While many people believe that the hd dvd vs. blu-ray format war is drawing to an end, this appears to be far from the case.  No matter which side of the battle you happen to land on, the format war is helping you whether or not you realize it.

I’ve seen comments by blu-ray supporters that go something like “now that the format war is over, blu-ray players can come down in price!” I challenge you to name a technology that came down in price without good competition.  If Toshiba surrenders tomorrow Sony and the rest of the blu-ray camp will have no good reason to make the players more affordable.  Since hardware prices have dropped so much recently it is obvious that this competition is currently working.  In the end I believe that we do indeed need one format for HD movies to become mainstream and eventually replace DVD, but for now I welcome the competition.  The recent player price reduction by Toshiba puts these players well into the realm of affordable.   If this doesn’t spur further price reductions for blu-ray hardware I don’t know what will.  Prices will continue to decrease over time, but if they hope to eventually replace the DVD market they have a long way to go.

High Def Man is on the HD DVD side at the moment, refusing to buy a blu-ray player until profile 2.0 (aka hd dvd feature equivalent) hardware is available and affordable.  The recent Warner announcement certainly put a damper on HD DVD’s spirits, and caused many potential buyers to put off making their purchase.  That seems to be wearing off however.  A quick glance at the Amazon top selling dvd players list shows that both HD-A3 and HD-A30 are outselling any blu-ray player. It has been that way for nearly a week since I noticed, so I’d say that the Toshiba price reduction has certainly offset the Warner defection.

Another way in which the format war is good for us all is the movies!  For a while there it looked as though HD DVD was going to pass up blu-ray for number of movies released.  They never did quite catch up and with the Warner change there’s little chance that will happen.  Without the 2 camps competing the releases may have been even slower than they were.  Nothing will turn off potential customers quite like looking at the list of available movies (on either format) and realizing that there aren’t enough movies available that they’d buy in order to justify the price of a new player.

Many folks say “just by a PS3 if you want a blu-ray player!”  However the PS3 isn’t a movie player any more than the xbox360 is an hd dvd player.  The PS3 can’t be powered on/off via remote control (since it requires an IR adaptor to be connected to use a standard remote), which makes it fun for a dorm room where the player is 6 feet away but lame for a real home theater.  If it works for you that’s great, but it doesn’t cut it for High Def Man.

This isn’t going to get any less ugly any time soon.  Neither side is going to give up. By the time a clear winner has been determined the technology and players will be mature enough for normal people (normal people don’t want to update firmware or mess around with HDMI connections that don’t ‘just work’).  In the meantime we can all sit back and laugh at the names people call the people on the other side of the war.

January 18th 2008
WASHINGTON

In an exclusive interview this morning long time HD DVD supporter Kris told High Def Man that “basically, blu-ray sucks compared to hd dvd.  I mean come on, we have built in ethernet.  Sure the discs don’t hold quite as much as blu-ray but dedicated blu-ray players cost twice as much money!  They wouldn’t sell any movies if it wasn’t for that failing POS game console called the PS3.”

In response to the recent news that Warner will stop releasing movies on HD DVD Kris responded “screw Warner”, which seems to be the consensus among HD DVD diehards.

Kris declined to specify exactly what exactly blu-ray could put in their pipe and smoke, instead choosing to gesture in an obscene manner.

“HD DVD isn’t dead. I’m going to keep buying movies until they stop making them..”

High def man has been a Comcast HD digital cable since it became available in the Seattle area. At that same time Comcast came out with their high definition DVR box from Motorola. It was slow.  It was ugly.  Fast forward several years and that box is still slow and ugly.  Unfortunate for Comcast, but fortunate for other companies to come along and make a better product.  If you’ve never seen a TiVo in action you’re missing out.  Unfortunately the word tivo has become synonomous with “DVR”, which has people calling their crappy DVR systems Tivo when in fact they are not even close.

The Setup
The TiVo Series 3 use CableCards, which allows them to record digital cable in High Definition.  Finally an alternative to the horrid Comcast box.   Depending on what service you have your cable provider may “rent” you a pair of Cable Cards for free.  Getting the cablecards setup is actually the most difficult part of the tivo installation.  As time goes on and cable companies get more experience with these devices I imagine this process will becomeeven smoother.  In my case I spent about 45 minutes on the phone with Comcast to get mine working.  They were having trouble with 1 of the CableCards not programming properly.  After that was fixed it was all smooth sailing.  The Tivo downloads program guide information and updates, which takes a while but requires no interaction.

The Basics
The heart of the Tivo and its service is of course the ability to record TV shows and completely replace your normal cable box.  It is very good at this.  By telling it what you like and what you don’t (using the thumbs up/ down buttons) it will also record stuff it think you might enjoy, which they call Tivo Suggestions. This feature did annoy me at first as it was constantly asking if it could change the channel to record a suggestion while I was watching live TV.  I haven’t seen that happen lately which means they either fixed it or I’m just never watching live tv.

Navigating the menus couldn’t be easier.  The software was created so that anybody could use it.  It even has a “Kids Zone” feature which allows you to lock down the box for child use allowing you to control precisely what they can record or watch.  The remote control has very few buttons on it compared to the otherA/V components I own.  The button layout is very nice and can be fully operated without looking after only a few days of use.

The box itself is not particularly nice looking, nor is it ugly. It features component video outputs as well as HDMI for HDTV goodness.  There are many output resolution options to choose from, 1080i fixed being my setting of choice.

New Features
Tivo recently updated the series 3 boxes to include Multi-room viewing, which is something the older devices have already had.  This also includes the ability to transfer and watch videos from your PC.  You can also copy shows off your Tivo to your PC and watch them there (TiVo to go).  Some content is protected and cannot be copied (such as shows I recorded from HBO).

The Tivo HD can hold up to 20 hours of HDTV content or 180 hours of standard definition video.  While some may think this is too small I find that it is more than enough.  You won’t have the space to keep a huge library of recorded shows on it obviously, but it should more than suffice for regular tv viewing.  If you think you’ll want more space there is also the much higher priced TiVo Series 3 which has a 300 hour capacity.  If you get the TiVo HD and later find that it indeed doesn’t have enough space they now have a 500 gbyte external drive that you can purchase for about $199 to expand your storage space.  This external hard drive more than doubles the amount of shows you can keep on your tivo at one time.

Now that they’ve added the “copy to PC” feature you can use that to make backups of content you want to keep.  Copying files to and from the PC seems to take quite a long time.  I imagine this is due to the transfers being throttled in order to avoid causing any performance degradations on the TiVo itself.

Limitations
The current tivo device is not capable of outputting 1080p resolution.  This isn’t really a problem since nobody broadcasts in 1080p anyway.

 Conclusion
I can only think of 2 reasons not to buy this HD Tivo.  The first is that you cannot afford it, and the second being that you’re a satellite subscriber.  While the device isn’t exactly cheap, it was the best thing added to my stereo stand since the HDTV itself.  Buy one, you won’t be sorry!