Home Entertainment

V Inc. has come out with the Bravo D3, an upgraded version of their Bravo D1 DVD player. Normally we

wouldn’t waste your time (our ours) with the news of another DVD player, but this is one is important. Why? Because the

Bravo D3 is one of only a handful of players that support Microsoft’s new high-definition Windows Media Video 9

format, meaning you can take full advantage of that plasma TV you paid too much for and start watching high-definition

DVDs (though admittedly there aren’t many titles available yet) at home right now.

PC Magazine review of the latest digital video recorder from ReplayTV, the 5504, which can store up to 40 hours of

programming (which is starting to seem a bit paltry, these days). The new ReplayTVs also lack some of the finer

features of the old ones, like the ability to automatically skip commercials or email shows to friends. The new owner

of ReplayTV didn’t feel like being sued, so these features promptly got the ax. But to be fair, TiVo has never had

either of those abilities.

Scientific Atlanta, which makes TV set-top boxes used by Time Warner and other cable companies, says it’s working on

new boxes that will be able to play video games. Not that we believe them, but they’re even claiming that the quality

of the games will rival that of the Xbox and the PlayStation 2. Of course, there’s no word on when the

first game boxes would be ready.

TiVo has just dropped their prices on standalone units and are offering another $50 rebate on top of that. The major

stores are getting in line behind the price drop — all the big chains have followed suit. TiVo’s web store and

most of the chain stores we visited were out of the 60-hour model, and it seems the supply of 40- and 80-hour

models isn’t exactly brimming over. Could they be killing off their smaller capacity lines now that they have

a 140 hour model on the way?

There were already a few high-definition DVD discs and players using Microsoft’s new WMV HD format, discs and

players being shown off at this past January’s Consumer Electronics Show, and now we’ve learned that a steering

committee for the DVD Forum, the industry body that governs the DVD format, just granted provisional approval to use

the technology as one of the mandatory playback standards (along with MPEG2 and H.264) for high-definition DVD video

players. This means that when high-definition DVD players <i>finally</i> hit it big, it’s most likely

they’ll have to support the Windows Media Video 9 format. This doesn’t mean that Microsoft is going to suddenly control

the market for HD-DVDs, but it does mean they’re going to pick up a nice royalty payment for every high-definition DVD

player that gets sold with their codec built-into it.

New DVD recorder from JVC that can record up to 16 hours of video on one double-sided 9.4GB DVD. The DR-M10 should

be out in Japan soon, no word on a possible US release.