Quick Notes - Wow! The picture is awesome. I used to think DirecTV’s HD feeds kinda sucked, now I know they completely suck arse. Only the occasional football game comes close to the level of detail. The pay HD feeds (HBO, etc) are absolutely miserable in comparison. The drive comes with the HD version of King Kong and it’s sooo beautiful. We were in the middle of a Sharks game and had only planned on watching a few minutes of it to see the action, but ended up watching almost half the movie.

The Remote is excellent as well. Nicely weighted with big buttons, much better than I expected for an add on. The bonus is that it replaces the miserable-for-DVD-control XBox wireless controller.

The only negative so far is the audio mix (on at least King Kong) is very quiet and not nearly as powerful as the standard-definition counterparts. From what I’ve read on the net, this is a known issue and Microsoft is working on a fix.

From what I’ve read, almost all of the HD-DVD playback process is handled in source code (somewhere there was a post that there’s more lines in the HD-DVD drivers than all of Win95). The great thing about this is that it makes fixing playback issues just a matter of software updates (of course, the flipside is that as Microsoft’s DRM grip tightens, locking down the player even more is also just a patch away).