The powers that be. Ever wonder about that phrase? Who are those powers? Unfortunately if you live in the world of HDTV, “the powers” end up being Hollywood studios, and their enforcer is AACS.

Remember that “interim” agreement a while ago that allowed manufacturers to go ahead and start making BD and HD DVD players? You had to wonder what the difference between “interim” and “final” would be, right? I did. Well I finally found out.

“Interim” means that you can’t have managed copy. There are also other unspecified features that you’ll be lacking.

Bummer.

CDRinfo - Hardware Makers Face Decision on Next-Generation DVD License

The MovieBeam service, available now, aims to replace your local Blockbusters / Rogers / Whatevers video rental store. It’s a new service that actually broadcasts movies to a device in your home in little pieces through your local PBS affiliate. Once a movie is accumulated on the device’s hard disc drive (HDD), you’ll be able to watch it for $1.99 or $3.99. Getting the box will cost you about $230, and you can rent HD movies too, for an extra $1 each (there’s I trend I don’t want to see move forward).

Interestingly, the 160GB HDD on the device will hold 100 movies. That’s 1.6GB per movie. I’m pretty sure that’s doable using MPEG4, but if they’re using MPEG2, then those are gonna be some cruddy looking movies!

The HD movies will be 720p, in case you’re wondering, and I wonder how good they look. Do any of my readers have this service? And guess what? If you want to watch the HD movies over an analog connection, you’re out of luck. They’ll be downconverted to 480p.

TWICE - MovieBeam HDTV Service Hits Retail Shelves

After the recent new that cards from ATI and NVIDIA didn’t really support HDCP after all, maybe now ATI is trying to make amends. There are rumours flitting about that they’re about to release a card with a true HDMI/HDCP output. It even comes with a digital audio input that can be routed out the HDMI. (HDMI allows both audio and video information to pass through at the same time, eliminating the need for one more cable.)

The jury is still out on whether this is just a ruse, a real product not near production, or something that users will be able to see soon.

Engadget - ATI releasing HDMI-HDCP card soon?

Get out that red pen and mark your calendar in the box marked “23″ on the month “May”. Because that’s the first firm date I’ve ever seen mentioned for a BD movie release.

Lionsgate yesterday announced plans for releasing 10 titles on Blu-ray Discs. The first wave of titles will include “Crash” and “Lord of War”, which will be released May 23rd for $39.99 SRP (ouch!). The Punisher, Saw, and Terminator 2 will be $29.99 SRP (somewhat better). Later in June/July, we’ll see titles such as Resevoir Dogs, Totall Recall, Stargate, Frank Herbert’s Dune, and The Devil’s Rejects.

Sony and MGM announced eight titles for May 23rd, with another eight on June 13th.

The first Blu-ray Disc titles from SPHE and MGM Home Entertainment will include: 50 First Dates, The Fifth Element, Hitch, House of Flying Daggers, A Knight’s Tale, The Last Waltz (MGM), Resident Evil Apocalypse and XXX.

BD titles streeting June 13 include: Kung Fu Hustle, Legends of the Fall, Robocop (MGM), Stealth, Species (MGM), SWAT and Terminator (MGM). Underworld Evolution will debut in early Summer day and date with the DVD.

PRNewswire - Lionsgate Embraces Blu-ray With First 10 Titles Scheduled for Two-Part Rollout Beginning May 23
PRNewswire - Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Targets May 23 for Launch of First Blu-Ray Disc Titles

Being secluded from as much HD stuff as possible by living in Ottawa, I get jealous when I read comments like this one. The dude effuses about how great Battlestar Galactica looks in HD. He gets it via his Universal HD service so if you have that too, you might want to check it out.

But on second thought, I’m not too jealous. I’m not such a big fan of the new series. It’s too depressing to watch! Every episode piles on the bad news, and nothing good ever seems to happen. It’s like watching the 6 o’clock news, for heaven’s sake!

DemolitionDomain - Battlestar Galactica in HD

Last we heard from Philips about Blu-ray was CES 2006 back at the beginning of January. Now I see this news about Philips and BD and have to wonder if it’s just a rehash of the CES news. I think the TripleWriter thing is new. Not only are they planning to release 25GB and 50GB BD-R and BD-RE discs, they will also be selling BD players and BD recorders:

Philips has announced its plans for the introduction of its first Blu-ray Disc consumer products ? the home entertainment player (BDP 9000), an all-in-one PC Writer (TripleWriter) and new Blu-ray media (BD-R and B-RE, single layer 25 GB and dual layer BD-R and BD-RE 50 GB).

The BDP9000 consumer player will be available in the US in the second half of 2006 and the TripleWriter (SPD7000) will be available in Europe and the US in the second half of 2006.

The new Philips TripleWriter (SPD7000) features recording and playback capabilities of all popular optical storage formats including CD, DVD and Blu-ray Disc.

The drive features a 2x (72 Mb/s continuous data-rate) read and write speed on BD-ROM, BD-R and BD-RE media. The drive reads and writes a variety of legacy media including CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-ROM, DVD+R, DVD+R DL, DVD-R, DVD-R DL, DVD+RW and DVD-RW. Additionally, Philips will launch four types of discs (BD-R and BD-RE, single layer 25 GB and dual layer BD-R and BD-RE 50 GB) together with the introduction of the TripleWriter. The TripleWriter can be built into any PCD featuring S-ATA interface.

CDRinfo - Philips Plans Intro of Blu-ray Disc Products and Media

On Saturday I had my HDTV professionally (ISF) calibrated. I did some research and found someone that was highly regarded in the industry, and since he was flying out to my area this past weekend, I booked him. He was very professional and personable, and worked hard on calibrating my set.

Results? Well, I certainly like the colours better. They are a lot more lifelike, and my wife noticed the difference too. Another cool thing he did was to set the default TV settings to the correct, calibrated settings. So I can fiddle with sharpness, brightness, whatever, as much as I want on a show-by-show basis, and just hit reset when done to go back to the calibrated settings. Pretty neat, huh?

Did I find anything bad? Well, actually I did. After calibration the blacks were more grey than before. Which I really didn’t like. As well, the geometry near the bottom of the screen seemed a little squished. I’ve never noticed that before, but it might have been there before the calibration. [Edit: I forgot to mention that I asked him to fix up my overscan, which was cutting off way too much of the image. This may have affected things.] So I still have to see if I can correct the former and live with the latter.

So the jury’s still out. I’ll have to live with my new set for a while longer to see if the calibration was worth the time and money.

Oh, and by the way, I also got some bad news in the process. It seems like my particular set has a problem resolving more than 900 or so vertical lines of resolution. (He showed me the test pattern that clearly showed the problem.) The calibrator said that he’s never seen that problem on this particular set before, so it looks like I got a bum set. No wonder I never had the ultimate in sharpness! Ah well, nothing I can do about that. I’m still happy with my set, mostly because I have to be! There’s no way I can afford to buy a new one. And there’s also now way that I’m going to let myself not enjoy my set because of a problem I didn’t even know about before.

Here’s another batch of HD movie trailers for you:

Haley Graham (MISSY PEREGRYM) is a rebellious 17 year-old who is forced to return to the regimented world of gymnastics after a run-in with the law. A judge sentences Haley to her ultimate nightmare - attending an elite gymnastics academy run by legendary coach Burt Vickerman (JEFF BRIDGES).

Apple - Stick It

Then there’s the Madagascar ripoff:

A fun-filled, action-packed computer-animated adventure featuring unique and exotic zoo animals on the loose in the wild concrete jungle of New York City.

Apple - The Wild

And Shaggy Dog? With, of course, Tim Allen:

When an accident turns him into a dog, Dave Douglas (TIM ALLEN) must find a way to become human again, all while learning what it really means to be man’s-and his family’s-best friend.

Apple - Shaggy Dog

ExtremeTech has a massive, three-part shootout about LCOS technologies. Strangely missing from the list of sets tested are the nice SXRD (aka, LCOS) sets from Sony. But the articles go quite in depth about everything you ever wanted to know about LCOS. So instead of summarizing, I’ll just do some pointing:

LCoS Display Technology Shootout Part A

Former Apple dude, Mike Evangelist, wants to boycott the new HD DVD and BD players because of AACS.

This is important. I really want you to understand what’s going on with the video industry’s push towards HD. They are engineering a complete removal of the concept of fair use. They are setting up systems that will completely control how, when and where you can use content that you buy. Even worse, they can retroactively change the rules!

But I think he’s got it backward. It’s not the video industry that’s at fault. Do you honestly think they chose of their own free will to add a bunch of complicated hardware and software to their BD and HD DVD players that would just increase the complexity and cost of the devices for no benefit to the end useer?

No.

Hollywood made them do it. If Hollywood wasn’t pushing for such draconian DRM in all these new devices, then it wouldn’t be there. Simple as that. So instead of boycotting the new players, we should really be boycotting Hollywood itself. Stop buying movies, simple as that. Don’t watch DVD’s, don’t watch PPV, don’t watch VOD. That’s where the problem lies.

Writers Block Live - The HD Boycott Begins Now

If you have Windows Vista on a machine with an HD DVD drive (just taking a little travel forward in time here…), can you Managed-Copy (I’m making it a verb) an HD DVD and then stream it to an Xbox 360 for playback?

That’s the question Chris Lanier tackles in a recent entry. He basically comes up with some words and rearranges them to look like this:

I’m not sure what the plan is for streaming the content around (in terms of the format), but if on-the-fly converting to WMV9 could be done I would think that would be choice for bandwidth considerations. I don’t know if WMRM can be applied if the content isn’t ASF/WMV, it will be interesting to see and again it’s still going to be a bit before all details are released. The Xbox 360 is going to have to get a software update (unless it’s already in place: InterVideo?!) when Microsoft releases the External HD DVD Drive since it will need to be able to decode MPEG-4 AVC, in addition to MPEG-2 and VC-1.

The way I’m reading things you still need HDCP output to get full resolution playback, so Microsoft is going to have to release a new dongle which will most likely have HDMI in order for the Xbox 360 to output full resolution. Unprotected output with WMRM is not allowed from what I can see.

You know, it might be better just to read the whole entry:

Chris Lanier’s Blog - HD DVD’s Managed Copy with Xbox 360 Extender

HD Beat is reporting that we won’t be seeing SED televisions until 2007. However, my memory (fallible as it is) informs me that they weren’t going to start mass production until 2007 anyway. So I never really expected to see SED displays.

A friend of mine is just finishing his basement and plans to put a home theater there. He’s been wondering what kind of display to put up, and yesterday said that he was leaning towards an LCD or plasma. Now I have to convince him to wait for SED. It’s just so sexy!

HD Beat - Toshiba delaying SED sets until 2007?

A survey shows that by and large ladies would prefer an HDTV over a new pair of pricey Manolo Blahnik shoes. And the New York Times is surprised?

I mean, who wouldn’t want an HDTV over a pair of manly black shoes? It’s a no-brainer!

New York Post - LADIES’ CHOICE: HDTV

This 1280 x 768 DLP projector was reviewed by Projector Reviews recently, so I read it over. First of all, you should know that this projector goes for $2k. The previous generation was a thousand dollars more. I think they’re trying to compete against the LCD projectors of the world… It uses the DarkChip2 chipset from TI. It has both horizontal and vertical lens shift (yay!). It has a zoom lens, but it’s only 1.2:1. The projector has both an HDMI input and a DVI input.

First off, this is an extremely bright projector. This is good for bigger screens, so go nuts! What about picture quality? Fleshtones were excellent, slightly brownish but very dark blacks (but not as good as the best). Sharpness is among the best in its price range. But best of all, the colours:

The image above is also a good image to start our consideration of the Optoma HD72’s color dynamics. One thing striking, about the HD72 projector is its ability to bring out color especially in darker areas. I have found this also to be true of Optoma’s H78DC3, one of my favorite projectors. I would watch a scene on the more expensive Optoma, and notice subtle colors that went unnoticed on other projectors.

It looks like this may be the projector to beat in its price category, if the short zoom range doesn’t bother you:

I am especially impressed with this projector. I have always liked what Optoma has done with their home theater projectors, when it comes to their image quality (but they all tend to need at least a basic calibration to really excel.) This one I will have no trouble recommending to friends, ergonomic issues aside.

If the HD72 will work in your room enviroment, relating to placement and mounting, you are looking at a great overall value. If, due to the limited zoom lens range or lack of lens shift, or the large offset angle, this Optoma is impractical in your room, look to one of the other projectors (probably LCD) that offer the flexibility you need.

Projector Reviews - Optoma HD72 Projector Review

Dan Ramer at DVDfile got a chance to see all the fuss Toshiba is making on the HD DVD roadshow.

First of all, take a moment and be jealous for a bit. He has a Sony VPL-VW100 (a.k.a. “Ruby”) SXRD projector. Mmmmm…..

Anyway, he notes that the picture quality of HD DVD is quite good indeed. Good colour, remarkable illusion of depth, great detail, and finely grained textures. Of course, much of this is due to the display, but the source format is just as important.

And contrary to some other reports I’ve noted, the players will be fully functional:

Toshiba assured me that when its first two players come to market, they would have full interactive capability; they will not have a partial feature set that must be updated later with a firmware upgrade. This also confirms a reported quote from Toshiba spokesperson Junko Furuta to Macworld.co.uk, “Toshiba’s first HD DVD players will support the advanced content features called for by HD-DVD.”

He concludes by saying HD is “true eye candy”. If you’ve been watching the Olympics in HD, then you know he’s right.

DVDFILE.com - A Report From Toshiba’s HD DVD Road Show