News from Tokyo today: "Toshiba Corporation today announced that it has undertaken a thorough review of its overall strategy for HD DVD and has decided it will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders. This decision has been made following recent major changes in the market. Toshiba will continue, however, to provide full product support and after-sales service for all owners of Toshiba HD DVD products."

Apparently, Toshiba has not yet decided on whether they will support blu-ray by making hardware and software for that format.

John

I'm glad to know that they will continue to provide support. I hope that's not an empty promise.

I think Toshiba should start marketing less expensive Blu-ray players that deliver on all the goods and are reliable. Okay, maybe that's a little too much to ask for, but I can dream, can't I?

I have to say that I've yet to find a blu-ray disc that my ps3 coudln't play or would skip on. But I agree that if DTS:MA is important to you then there's no guarantee that it will ever be available on it (while it's certain that there'll be a 2.0 profile update at some point). In my case I don't care since I don't have a newer receiver that can decode multichannel PCM over hdmi as well as the decode the new formats.

All in all though the ps3 is the only blu-ray "player" on sale right now that has the possibility to be upated to match any new player. By the time it's obsolete there'll be cheaper and better players for me to consider.

I am not necessarily putting the assertion into great question, but I am wondering what it means exactly. All HD players are essentially computers; why would the PS3 be more upgradable than the other players? Just curious.

Well for instance if you own a bluray player that isn't profile 2.0 then it's very unlikely that you can update it to it through firmware since it has hardware requirements on top of software. The ps3 has the hardware requirements right off the bat.

You're right that bluray players are "computers" but their hardware is designed to play blurays (and decode sound) only with no margin for anything else really. They don't have the ability to "do" anything else than that, but they do it well (at least you would hope so... Not the case for all players right now).

The ps3 is primarily a gaming console, thus it's more akin to a full blown computer, with more processing power necessary to accomplish many tasks. Provided its memory and cpu/bus are capable of it you can update its functions easily through software.

For instance at first the ps3 didn't upconvert dvds and that was added later through a firmware update. You couldn't do that with a regular player (by that I mean a bluray player that wouldn't have the ability to upconvert dvds, which all do right now) since it would lack the hardware to do so and doesn't have any processing power available to provide it through software.

I guess I need a PS3 primer. Is it true that the $399 40GB model is not backwards compatible with PS2 titles but that the more expensive model is?

Just when you think you can dismiss Sony and be content with a Wii, you get "developments". Harumph.

That's correct. The 40GB PS3 isn't backward compatible, and also doesn't play sacds.

The 60GB is backward compatible through hardware (has ps2 logic boards included).

The 80GB is backward compatible through software emulation (thus not all games are playable).

I have the Toshiba XA2 HD-DVD player. It has now essentially became an expensive SD-DVD player, but I have no regrets; it is arguably the best upconverting player around and this will be valuable as long as we have more SD-DVDs than BR discs. I think Toshiba developed the HD-DVD format better than Sony did for the BR. Now that the format war is over, one hopes that the players catch up to the profiles and are offered at a cheaper price.

To answer Eric's question, I will post Wikipedia's excellent explanation:
"On November 1, 2007, the Grace Period Profile was superseded by "Bonus View" as the minimum profile for new players released to the market.[65] With the exception of the PlayStation 3, profile 1.0 players cannot be upgraded to be Bonus View compliant.[66] On December 17, 2007, the PlayStation 3 became Bonus View 1.1 compliant through PlayStation 3 System Software version 2.10.[67] When software authored with interactive features dependent on "Bonus View" hardware capabilities are played on profile 1.0 players some features may not be available or may offer limited capability. Profile 1.0 players will still be able to play the main feature of the disc, however.[68] The first BD Live titles (War and Saw IV) were released by Lionsgate in January 2008, despite the fact that no players existed to play the web-enhanced content.[69] BD Live (Profile 2.0) players are expected to be released in early 2008. Various reports have indicated that the PS3 will be updated to support the specification, taking full advantage of the player's Ethernet and Wifi connectivity and hard drive storage space."

John

Hopefully now Paramount will get their head out of their backside and start releasing Blu-ray disks again, then we can get Raiders of the Lost Ark in HD!

Universal has decided to go Blu, at this point Toshiba has no plans on going in that direction. News