Took the Red pill

A-ha! I knew it all along. God does favor HD DVD! So after a year of waiting on the sidelines, I finally broke down and picked up the Toshiba HD-XA2 HD DVD player.

I can't help but think many folks ("fanboys") are drunk on the whole HD disc format war. All this bickering on the forums re: which format has better technology, capacity, studio support, features, cost, short term sales figures, yada yada yada. Dammit, can't we all just get along?

I personally think Blu Ray is a great format but what led me to my decision to go with HD DVD for now:

• When it comes down to it, it's more about the movies. Technology is a means to an end. It can certainly enhance the experience but without movies you actually want to watch, what's the point? Most of the movies that I actually want to own are only in HD DVD today ==> Batman Begins, the Matrix Trilogy, and many of my favorite films are from Universal. Universal is HD DVD only today and show no indication of going to Blu Ray any time soon.
• The current pricing of Toshiba HD-XA2 vs current pricing of Blu Ray players taking into account feature parity.
• The Toshiba HD-XA2 just happens to be one of the BEST at deinterlacing/upconverting Standard Defintion DVDs thanks to it's Silicon Optix Reon chip and supposedly surpasses even "high end" video scalers like the Crystallio 2.
• Outstanding picture quality of HD DVD releases (although to be fair, Blu Ray discs have been getting a lot better since their initial releases).
• More HD DVD releases having newer and better sounding Dolby Digital Plus or Dolby True HD encoded soundtracks.
  
• I can still make good use of my old but faithful Sony ES Dolby Digital decoder as it accepts Dolby Digital Plus from the XA2 via S/PDIF. The previous 1st gen HD-XA1 could only output in DTS via S/PDIF which my Sony decoder does not have support for. Nor does my Sony decoder have analog in or HDMI to take advantage of Dolby True HD.
• More mature Interactive content support . There is no BD-J support on current gen Blu-Ray players. BD-J support will come on newer gen Blu Ray players later this year (rumored to be cause of delay of many BR titles).
• Firmware updates to update bugs and introduce new features are easily obtained via an ethernet port in the back of the unit.
• I've hedged my bet with the fact that full featured/compliant HD DVD / Blu Ray combo players will be released late this year or next. So I am not too concerned about my HD DVD discs being obsolete in the near future (possibly Samsung BD-UP5000).
• Life is short. In the grand scheme of things, it's silly to wait and agonize over something as petty as a DVD player.
  

I typically don't buy bleeding edge and the XA2 is a 2nd gen player so maybe I am still considered an early adopter. Both Blu Ray and HD DVD have are not without their own set of bugs. Since I only own HD DVD, I'll only comment on the quirks I've ran into so far. I've had two instances so far where my unit would freeze when I would fast forward or chapter skip. A quick reboot resolved the issue so not too big of a deal. However, my "Fearless" HD DVD disc now freezes at a certain scene consistenly. Luckily I bought it at Costco so it should be very easy to exchange. I'll be posting some screen shots later.