Well I have my HD-DVD player. First I must say Value Electronics did a great job of handling the mess of delays with the HD-DVD launch. I received my player and 2 movies The last Samurai and The Phantom of the Opera. The other 2 titles Chonos and Million Dollar Baby were delayed, so I expect them to arrive shortly.
The remote control is huge. It has a puzzling length to it. Buttons are pretty hard to find in the dark since they are all shaped the same. It is an universal remote and it does control my Panasonic Plasma without issue.
As far as I can tell the remote works fine, it is the player that has the issues. Luckily there is an option to have the player beep every time a remote control button is pressed. This way you can hear that at least your remote control is working and it is the player that seems to be ignoring it.
I have locked up the player a couple times just fast forwarding and rewinding around an HD-DVD. At least you can reset the player by pressing the power button for 10 seconds.
The player takes a full minute to turn on. You have to wait a full minute to open the drawer. If you have a disc in the player and turn it on, you are forced to wait another 45 seconds or so to get the drawer open since it will insist on loading the disc. If you put in a new disc it takes about 50 seconds for it to load the disc.
The fan on the player is loud. This is essentially a PC without the best cooling solution so it has a lot of noise. The fan does not crank down, it stays the same level.
One also feels more trapped than normal with HD-DVDs. They force you to watch the FBI warnings and such, but you also have no way to get to the menus until you are past the previews. Lucky you can fast forward throug the previews to the movies (or chapter skip).
The unit is sluggish doing many things. Thank goodness you have the remote control beep option so you know that it heard the remote and will get to the command eventually.
I hooked it up to the internet hoping that there would be a firmware release to help, and no luck so far, I have the most current version. Be aware that you have to turn on DHCP for it to get an internet address. It has a built in default IP address of like 192.168.0.2 and no address for a name server. Turning on DHCP and having it ask for a name server fixed this and it was able to go onto the internet and look for an upgrade.
On the bright side the picture is excellent on HD-DVD. I cannot really comment on sound at the moment, I am waiting a bit for the dust to settle on the HD sound formats to get a new receiver that will do the new formats (and have multiple HDMI inputs).
I hope that they are able to address these issues quickly with a firmware upgrade. They should at least be able to get the responsiveness to improve and hopefully shorten the boot time and the load times. They should at least fast path the eject time. Nothing can be more annoying than to have to wait 1-2 minutes to get a disc out.
I feel like I have more of a Beta product than a finished product.
The remote control is huge. It has a puzzling length to it. Buttons are pretty hard to find in the dark since they are all shaped the same. It is an universal remote and it does control my Panasonic Plasma without issue.
As far as I can tell the remote works fine, it is the player that has the issues. Luckily there is an option to have the player beep every time a remote control button is pressed. This way you can hear that at least your remote control is working and it is the player that seems to be ignoring it.
I have locked up the player a couple times just fast forwarding and rewinding around an HD-DVD. At least you can reset the player by pressing the power button for 10 seconds.
The player takes a full minute to turn on. You have to wait a full minute to open the drawer. If you have a disc in the player and turn it on, you are forced to wait another 45 seconds or so to get the drawer open since it will insist on loading the disc. If you put in a new disc it takes about 50 seconds for it to load the disc.
The fan on the player is loud. This is essentially a PC without the best cooling solution so it has a lot of noise. The fan does not crank down, it stays the same level.
One also feels more trapped than normal with HD-DVDs. They force you to watch the FBI warnings and such, but you also have no way to get to the menus until you are past the previews. Lucky you can fast forward throug the previews to the movies (or chapter skip).
The unit is sluggish doing many things. Thank goodness you have the remote control beep option so you know that it heard the remote and will get to the command eventually.
I hooked it up to the internet hoping that there would be a firmware release to help, and no luck so far, I have the most current version. Be aware that you have to turn on DHCP for it to get an internet address. It has a built in default IP address of like 192.168.0.2 and no address for a name server. Turning on DHCP and having it ask for a name server fixed this and it was able to go onto the internet and look for an upgrade.
On the bright side the picture is excellent on HD-DVD. I cannot really comment on sound at the moment, I am waiting a bit for the dust to settle on the HD sound formats to get a new receiver that will do the new formats (and have multiple HDMI inputs).
I hope that they are able to address these issues quickly with a firmware upgrade. They should at least be able to get the responsiveness to improve and hopefully shorten the boot time and the load times. They should at least fast path the eject time. Nothing can be more annoying than to have to wait 1-2 minutes to get a disc out.
I feel like I have more of a Beta product than a finished product.
