HD DVD firesale begins on eBay eBay said today it expects to an increase in listings for HD DVD products following Toshiba's announcement yesterday that it is going to ditch its optical disc format. "With a large variety of now defunct entertainment formats, including Betamax and Mini Disc being regularly traded and ultimately becoming collecters items, [we …
Both Amazon and Play are giving away the EP-30 for a ridiculous £77. The EP-35 is also available for around the £150 mark. That EP-30 price is quite good considering that it does a great job of upscaling DVD. Look at it as a standard def DVD player with Hi-Def functionality thrown in.
Let's face it, just how much life has High-Def in disk format got anyway? I'm waiting for solid state; I've had enough disks go west on me over the years to think that forking out the levels of cash required is just not workth it. I'm hanging on for the next generation.
Disk formats will probably always be preferable to solid state because they are far cheaper and easier to make and more offen than not a lot less environmentally damaging.
Solid state formats will only come into common use when there is a device which you can download multiple films to and an agreement for a player technology, which with the SS market the way it is at the moment, currently isn't going to happen. Also, people like having a box with their film in it, this isn't giong to change any time soon. All of the current SS technologies rely upon ripping an existing media.
If you want to know how much items are going for on eBay, don't rely on the £X amount with 5 minutes to go. We all know that most auctions shoot up in price in the last few seconds.
Instead do an advanced search and tick the "completed listings only" box. That'll list the closing price for past auctions.
Oh yes, if you want to exclude chinese stuff, select only items within 500 miles of birmingham
You'd have to be clinically insane to spend over £100 on a HD-DVD player right now.
With no new content the thing will be a doorstop within months, and then you'll have to clear it out the way for a BluRay/PS3.
Or do you like cluttering your living room with multiple boxes/wires/discs.
And please, shut up about downloads being the future. "Fair usage policies" are the future, and the present in most places, and will forever render that argument pointless.
It's almost worth grabbing a 360 HD drive cheap along with movies just to rip them onto a hard drive, that way you can serve them via MythTV and the likes round your house if you have such a setup without having to bother with physical media! Certainly saves a lot of time over trying to download 30gb each time ;)
...if I'd shell out even a hundred pounds on an essentially defunct format the instant I even unbox the thing.
The obvious reasons spring to mind - It'll simply be an expensive toy that plays only dozens of older movies (UMD format springs to mind too). Its gone the way of the 8-track - albeit with far better quality. Leave it there.
.
@Michelle - I'm not sure the studios would be so quick to adopt solid state (SSD) tech - To compete with BluRay, it would have to be at least 25Gb (currently around 150 quid for only 16Gb), plus it would have to be altered to be read only and have anti-copy protection built in, it would require lightning fast transfer speeds (already possible though) a movie format standard would probably need redesigning from the ground up for SSD,
Oh and theres likely to be yet another HDDVD-BluRay or Beta/VHS format war for solid state drives between different companies too.
Oh I have no doubt it'll be on its way, its smaller, much more resilient to damage, but is prone to individual bit failures all the time - you just dont see it, but I reckon BluRay has five or ten years or so over SSD yet.
Great upscaling player and access to 300+ HD movies for next to nothing. No brainer really. Then when you've watched them all, either use it as an upscaler or a door stop. Who cares :-).
Doesn't stop you getting into Blu-Ray too of course for all the new releases, though you won't be seeing them this cheap for a long time ;-)
The early Toshiba HD-DVD players appeared to be a stripped down PC (according to some of the tech blogs that opened the cases). Pentium-M processor, 1G memory, USB ports, network port(?).
If the price of the player drops far enough ($50?), then they may be worth that if they can be converted into more general purpose PCs (myth-TV front-end?). Anyone heard of anyone hacking one of these to do this?
"Betamax and Mini Disc being regularly traded and ultimately becoming collecters items"
I just looked, $12.99 for 10 minidiscs, that's less than I was paying for them brand new 6 years ago. I'm not exactly sitting on a goldmine made out of L@@K R@RE, am I?
Maybe in another decade or so! Yeah! Throw in all my old audio cassettes and those half-a-dozen 3" CF2 floppies I still have somewhere and that's my retirement plan sorted, according to eBay. Sweet!
Oh wait, betamax tapes are only going for B.I.N. of $2/each. Bugger, looks like it's back to playing the lottery.
Sounds like eBay trying to drum up some business off the back of others' misfortune if you ask me.
It wouldn't surprise me if MS took the tech off Toshiba's hands and carried on integrating it into the X-Box. It would suit them perfectly, vendor/tech lock-in, $$$'s not wasted on X-box HD-DVD development and they could ship it to desktop/server machines as removable mass storage. Sell it cheap for PC users and slow down Blu-Ray integration into the desktop machine for years to come.
MS have been sparring in the home entertainment arena for years so having their own DVD format would just be the next logical step.
Sadly not... i have an Ep35 and am waiting on that.
The E1 (1080i only) EP10 and XE1 can all be modded via a leaked Australian firmware v2.5.1 to be multi region for SD DVD, they even handle RCE disks too.
LG have confirmed continued support for the hardware too, so lets hope a BH300 comes out that is BR Profile 2 compliant and has 5.1 analogue outputs and is MR for SD... then i'll be happy :D
This to me seems like ebay trying to make friends with the register
when you consider the facts that they are at a loss at the moment due to people not taking kindly to some of their new rule changes
I think personally there must come a time when people will notice that eBay is a snowball guided by all the wrong people
maybe one day we will see peoples feeling make a difference for now i say this is nothing but eBay trying to drum up business
following current boycott by many of its users
Umm, does the embedded DRM in all these new formats allow for that ? I've read that, in order to get the normal HD-size on your screen, all the components had to have the proper, certified, nanny chip in, otherwise it would be downgraded to VHS-quality or even not displayed at all.
That's what put me off either formats, that and the fact that my hardware could apparently be remotely shut off by the Central License Coordination Agency if they thought I had pirate hardware, or if my hardware phoned home to tell the CLCA that I was reading pirate content.
I don't condone piracy, but I'll be damned if I accept that my hard-earned money can be blown off by some jerk with a kill button without my having a say.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
