Prediction of the day: Apple is going to announce Blu-ray support for a few of their machines come MacWorld. We have two bits of information we're basing this one on. One, the above image out of computershopper.com, which was sent to us by reader Sky. It's a scan that shows the feature comparison between Blu-ray and HD DVD. The interesting part is of the manufacturer support, which notes Apple among the companies to support Blu-ray. Typo? Early leak?
The second bit of evidence comes from an inside tip in one of Apple's departments. Apparently, Blu-ray people were there for an entire week holding talks on incorporating Blu-ray into Apple's products. Of course, the HD DVD camp could have also had a week there as well, but our tipster said he/she did not see them there personally.
Our prediction is that Apple's going to surprise-announce Blu-ray support come January, possibly in the Mac Pro and iMac lines. – Jason Chen
Thanks Sky!

Brian from Kotaku drops two PS3 hardware rumor gems on us.
•A Sony poll inquired if he'd be interested in an HD Eyetoy Camera. To which he replied, "HuhWhatsItOKyesSure?!" (See photo) The odds: 3/10. Marketing guys always label everything HD. It's what they do.
•Rumors that the PS3's Bluetooth remote is showing up in stores. Which may be a comfortable thing to sleep next to if you're still waiting for your preorder or can't dream of affording more than a PS3 clicker. –Brian Lam
Eyetoy HD? [Kotaku]
Bluray remotes in the wild [Kotaku]

With the combination of an Xbox 360 HD DVD Drive and Cyberlink's newest version of PowerDVD, you can easily piece together a solution for watching HD DVD movies on your PC.
First, install the Xbox 360 HD DVD Drive on your PC using these unofficial drivers. Then buy (or somehow obtain) a copy of CyberLink's PowerDVD Ultra, which supports both HD DVD and Blu-ray. That's it! All done for a price around $300. – Jason Chen
Press Release [CyberLink]

Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment
Where is Sony landing those PS3s? Kitchens? The rivalry between Sony and Toshiba has been quite the visible one of late in the HD movies space, with Sony backing up Blu-ray and Toshiba firmly ensconced behind its HD DVD format, so it's easy to forget that the two companies recently partnered with IBM to build that much-ballyhooed Cell processor which Sony has powering its new PS3. Neither company has specified exact plans for the chip beyond Sony's obvious gaming push, but both are racing to squeeze Cell into home entertainment products, with the first likely to hit in 2008. When asked recently if Toshiba would have Cell-based consumer products to market first, Toshiba digital media CEO, Yoshihide Fujii, responded with an emphatic "yes," apparently forgetting the fact that Sony has been shipping just such a product for about a month now. According to Sony, "The first priority is the PlayStation and nothing beyond that has been decided yet," s...

Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment
Cyberlink has finally released a standalone version of its HD DVD and Blu-ray movie playback software, PowerDVD Ultra. The total package carries a $99/€99 price tag and is available for download now, while Intervideo's WinDVD 8 continues to wait for its HD upgrade. Dual core processor, 512MB of RAM, 256MB of video RAM, HDCP for any digital connections and of course an HD DVD or Blu-ray drive (the Xbox 360 HD DVD drive is officially supported) are just the mininum requirements. NVIDIA PureVideo, ATI Avivo and Intel Clear Video hardware acceleration support should keep those h.264 and VC-1 encoded movies playing smoothly while Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD soundtracks play in 6.1 surround sound. Blu-ray Java and HDi interactive features are supported, as well as UPnP streaming to compatible devices. With features that outpace many of the standalone players on the market, building your own dual format player doesn't sound so crazy after all. ...

With the HD Disc war hitting the 6 month mark, it's good to know where we stand on high quality content. Here's a list of top and bottom discs, as rated by High Def Digest. Their criteria includes A/V quality, extras, and replayability. Here are their picks, alphabetically.
•Batman Begins (HD-DVD)
•The Bourne Supremacy (HD-DVD)
•Casablanca (HD-DVD)
•The Devil Wears Prada (Blu-Ray)
•Hulk (HD-DVD)
•Mission: Impossible III (HD-DVD and Blu-ray)
•Ray (HD-DVD)
•Superman Returns (HD-DVD and Blu-ray)
• V for Vendetta (HD-DVD)
•World Trade Center (HD-DVD and Blu-ray)
–Brian Lam

THE BEST (AND WORST) OF 2006 [High Def Digest]

Filed under: Home Entertainment
We can't remember the last time we even used a VCR (nor did we ever figure out how to program the clock on those blasted things), but apparently we (and probably you, too) are just a little ahead of the curve. According to a recent Nielsen study, there are finally more American households that have DVDs than have VCRs. Translated into statistics, that means that 81.2 percent of all households in the good ol' US of A have DVD players, surpassing the 79.2 percent that have VCRs. (We've got no idea how many of those are dual-use machines, however.) Nielsen's been tracking this trend since 1999, when only 6.7 percent of American households had DVD players; we take that to surely mean that by 2013 the six percent of people who have Blu-ray or HD DVD players currently will have finally settled on one of them newfangled hybrid devices that we're dying to get our hands on.

[Via PVR Wire] 
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When only the best and most outrageously-equipped laptop will do, check out the Microworks Vega with a 20.1 inch screen and the latest AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-60 CPU. Besides its absurdly large screen, you can equip it with just about anything available on notebooks, including a Blu-ray burner, EV-DO, GPS, a TV tuner, a couple of hard drives totaling 600GB of storage, and connectivity to just about everything except HDMI.
The base configuration doesn't give you much of a sticker shock at $3599, but if you load it with everything under the sun, you'll be $7800 poorer. Looks like a great laptop, but just don't try using it on an airplane unless you're sitting in First Class. – Charlie White
Product Page [Microworks Corporation, via BornRich]

Philips' first Blu-ray player has finally made its way out the door and the folks at CNET ain't that impressed. Sure, it's one of the best-looking high-def players out there and it comes with a kick-ass remote, but feature-wise the BDP9000 lacks HDMI 1.3, doesn't support any of the new audio formats like Dolby Digital Plus or Dolby True HD, and most importantly, it's still a helluva lot more expensive than buying a PS3. Otherwise, the player performs just as well as any of its competitors and also gets props for its spiffy speeds and load times (though it's still slower than the PS3's almost instantaneous Blu-ray drive). We're gonna side with CNET on this one and say that you're better off buying a PS3 or at the very least waiting till CES before bringing the BDP9000 home. Chances are CES will bring a whole slew of new, perhaps cheaper players. – Louis Ramirez
Philips BDP9000 Blu-ray Player [CNET]

Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment
This just in from our Tokyo bureau: according to an interview conducted by Japan's Impress, Sony's Ken Kutaragi has gone on record with a "promise" for what he's calling an AV-centric PS3. In other words, audio and video capabilities first, gaming second (if at all), in a device built around the Cell-processor platform. Ken says that the device would certainly be more expensive, reflecting the prices and margins expected on high-end consumer electronic devices such as TVs, Blu-ray personal video recorders, etc. -- not the relatively cheap, but powerful gaming rigs sold at a loss under Sony's Computer Entertainment division. The new Sony-branded living room box would, in Ken's (translated) words, "be a standard AV component sized box with a more powerful, power supply unit, anti-shake insulator, twice the main memory, and 2x HDMI to split sound and video output." More Cell-processor devices in the living room? We say bring it, Sony.&n...