Pioneer's Elite AV receivers weren't looking so fresh, after Onkyo's next gen receivers launched in April. These receivers, which launched in the deep shadows of the Project Kuro plasmas, have HDMI 1.3a among other thing. Looks like someone's playing catch up.
The new models are the VSX-90TXV, VSX-91TXH, VSX-92TXH and VSX-94TXH.
It has HDMI 1.3a, 1080p upscaling by Farouja chips, of any video source. The $1600 VSX-94TXH is the first Elite to stream music from the internet, as well as from a PC. And all four new receivers are XM and Sirius Ready. The press material pushes that the receivers will be able to decode all HD DVD and Blu-ray audio formats internally, which is still a surprisingly rare thing. That puts it on par with many of the many of the Onkyo's main points, although lots of press has favored the Onkyo's Reon HQV video processor over the Elite's Farouja.
These two receivers sound nice, but the flashy new UI on the Denon receivers could give Pioneer's us...

To go along with their HD DVD rebate promotion, the HD DVD camp is making a big push and releasing popular titles this week. The list:
The Complete Matrix Trilogy, 40-year-old Virgin, Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima, Mission Impossible 1 + 2, Freedom Writers, the Skeleton Key, Smokey and the Bandit, and the Ultimate Matrix Collection.
So when you get in on HD DVD with the $100 rebate, you actually have some nice movies to watch.
Blu-ray's not lying down either.
They've got Apocalypto, Closer, Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima, Mission Impossible 1 + 2, Pirates of the Caribbean 1 + 2, Closer, and Freedom Writers.
It seems like some good new titles are finally making their way onto HD formats, which may mean some higher adoption rates and even more movies for those of us who made like Angelina Jolie and adopted early and often. – Jason Chen
HD DVD Digest
Blu-ray Digest

This looks like to be the first real benefit from adding a Blu-ray drive to the PS3. Midway's unreleased game, Stranglehold, will come with an HD version of the movie Hard Boiled, making it the first Game/Blu-ray single disc.
Apple's got a new class-action lawsuit on their hands. This time MacBook and MacBook Pro users are claiming that Apple mislead them into thinking that the screens are physically capable of better clarity, when it was really just an effect known as dithering.
Microsoft spent a decent chunk of change today in order to stay competitive in the online ad game. $6 billion to be specific for digital marking firm, Aquantive. $6 BILLION, Take that GooTube.
In a recently conducted survey of 40 countries, over 26 were found to be blocking Internet content to "protect" their citizens. Even the US made the list, but we say it's ok because it's focused on copyright infringement.– Ben Longo

Filed under: Handhelds, Laptops
AMD just let loose a few details on their upcoming "Griffin" and "Puma" mobile platform technologies due out in 2008. The Griffin codename denotes 65nm processors bent on increasing performance and battery life of our beloved laptops and mobile devices. These third generation Turion 64 X2 dual-core 64-bit processors also bring support for DDR2-800 memory. Puma then, is the name given to the overall platform built initially around an RS780 chipset featuring a DX-10 class graphics core, Blu-ray and HD DVD acceleration support, and output options for DVI, HDMI, and DisplayPort. According to AMD, the combination of Griffin with the RS780 chipset will provide "significantly better" performance-per-watt-per-dollar than their existing platform. Be sure to click through to Hot Hardware for the detailed techno-gore.

[Thanks, Dave A.] 
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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum Sys...

Filed under: HDTV, Portable Audio, Portable Video, Storage

S.Korea's DViCO just made it a bit easier to take your HD video collection on the road. Meet the ¥27,800 ($229) TViX HD M-4000SA which combines a 3.5-inch SATA disk enclosure with 1080i output. The player pumps WMV HD, MPEG-2TS and DivX HD video and MP3, Ogg Vobis, and WMA audio out a selection of jacks including DVI, component, and S-Video along with optical and coaxial digital audio -- sorry, no HDMI. It even features a USB-host port to quickly suck media from DAPs and digital cameras with Ethernet providing a link back to DViCO's TiVX series of home media servers. Now don't be shy, go ahead and slap in some hot 1TB disk action for all your self-ripped HD DVD or Blu-ray Disc titles. Then get Kerouac and take your mad, beat media on the road.

[Via Impress] 
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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to li...

Filed under: Gaming, HDTV, Home Entertainment, Storage
Alright folks, the merry-go-round on this one is apparently grinding to a halt, as recent reports are finally clarifying a statement made way back in January of last year by Peter Moore in regard to Blu-ray making nice with the Xbox 360. Mr. Moore's insinuation that Microsoft's latest console had "the flexibility to adapt to consumers' needs" was purportedly taken way out of context, as a post on the firm's Gamerscore Blog boldly proclaims that these reports were "completely incorrect," and further crushed any remaining hope by stating that Redmond is "fully committed to HD DVD and has absolutely no plans to support other optical formats." Hey, at least you can pull the trigger on that standalone BD player you've been eying now, eh?

[Via GamesIndustry] 
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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Blu-Ray will dominate the industry in three years. Or maybe it will be HD DVD. The general consensus is that whoever wins doesn't really get a lasting victory, since they're both in the last physical video format ever. That sentiment has largely been the consensus of the press and leaders in the tech industry.
The end of physical formats for movie and TV shows could be called digital convergence, a happy, wonderfully singular, unified digital world. Content moves seamlessly from your multifunction portable device to your TV, between your computers, and to every monitor and audio system and random networked appliance in between. To have that happen in a stream of bits floating effortlessly on radio waves, without physical discs or specially designated boxes, would be truly wonderful.
But an end to physical video formats doesn't mean an end to format wars. In fact, once film and television content are no longer bound by physical media, we're in for the mother of ...

We already liked this Sony VAIO R Master PC's form factor before the company announced its latest iteration, letting you order an NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS graphics card that not only speeds up that 1080p Blu-ray playback, but lets you feed a couple of gigantic dual-link displays at the same time.
Plus, it's packing an even faster range of choices in Core 2 processors. It tops out with the formidable Core 2 Extreme QX6700 processor at the high end, giving you plenty of quickness for video editing, or perfectly powerful home theater capabilities with its 3TB of storage. What do we like about its form factor?

It has a separate unit for its huge set of drives and PC innards, and the top part holds the Blu-ray drive, 1394 ports and USB, too. Perhaps you can put that on your stereo rack and hide that noisy PC/hard drive unit with all of its fans and such elsewhere.
This updated model will be shipping June 2 in Japan with a US release hopefully not far behind, an...

Besides that pesky little required DRM update, there's a neat trick hiding underneath CyberLink's just-announced new version of its PowerDVD Ultra playback software: it can now unlock the power of NVIDIA's next-gen PureVideo HD VP2 architecture, which gooses Blu-ray and HD DVD playback to the extreme. This means that for the first time, NVIDIA's GeForce 8500/8600 series graphics cards can handle most of the processing for decoding and playing back HD DVD and Blu-ray's 1080p videos. All that number crunching is offloaded to NVIDIA's GPU processor instead of bogging down the PC's CPU.
We saw a demo comparing the last generation of NVIDIA's PureVideo HD tech used in its 7600 series to this newest PureVideo HD VP2 (video processor 2) inside its 8500 and 8600 series graphics cards rolled out in April. When they unleashed this VP2 beast, were we impressed?

Check out these numbers, which we saw happening with our own eyes. The slowest playback (blue bar on the graph be...

Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment
var digg_url = 'http://www.digg.com/software/Newest_AACS_circumvented_The_Matrix_Trilogy_set_free'; Just in case you didn't already piece it together, many (if not all) of the new HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc titles set for release on May 22nd will feature the latest revisions to AACS. Right, the update hinted at by those forced user updates to the WinDVD and PowerDVD software. Yeah, well no worries... it's cracked. That's right, a week before the disks have even hit the shops, the kids over at Slysoft have already released AnyDVD HD 6.1.5.1 (beta) which kicks AACS MKB v3 swiftly to the curb. Thus you can continue to rip all your newly purchased HD DVD and BD flicks for playback any damn way you like. The update has already been demonstrated to work with an early-shipped release of The Matrix Trilogy on HD DVD and will likely work for Pirates of the Caribbean - Dead Man's Chest when it arrives on Blu-ray. Come on AACS LA, you're gonna have to a...