My HD DVD drive arrived today. Here’s a deal where you can get 5 free movies when you buy one. The player was about $160 thanks to NewEgg and a secret code from my new favorite shopping promotional code site. I figure that I should be able to unload at least 3 of the movies on Amazon (King Kong came with the player making it a total of 6 movies), so that means I’m upgrading for about $100.
The other cool thing is that Netflix automatically updates my queue so that we will be sent HD DVDs if they are available at no extra charge.
It’s funny, it does look really good, but you don’t really notice it until you go back to a regular DVD and are thinking “Why is this picture so crappy?”. I’ve heard Hot Fuzz is actually a very good HD DVD and I’m looking forward to checking out some concerts. And speaking of concerts, let me get all 80’s on you and brag about the return of Van Halen.
3 replies on “Now in HD DVD!”
Cool! How loud is the Xbox360 hd dvd player? I’ve considered this for a little while, but haven’t pulled the trigger.
And “Hot Fuzz” is hilarious!
In my opinion it’s noisy, big, and heavy. I’m in a smaller room, about 6 feet from the player and it is annoying when I sit in complete silence. But the thing is, the sound is so good that I have it turned up enough so that I never notice it. I’m watching crap like Armageddon so it doesn’t matter to me, I’ll report back when my wife tests one of those abysmally boring Jane Austin films.
From the pictures it looked small enough that I thought about hacking the case to just replace the DVD drive with the HD one, but now that I have it in hand I don’t think that would be possible (or require engineering jedi powers far beyond mine).
If you are on LIVE my handle is jwol3, I’m always looking for games and recommendations.
J
Here you can sort HD-DVD reviews by Video (5 Star Video) or even by audio
http://hddvd.highdefdigest.com/reviews_video.html
Black Snake Moan (which I really liked in the theaters) looks like the current video demo disc.
I like animated discs for demos and I own Corpse Bridge on HD-DVD and it looks really great.
It’s obvious, but do retune your TV once you get HD-DVD movies rolling on the set. Contrast, brightness, sharpness and other controls when tweaked properly make a big different with HD content. Biggest problem is brightness is low and contrast is high..which crushes a lot of detail. Google “adjusting hdtv” for many recommendations.
http://www.cnet.com/4520-7874_1-5108543-1.html?tag=main.optimize
I have not noticed the sound of the HD-DVD drive, probably because the Xbox 360 fan drowns it out and plus once I have the surround sound kicked up I don’t notice any hardware.