Toshiba HD-XA1 and HD A1 HD DVD player

Almost nine years after the release of DVD, another format HD DVD is making news. The new HD DVD players from Toshiba offer a transfer rate of 35.5 mbps and advanced codecs, which includes VC-1 and H.264. The first models are manufactured by Toshiba, the HD-A1 ($499) and HD-XA1 ($799).

The performance of both the models are the same, but the HD XA model comes with a better enclosure, a motorized door, RS-232, and a backlit remote. The application-specific home theater PC has a 2.5-gigahertz Pentium 4 processor and 1 GB RAM. It is expected that the future models will have a application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC). The HD XA-1 can play both DVDs and HD DVDs.

Though the layout of the buttons on the remote control is a bit odd, the overall appearance is good. The remote control is backlit and has a motion sensitive lamp activation. The audio formats supported by the product include both lossy and lossless compression from Dolby labs and DTS plus the Dolby Digital Plus and DTS-HD.

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