HD-DVD & Receivers

[macsound]

With the talk of blu-ray and HD-DVD's that seem to be on the verge of coming out. I had a question about receivers. Would this meen that all DD Receivers will be useless and you will need a brand new HD Receiver? Does anybody have any knowledge on this?

[Wireworm5]

If you want HD Blue-Ray movies you will need a Blue-Ray player. The movies of coarse will be backward compatiable so you could play them in a standard dvd player. But you won't get the HD format. The reason for this is the Blue-Ray uses a blue laser which has a very short wave length. This allows them to precisely focuse the beam on the very small 0's and 1's that are crammed onto the dvd to hold the 50+ megabytes of imformation needed for HD movies.

Sorry, you were asking about receivers. Duh!

[macsound]

Any knowledge is good. I'm just worried when the PS3 comes out when watching DVD's if its possible but I'm wondering if the will be a DD track on these HD-DVD's.

[Geoffcin]

Any knowledge is good. I'm just worried when the PS3 comes out when watching DVD's if its possible but I'm wondering if the will be a DD track on these HD-DVD's.

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,119665,00.asp

[Woochifer]

The sound formats chosen for the HD-DVD and Blu-ray players are Dolby Digital Plus and DTS-HD. Both of those formats will be backwards compatible with existing DD and DTS decoders, while offering scalability that can allow for additional channels as well as lossless playback with newer DD+ and DTS-HD decoders. Nothing to worry about on the audio front. And given that there are no DD+ and DTS-HD receivers/processors currently on the market, it would be suicide for those formats to get launched with sound formats that cannot play 5.1 through existing equipment.

The video side though might be a different story. My understanding is that HD-DVD and Blu-ray likely will not allow HD resolution signals to pass through the component video outputs (limiting that output to 480p, which is no better than existing progressive DVD), instead requiring the HD quality signal to go through a copy protected digital video output such as HDMI. In that case, you will have to buy a new receiver if you want the receiver to handle the video switching.