"how many HD-DVD players were sold for the 360???"

The first official retail reports (which where given on this site) state that as of Dec. 1, only 43,000 X-Box 360 HD DVD add-ons have been sold.

The estimate of PS3 sales at the same date puts it at between 150,000 and 200,000. A total sell-out. I'm not sure what the sales numbers are for HD DVD and Blu-ray stand-alone units, but the consensus is that there are actually more Blu-ray players in homes than HD DVD, when considering the PS3 as a player. How many of those PS3 owners are watching Blu-ray movies on them is anybody's guess.

This firmware update also greatly improves the up-conversion capabilities from standard DVD, though it doesn't allow pillarboxing for 4:3 DVDs.

"Uncompressed audio" Means 5.1 channels of PCM audio, at the original sampling rates of the master.

#4: You still haven't seen 1080p on display. Although the HD-DVD movies are encoded at 1080p, the players only put out at 1080i. But for the record, if you have a 1080p screen, it will not look any different with a 1080i input that it would with a native 1080p input. The resolution is all that matters, not the order that the lines get there. It's going to arrange them in the proper order, so it all looks the same.

#11. Sony and other supporters of SACD and DVD-A consider them dead formats. An audio-only blu-ray standard is being developed and will replace older multi-channel formats with up to 7.1 uncompressed audio. Therefore there was no need to standardize them into HDMI. Sucks if you have built a library, but that's the way it is.