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Pioneer Elite's DV-79AVi "Universal" DVD player ($1,000) won't play HD DVD and Blu-ray discs, but it does play nearly everything else on a 5" consumer disc format. A glance at the specs tell you what formats it's designed to handle, though with all such players there will be exceptions. For me, it never hiccupped with any DVD-Video, CD, CD-R/RW, DVD-Audio, or SACD discs I threw at it. For the present, I don't speak either DVD-R/RW or MP-3/CD-ROM, so I did not check either format, though the player is specified to handle them.

In these TiVo-centric times it's tough for advertisers to figure out how to get their expensive to produce and place commercial messages in front of people. The burgeoning DVR market allows more and more users to not only time shift their content, but to zip right past those commercials the advertisers have paid millions of dollars to place on your favorite show. While the TV networks keep coming up with studies showing that their customers' ads are still buying them some impact with the DVR- generation, a recent survey from DIGDIA shows viewers would pay more for on-demand movie content to avoid commercials entirely.