Yea, I really don't see what their point in announcing this is besides to get attention for the dvd forum, especially if it's not even going to work in the players that are out there now (which, by the way, they keep reminding everyone there are a lot of). They don't need any more than 30 gigs, this is fact. On releases like '300' where the video transfers on both the hd-dvd and the blu-ray disc are identical VC-1 and therefore taking up the same amount of space, blu-ray fills up at least some of the remaining space with a PCM soundtrack. VC-1 and AVC are neck and neck in terms of looks, at least judging from a thread I stumbled upon where a guy compared the japanese AVC hd-dvd release of Chronicles of Riddick to the American VC-1 hd-dvd release and gave the slight but negligible edge to one of them (I don't remember which). Therefore, if using VC-1 on more releases from now on is what will make microsoft happy enough to let hd-dvd loose and end this stupid format competition, so be it. DVD/HD-DVD combo discs are stupid when we're not going to want to watch our movies in standard def NTSC or PAL ten years from now anymore, not to mention they cost more than a blu-ray only disc. Keeping the players themselves backward compatible I would imagine is the more relevant issue in people's minds, especially the ones with gigantic dvd collections. Yes, I understand that people without high def players might not want to pay for the same thing twice and that's the appeal of the dvd/hd-dvd discs, which if fine except for the fact that there's a very high defect rate in their production.

Speaking of this whole high def discussion: I realize this is the off topic section but there's a question that's been on my mind for a while. Were the HD broadcasts of the Star Wars movies running at a true 24 frames per second or were they transferred to 25 frames per second in Germany and 23.976 in the U.S.? This is actually part of a bigger question I have and that is about HD broadcasts in general. Does "high definition" always mean "being displayed at its proper frame rate" or does it just have to do with the fact that it's digital and at a higher resolution?