Blu-ray news

[Woochifer]

It looks like there is going to be plenty of manufacturer support for BR though. An interesting move on Samsung's part to put out a dual format player but maybe they think that's the way to go to get those sitting on the fence.

Samsung has been pursuing a dual format strategy all along, and their competition in many product categories with Korean rival LG just adds fuel to the fire. Samsung has their eye on the bigger prize since they are also one of the largest OEM optical drive suppliers. If the market winds up supporting both formats, Samsung's in prime position to dominate the OEM market, since all of the hardware vendors need to obtain the optical drives from somebody. Doubtful that Toshiba will become a Blu-ray licensee, or that Sony and some of its Blu-ray partners will license HD-DVD anytime soon. This leaves the field clear for Samsung and LG if demand for dual format hardware picks up.

For now though, dual format players and drives make up a very limited market, since it costs more to buy a dual format player than to buy a separate HD-DVD and Blu-ray player.

A HDMI 1.3, transport only, scares me, even if it is from Denon. I know the new Sony is supposed to pass the digital HD audio by the internal decoder if asked to but what I know of HDMI so far and what I've read on the Dolby website, I'm more than leary of HD audio decoding outside the original player. HDMI has been deceptive up to this point, trying to put out versions to keep up with their hype.

I don't think it's deception and hype, so much as the specs getting revised as the various new formats get finalized. When HDMI 1.0 came out, Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD were still in the discussion stage. HDMI 1.3 simply includes those formats in the spec, and integrates the native format support for HD-DVD and Blu-ray. Discussions on this and other boards two years ago clearly mapped out the capabilities that would get added into future HDMI revisions, so it's not like all of this was done in secret.

But, I agree with you about the uncertainty associated with separating the drive from the audio processing with so many layers of copy protection and compatibility issues to sift through. My main concern is how the Blu-ray drive would output the lossless audio when on discs using "advanced" authoring. I suppose that if everything gets transcoded to PCM, then it doesn't matter whether the audio stream is PCM or TrueHD or DTS-HD.