It's not the actual 'HD-DVD' or Blu-Ray standard. Kind of like the Divx discs that you can make and some DVD players support.

10.4's DVD player has always had that preference pane. It's for making "HD-DVDs" in DVD Studio Pro 4. They're not real HD-DVDs, they're regular discs with your HD videos encoded in h.264, and apparently only playable in Macs running 10.4. Possibly anything else that can play h.264 videos as well, so maybe some PCs.

It doesn't make sense to me that they would author discs in 1080i, but it just seems possible because sometimes (read: most of the time) the studios are just so damn stupid. If it happens to be true though, I hope HD-DVD dies a horrible horrible death as quick as possible. I just love this whole 'let's not look to the future' attitude that's been prevailent lately. If it's not compatible THIS SECOND, to hell with anything that comes next, even within a few months. But like the post above said... I doubt it's true. And still, 1080i players are stupid too.

They can't just NOT support it at all, they'd be shooting themselves in the foot. Especially if Blu-Ray becomes the dominant format (hopefully). I'm wondering what Intel's big plans for 'support' of HD-DVD are. Especially now that they are in Macs and Apple is in the Blu-Ray group. Apple will probably fold and bend to Intel's whims like they have been so far..

Two ports?

But can you mod it and put Linux on it?

Are you kidding me with this fullscreen shit still? I thought we were getting rid of that idiocy this generation. So will 16x9 be the new fullscreen? It'll have to be. So the whole fullscreen/widescreen dilemma will only exist with movies shot 2.35:1+ then. Well that's better than what we have now, but come on... seeing as the only black bars people will ever have to deal with (at least horizontally) will be small, they should just suck it up. Or make a zoom button mandatory on all players, even a setting to detect 2.35 flagged movies, and automatically zoom it. There, save the studios alot of money, they're happy and Joe Six Pack is happy that he doesn't have black bars on his 60 inch plasma (we're probably talking 2008 or 9 at the least before or IF BR/HD gets mainstream enough for common consumers to care about black bars. Just like with DVD. Wait, what the hell do I care? I'll just buy the widescreen versions. Nevermind this rant.

Actually the article is talking about Sony Pictures, the movie studio (Columbia/Tri-Star) and not Sony Electronics. Blu-Ray supports h.264 and VC-1, but the Sony movie studio will be using MPEG-2 for THEIR movies. Other studios can still use the better codecs. One reasoning behind this is likely because they know how to work with MPEG-2, (transfers in the early days of DVD are terrible compared to now) so out of the gate, Sony's movies will look perfect on Sony's format. And they wait a couple years to get the kinks out of h.264 etc. then rerelease the same movies in 'new improved bitrate/superbit/ultra definition/new transfers because we know you'll pay for them' editions. And also if the other studios follow their lead, they'd just forget about HD-DVD as (hopefully to Sony) they would have to then encode each of their movies twice. And you know how they like to save a buck.