HD DVD is available in the USA!

Yesterday the first HD DVD players from Toshiba became available (from Best Buy mostly by the looks of it). There is a gigantic thread on AVS forum about this exciting new piece of technology.

The launch movies were embargoed until today, though some folks managed to get copies early. Also Netflix offer HD DVDs now too. More movies are released next week, and Apollo 13 and Serenity are at the top of my want list. A good list of forthcoming titles is here - ignore that pesky BD stuff, you can't get BD hardware or software for many months yet, and HD DVD is better anyway (though I am not exactly unbiased of course).

My own player has yet to arrive from bestbuy.com - in fact it has yet to even ship if I believe the web site (and I'm not sure I do - it contradicts the emails they keep sending me).

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 18, 2006
  Why is HDDVD better than BD?  The only argument from the HDDVD camp (you guys) is that it is easier to transition from existing DVD technology .  Both discs offer HD video with more interactive features but BD offers considerably more storage space.  I guess I would like to hear another argument on why HDDVD is better.  
• Anonymous
  April 18, 2006
  I don't want this post to turn into a BD vs HD DVD, so I will refer you to my VP Amir's many postings on AVSForum for the official Microsoft answer.
• Anonymous
  April 18, 2006
  Can you link to that post of Amir's? It's hard to wade through 58 pages of posts to find one.
• Anonymous
  April 18, 2006
  I spent a good while trawling AVS Forum and gave up. See http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/hardware/microsoft-hd-dvd.ars for at least some of the reasons.
• Anonymous
  April 23, 2006
  I gave up waiting for BestBuy.com and ordered one with next day delivery from OneCall.com. Turned up on Friday, I'll post a more detailed review soon.