Audio Video News

Looks like there's no relief from the format war in sight. According to TWICE, LG Electronics has backed off its plan to deliver a Blu-ray/HD DVD combi disc player later this year. In addition, a recently published report from Video Business claims that Toshiba has denied that it will ship a second generation HD DVD player in time for the holiday shopping season this year.

LG Electronics had previously been a staunch supporter of the Blu-ray format exclusively prior to this spring when a source at LG informed UAV that the company was planning on releasing the multi-format player this fall. Now the company merely says that it won't rule out a 2007 combi player launch, but also notes that its product plans for 2007 are not yet finalized.

Rumors of Toshiba's second gen HD DVD player have been swirling for months. The HD-A1 and HD-XA1 players have universally been found to offer very high performance, but are ergonomically slow and buggy. Firmware updates released subsequent to the players' launch have eliminated a number of glitches common to both players, but the units still load and access discs very slowly and the players don't include support for some key technologies that will be part of the HD DVD format, including multichannel support for Dolby's TrueHD lossless audio codec, and the DTS-HD audio formats.

In addition to all of the above, it's been announced that the first consumer electronics components supporting the HDMI 1.3 spec are slated for late fall. Among other things HDMI 1.3 will transport Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD and the DTS-HD formats in their native digital form for processing by compatible AV receivers and surround processors. It's likely that the second generation HD DVD players and some first generation Blu-ray players will include HDMI 1.3.