The Far Side of Tech - Latest Comments in HD-DVD’s Secret Weapon? HD-DVD Standard on Toshiba Laptops Come 2008, And Why It Probably Won’t Matter

Re: HD-DVD’s Secret Weapon? HD-DVD Standard on Toshiba Laptops Come 2008, And Why It Probably Won’t Matter

Devindra — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 02:10:22 -0000

I should have been clearer, as it's quite obvious right now that you will need a fairly new laptop with HDCP compliant video outputs to output HD-DVD or Blu-ray content to your TV. We still don't know what Toshiba has planned with these new laptops though, and it would be fairly stupid of them to include HD-DVD playback and no easy way for people to get that content to their TV...

If they really wanted to impress us though, they could get the digital audio outputted through the HDMI as well and fix both setup issues at once.

Re: HD-DVD’s Secret Weapon? HD-DVD Standard on Toshiba Laptops Come 2008, And Why It Probably Won’t Matter

dave — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 22:20:00 -0000

This part of the article is funny: "it’s possible to configure your laptop to output to an HDTV, the process isn’t entirely foolproof". This will be totally hit or miss, with people having significant problems or getting crappy output because of MPAA's requirements for copy protection, which require end to end encryption of all the content, for you to get hi-definition content on your TV. Sure Vista's got all this fun code in it, but it's also the video chips that need to specifically support this functionality, including HDCP over DVI, as well as the TV itself also supporting HDCP over DVI or HDMI. And fun compatibility problems with HDMI.