LATEST ADDITIONS

According to the Hollywood Reporter on November 7th, HBO Video will release <I>The Sopranos: Season 6</I> day and date on DVD and HD DVD, making the critically acclaimed HBO series the first TV series to appear in high-definition on disc. According the article, a Blu-ray release is being planned for 2007.

"DVD album" is what Warner is calling a new DVD-based music format that will be sold alongside CDs, according to The Wall Street Journal. Though it is neither a DVD-Audio nor a DualDisc, the five-inch disc will include both surround and stereo soundtracks as well as video footage. What form these soundtracks will take remains undisclosed. However, if the disc is to play on a standard DVD player as advertised, then the surround track might be Dolby Digital or DTS. It would not be the DSD signal format used in SACDs. The stereo track will be some form of compressed file that can be copied to a PC or converted for burning to CD-R. Rumor has it that the file format may be AAC with Apple FairPlay DRM, and that negotiations are ongoing between Warner and Apple. If they don't come to an agreement, Microsoft's WMA would be the obvious second choice. There will be no CD audio on the disc, so it will not play on standard CD players. The format will shortly become available to Warner subsidiaries for product-planning purposes and may hit the shelves next year. Warner is the world's fourth-largest record company.

Sony has a definite knack for making ultra-cool looking gadgets, and the new mylo "personal communicator" (despite the annoying all-lower-case spelling of the model name) is yet another example of the company's high-tech design prowess.

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.