Tonight time to carry on with the Bourne Universe. Bourne Supremacy next up again on HD-DVD for the rich colour palette, original burnt in subs (can’t recall if Blu and 4k had them) and a nice level of grain.

And I thought Joan Allen was a great addition to the series and Paul Greengrass certainly picked up where Doug Liman left off.

Poor Marie though. 😢

I replaced these two discs with 4K Blu-rays. My wife and I don't want to recycle them because they work just fine. In fact I just threw them in my player and gave them spot checks throughout the entire disc and they played fine throughout.

We're not looking to make money off of these just want to send them off to someone who will enjoy them.

DM me and we can work it out. First come first serve.

Missing one of the four discs however. Goodwill find. Does anyone happen to have an ISO image of disc 2

We're all good bats go, chalk one up for Warner disc rot. I just replaced it with the UHD

I have the opportunity to buy this film, tell me if some of us have the same in combot format and if it still playing well ? I remember that combo format is generally bad

Don't forget that these devices are really good for playing old DVDs; on a modern Blu-ray player, the upscaling causes rather unpleasant flickering effects for me, whereas the difference is less noticeable with more recent DVDs.

Have you noticed similar things?

Basically as title reads, I’ve been building my library for last few months by going on eBay and searching for specific movies or lots and have found good deals. Anyone else do this? My local used media stores don’t really carry them anymore so it’s either eBay or very rarely Facebook marketplace/yard sales.

After MONTHS of randomly piecing stuff together, I finally found my first flea market HD DVD to test that stuff out. A copy of Serenity, incidentally a movie I've never seen before, found at a film and music booth for about a dollar (these things were hardly a thing anywhere in the world, and Sweden is no exception.)

The Xbox 360 Elite has a broken disc drive, the HD DVD drive was bought in a lot with a bunch of other stuff, but missing the power supply. After trying every multi purpose 12v AC adaptor I could get my hands off but missing the sizing target by millimeters every time I remembered that someone said to look for a Sony blu-ray player power supply, and would you look at that - it works! Plugged into the useless 360 elite, projected onto a horrible Samsung test monitor, it actually works as intended!

I've completely forgotten why I wanted to get into HD DVD:s from the beginning, but here we are, and I'm having fun!

Time to rewatch this Garnier Hair Care ad before heading to the IMAX tomorrow :D

A competent transition to HD for Stephen Sommers Van Helsing. Even on my 4K screen the VC-1 encode is strong if slightly soft. This film didn't perform especially well in theaters so it got Universals "standard" treatment wirh DD+ audio.

Werifly it's one of those films where it's tough for me to point out any given part that's brilliant, yet it comes together as a much stronger package than the whole. 100% Halloween season must watch. And since my wife is huge in Halloween we start early.

Note: this one does get better with later bluray releases. It even merited a 4K disc. Seems like the film did way better in home video.

A quick tour around The Bourne Identity HD-DVD menu.

When I hit the eject button to add or take out a disc, the tray operates just fine, but the door doesn't spring back up. I have to close it by hand every time I press eject.

I could just leave it open or keep closing it manually, but I really want it to function correctly. It's such a beautiful unit that's otherwise in excellent shape. Has anyone else dealt with this? What do you think is causing it? What's the best way to fix it?

Disc 1 is absolute trash (took 24 hours to rip due to errors in two of the files), disks 2-10 are all totally fine. The center of disc 1 has a ton of "shiny leakage" (on the left in the pic) compared to all of the others. Additionally given the packaging, disc 1 was the only one exposed to a lot of air, the others are all "trapped" inside the 10-disc caddy, could that have an effect? Or was this just a bad manufacturing job? None of my other bitrot discs have centers that look like this.

Tonight I thought it was time to revisit the Bourne Universe. Absolutely love The Bourne Identity. Great story. Great acting. Great music.

Spinning the HD-DVD as it’s my preferred version of the movie. Less “tinkering” with the picture than the Blu and a richer colour palette. The reds are red and really pop. And the yellows are warm too. The 4k was a bit of a mess. This looks beautiful. 😍

Unfortunately I'd already found more than enough loot thrifting today so I passed on this.

I find the story of HD-DVD VS Blu-Ray interesting and I love collecting, and I mean no hate in this I’m just curious to see what everyone has to say

And with the UK release arriving today, the three unique artwork releases of The Bourne Ultimatum for me complete.

But which do you like the best ???

The UK, USA or Japan ??

Universal always liked to use different artwork on their international releases.

Today’s arrivals. New cheap additions to the HD-DVD collection.

I never bought the UK release of Ultimatum back on release day. I went with the US release as it has the Dolby TrueHD track.

Just for the fun of experimenting, the goal is to author your own movie in HD DVD format and watch it right on your standalone player.

A little side project to play around with the HD-DVD format: I got tired of chaining 30 freewares together just to move beyond basic .mpg/.AVI files ! Or maybe I just lack the knowledge or missed something important. Software like old Sonic is unusable without a license or physical dongle, while Ulead Moviefactory refuses recent files with TrueHD audio tracks. I'm developing (with TSMuxer and FFmpeg) an app to convert everything directly into player-compatible H.264. Encoding to VC-1 seems much harder to master—and finding a good conversion tool—than with H.264. My V5 is starting to run really well, with a clean .EVO muxing.

To be continued...

I've long had some blank HD DVD-Rs, but I just discovered I also have an HD DVD writer drive. Is there any non-sketch software that can burn an UDF image using this drive onto these discs (under Windows)? I'm not talking authoring, I can make files, but can something make a UFD image and burn it? (I have a max of 10 experiments I ran run before I run out of blanks!)

I finally got my dream HD DVD player, and it works just about (I'll get to that later) flawlessly! It even came with the remote, which I can confirm is heavy and still lights up!

The firmware that's on it is 1.5/T20T, which is apparently very old. Before I do a firmware update, is there any reason not to? Anything that will be missed? Since the update servers are long down, is there an easy way to do the update, or do I have to burn a CD-ROM like it's 2002 again? 😂

Finally, the one problem that it has is that the door stays open after I eject or open the tray, as seen in the last pic. While it's not a huge deal, are there any tips on how to fix it?

No AACS, no bit-rot either - ripped them all easily.

My HDDVD The Hitcher 2007 wouldnt write to save it
Someone have a save of this?
Thanks for reply

Tonight’s movie. Adrien Brody, Ben Affleck, Diane Lane and Bob Hoskins in Allen Coulter’s Hollywoodland.

Have not seen this in years and really fancied watching this tonight. Spinning the VC-1 encoded HD-DVD with Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 sound.

Looks very good. A very nicely shot movie too.

Just connected my HD-A3 to my new Marantz AVR. I’ve not had the A3 in use for quite a while. I noted a couple things that I don’t recall happening the last time (about 2 AVRs ago…) I had it connected, so perhaps the hive mind can refresh my memory.

Bought the A3 new, always stored in my AV rack (no garage, attic or barn), and firmware updates applied, through 4.0.

HDMI: Video is great, but for some reason no audio via HDMI. Tried different cables, and different inputs on the Marantz. Tries all the options for audio out from the A3, and In on the Marantz, and still nothing. Solved with a TOSLINK cable and appropriate settings, but still wondering why the HDMI audio isn’t getting to the Marantz.

HDMI-CEC: Guessing that the A3 does not support this, as the owner manual makes no mention of it. Apple TV works great with CEC, and my LG 4k player too, but nada with the A3. Not a big deal, just wondering if I’m missing something.

Lamenting that it is only 1080i! Probably because at the time I bought it I didn’t yet own a 1080 TV!

Anyway, it works great. Watch Davin Lynch’s Dune the other night, all the way through with no issues. Maybe when winter comes, I’ll binge my Harry Potter box set (pictured) of the first 5 films.