An HD DVD tidbit you might find interesting…
By PaulAs many of you might know, HD DVD is Toshiba’s candidate for a high definition replacement for good old DVD (which is less than ten years old and probably doesn’t need replacing in a lot of people’s eyes, but that’s a story of another day).
Lorin Thwaits didn’t even bother to hook his new Toshiba HD DVD player to his big screen TV. Instead, he took it apart to see what makes it tick (do not try this at home, folks!). It turns out that this shiny piece of home electronics is just a home media PC running Red Hat Linux off of a flash drive. That might explain the 60-second start-up times that owners have been reporting. Also, the frequent lock-ups that others have experienced have been blamed on the unit’s less-than-impressive remote. If you do spring for one of these units, invest in a universal remote control.
Since no one has seen any of the first Blu Ray players yet, we can’t say whether or not similar problems await early adopters of that format, but I’m hoping that they’re not a hastily kluged-together product like the Toshiba player.
Frankly, my advice would be to sit out the first generation players of either format. We’ll let all the bleeding-edge geeks with wads of cash be our guinea pigs. Plain ol’ DVD is good enough for me for a while.
About the author:
Paul's cat has violent mood swings between ennui and apathy.
