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The Grinch came to steal HD DVD's Christmas a little late this year, as the Internet lit up late last week with the news that a hacker calling him/herself "muslix64" had cracked HD DVD's AACS copy protection with an apparently self-written Java-based utility called "BackupHDDVD." Stories over the 'Net calimed that muslix64 had successfully used the utility to move copies of Warner's <I>Full Metal Jacket</I> (one of the worst looking HD DVDs released so far) and Universal's <I>Van Helsing</I> to his/her hard drive. On top of that, muslix64 released the code to this utility, inviting others to take a crack (pun intended) at copying their own HD DVDs.

The big news in 2006 has been the emergence of two new high-def DVD formats—Blu-ray and HD DVD. With greater storage capacity than a traditional DVD, we can now get higher-quality audio and video on the small screen. Depending on the compression used, each release can contain a whole slew of extras—or you can fit entire seasons of television shows, in SD, on one disc. Now, with the introduction of some internal drives for the home computer, you can back up vast amounts of information with a single disc. My personal iTunes music library, which contains the majority of my CDs, encoded as AAC files at 192 kilobits per second (stereo), could almost all fit on one Blu-ray disc. That's three-and-a-half months of continuous music. Add the ability to play Blu-ray titles, and it's the perfect time to move that home computer into the home theater for some high-def goodness. Before you get too excited and run out to buy a new drive, there are a few things that you need to consider first.

The high-definition video capabilities of the Xbox 360, like those of the imminent Sony PlayStation 3, have put a renewed emphasis on the importance of the video display. And, indeed, consumers young and old continue to bring HDTVs into their homes in record numbers. But no one was more shocked than I was to discover that there are still some gamers out there with current- and next-generation consoles in their living rooms who aren't hooked up to discrete 5.1-channel audio systems. Rather than record a Sally Struthers–style public-service announcement to elicit help for these poor, unfortunate souls, I chose to investigate the options—and I came up with Pioneer's officially licensed Xbox 360 sound solution, the HTS-GS1.

As I've mentioned in the past, one of my least favorite artifacts in the video world is the motion blur that flat-panel LCDs exhibit. Not everyone is as allergic to this as I am, and that's fine. I tend not to be bothered by DLP rainbows; some are. So, we all have our things.