The previous article points out what formats are mandatory and what formats are optional in the BD and HD DVD formats. What it doesn’t discuss (though you could read it at TWICE) was the players themselves, and what they support.

Dan Ramer over at DVDFILE has been thinking about it, and doesn’t like what he sees. “The really bad news is that, with the exception of PCM, the initial Sony player will not support advanced CODECs either by decoding with its internal decoder or by outputing those digital bit streams for external decoding. Until HDMI 1.3 becomes available, you will not be able to send the bit streams for the advanced CODECs to an external decoder.”

Dolby Digital Plus, DTS HD, Dolby True HD, and DTS HD Master are all optional formats in the BD spec. These are all superior formats to standard DD 5.1, and the new Sony BD player will pass none of them out on a digital output. And if I read things correctly, it won’t even decode them to analog for you either.

For now, the digital part is no big deal. No receiver or pre/pro in existence today can decode these formats, as far as I know. But many receivers and pre/pros have analog inputs. So it would have been nice if the Sony player could at least output the high-fidelity soundtracks in analog. But that’s not the case.

One more reason to wait things out…

Digital Audio in Early HD Disc Players

Engadget’s sniffers are doing a good job, recently finding this:

Sony just announced three new HDD/DVD recorder additions to their RDZ series. The new RDZ-D97A (pictured) and 77A bring 400GB and 250GB of storage respectively, to the show with one digital Hi-Vision (1080i HDTV in Japan) tuner and apparently two-analog tuners allowing you to record not one, not two, but three teeveelicious broadcasts simultaneously. They also feature the ability to record directly to your PSP to take your recordings on the go.

Any idea how they record directly to the PSP? Do they plug in via the USB port? Or do they just record onto Memory Stick media? I guess that wouldn’t be so direct, but trying to decipher the translated site gives me that impression.

At any rate, that’s pretty cool. I use my PSP for reading mail, reading RSS feeds, and playing games. I can’t say that I really care for recording video material directly to the PSP for my sake, but it would be great for my kids. Anybody who has kids will know what a pain long trips are, and if I could just give my kids my PSP for the trip, what a blessing that would be.

Sony’s RDZ-D97A, RDZ-77A, and RDZ-87 HDD/DVD recorders record directly to PSP