ]

Hulk? Troy?

No wonder they can't give it away. Try something that we'd actually watch, it might get interesting...

HDA3?

It looks like the same as the Toshiba HD DVD Player - HDA3 with a different name suck on it.

QVC and HD-DVD go together well

"It also comes with an HDMI cable, though the player provides component-video and composite-video outputs too. There's a 10/100Mb/s Ethernet port on the back for linking HD DVDs to online content, and both digital optical and analogue audio outputs."

I thought that the HDMI spec was designed to provide a protected path for the purposes of DRM ? What's that ? No DRM on HD-DVD ? Go ahead, plug in that ethernet cable - do ya feel lucky, punk ?

And besides that, more of the available HD content is available on Blu-Ray.

Not that I'm interested in "content" anyway. But for my purposes (PC backup etc) Blu-Ray is the only choice. As noted by Sampler, LG already do a BR writer, which allows HD-DVD playback, BR DL writing, BR rewriting, and DVD/cd writing and rewriting. So for my purposes 50GB on a disc is pretty good. Not to mention that I am unable to find an HD-DVD writer for the PC that I can actually buy, even if I were to accept the 20GB loss of storage per disc, and the fact that there seems to be no rewritable disc version.

And some shills claim HD-DVD is better - lol

BTW Amazon have 839 HD-DVD titles and 1055 Bluray titles available to buy.

And another BTW, vhs won over Beta, because of the recording length available.

Still CRTs out there

There's still a lot of CRT TVs out there. Only when CRTs are extinct and everyone is HD compatible will the formats take off big time.

The quality of DVD was noticable even on CRTs, but you need a HD LCD, Plasma etc to make HD DVD or Blu-ray worth it. Not just any old LCD or Plasma, one with a 24Hz mode or slow panned shots won't be very smooth.

@alan re: vhs over beatmax

I beg to differ on the reason vhs won over beta.

If everyone remembers correctly, VHS tapes were cheaper, and a certain entertainment industry thrived very quickly making cheap straight to video (with a lot of pink colours) films.

as for the format wars. am I REALLY that bothered about buying all my films again.

do I REALLY need all that much more detail? Will I even notice it while sat drunk watching Rush Hour? :)

some things will obviously be great in HD, but there is no rush, and thats probably why the takeup is nowhere near as fast as with dvd's.

Dvd's offered more durable storage than video cassettes, took up less space and of course the quality is great.

I do like the idea of writing tons of data onto one disc, especially since a lot of my backups on cd are now unreadable (even on discs that were supposed to last 100 years, which I think would work if I had some nice vacuum storage for them) so I need somewhere easy to transfer all my old files to.

What a lousy deal

I don't see a few overpriced boxes on QVC making much of a difference. Besides, the thing is $199 in the US, so how is £170 a bargain? On top of that there are large numbers of blu ray players appearing from brand name manufacturers in the next 12 months that ensure that prices will probably be far less than £170 this time next year.

HD DVD has a serious problem in Europe. A trip to HMV will show that Blu Ray commands anywhere 3 to 10 times the space as HD DVD. Both are still in their infancy, but it looks to me as if Blu is the stronger of the two. The problem for adoption of both formats is that prices for media borders on rape. I know of few films that justify forking out upwards of £20 (sometimes £30) to watch them in high definition when often the same movie on DVD is often a third the price, especially after its been out a while. While the rape continues, neither format is going to pick up.

Let's just hope the price of movies drops. Otherwise the "winner" of this war might be the proud owner of a severely diminished market as consumers revolt against ripoff prices.

About Picture Quality

I hope I'm not the only one who can barely tell the difference between so-called HD and DVD pictures. I mean DVD and Xvid look similar enough to me already, 98% of the time. Hope I'm not going blind, I'm only 21.

@Colony

Nope, your not the only one!!!

Well, thats a lie, there is a difference, but there isnt a huge difference and certainly not enough to justify a move. There were clear differences when dvd came out compared to vhs/beta and thats why it took off so well, here we have something that the industry is TELLING us is much more superior when in actual fact the difference isn't actually living up to the hype.

I am a sad adopter, I bought into the whole skyhd rubbish and have watched a few "hd" films on pc and tv and I can honestly say, hand on heart, it isn't worth it.

Sure if the prices of disks fall to that of dvds (and the players) then why not, but at this moment in time I feel that consumers arent really that bothered, and quite right too.

To HD or not....

I third (or whateverth by now) that lot. DVD had the advantage of being a ton better than VCR for a nominal cost. HD offers an incremental improvement at massive cost (new telly, new player and unknown "FUD factor" in HDCP).

BTW, VHS won 'cos Sony licensed Beta tech while JVC stuck VHS in the public domain. Nobody likes paying one of their major competitors for the privilege of building a competing product. Anyhow, the result was that Beta players remained expensive objects from a select few manufacturers while VHS costs plummeted in a hail of cheap copies to a level that the mass market was prepared to pay. As usual, it took the content providers so long to wake up and smell the coffee that for a while it was possible to buy a new VCR for less than the cost of a recent-release film to play on it.

Emperor’s New Clothes

Personally I think HD is a little bit a case of emperor’s new clothes. But if you are going to do it, signup for lovefilm who have a decent HD range and rent them out for about a pound a time depending on your rental plan.