Toshiba, which spent an absolute fortune in the HD-wars, gave up the ghost when major studios refused to back the [HD-DVD] format and the big distribution chains decided that it was not financially viable.
For a while Tosh has been talking about getting more mileage from existing DVD technology, but now it seems that it has thrown in the towel all together and built a Blu-Ray player of its own.
Details of the player are sketchy. It appears to have the catchy title of BD-18 and will be in the shops in Japan in time for the Christmas sales.
The dark satanic rumour mill suggests that Tosh is considering a Blu-ray recorder for the Japanese market, though no further details on that are available.
Gidget the Chihuahua, whose Taco Bell commercials made her a star, has died. She was 15.
The owner of Studio Animal Services in Castaic says Gidget suffered a massive stroke late Tuesday at her trainer’s home in Santa Clarita and had to be euthanized.
Gidget was the sassy mascot in Taco Bell commercials from 1997 to 2000. While other dogs had bit parts, it was her bug-eyed, big-eared face that was seen pronouncing “Yo quiero Taco Bell,” Spanish for “I want Taco Bell,” in a male voice dubbed by Argentine actor Carlos Alazraqui. A few years later, Alazraqui landed the role for which he is best known: Deputy James Garcia on Comedy Central’s “Reno 911!”
[…]
Gidget’s trainer, Sue Chipperton, in an interview earlier this year with the People Pets website, described the diminutive dog as a consummate professional on the set. But, she said, Gidget had been the victim of typecasting, which limited her career choices (or, rather, Chipperton’s choices on her behalf).
What a shame
What a feisty little guy
A market leader and adverting / marketing industry force to note
Truly a shame. She had just signed a contract to do a show for TLC called “Spokesdog”.
The sad thing, after 5 months with a Blu-Ray player, I can recommend it more for up-scaling standard DVD’s, but The Java encoded extra’s and menu features make the Blu-Ray discs unpredictable. It works, but there are the occasional hiccups, not to mention firmware updates. As a tech person I can live with it, but I doubt the average person would, maybe in a few years. I would have liked HD players as an alternative.
I almost bought an HD player because the price was getting right about the time they pulled the plug. The tech was mature and the machines worked.
Blue ray players have been to high until recently and as the first poster has noted the software side of this thing still isn’t mature. I almost bought one a couple of weeks back when I found a good price but then I’d have needed a disk to play and I just balked. To much money for not enough fun.
I’m glad Blu Ray won out in the end. It took longer for Sony to integrate the same features as HD-DVD, but its a higher capacity disk format (and thus the mandatory audio/video bitrates are higher).
I bought a Blu ray drive for my computer a couple months ago. I rip the movies to my fileserver rather than watching them from the disk. No DRM to screw things up.
@Somebody_Else
If you are ripping Blu-Ray discs you must be buying 1TB+ hard drives like crazy just to store them. Yikes.
I think Hd DVD was best for home viewing of movies but BR discs are also essential too as change is always required,
#
@Improbus yeah ripping a br disc is just big pain,
i just bought a br player so it gets easy to watch without jamming my PC
#6 Its generally 20-25 GB per movie (I just rip the main feature, not the whole disk). I’ve got 6 TB of storage on the server.
I could re-encode the movies to save space, but I don’t plan on buying a ton of movies all at once. I’ll just add/upgrade drives down the line as necessary. Drives are cheap now, I’m sure they’ll be even cheaper in a year or two when I need more space.
Re: My Blu-Ray Player purchase, since owning the player I’ve bought a total of 2 Blu-Ray DVD’s “Dark Knight” and “Shoot ‘Em Up” bought at a big discount. I don’t intend on replacing all my DVD’s. I now rent Blu-Rays from Netflix. So I’m not as much these days.
I just got back from Taco Bell, I nom these burritos for you Gidget. 🙂
Blu-ray: The reason you still need to buy a standard definition version if you or your kids ever want to use a portable DVD player. That’s progress for you.
RBG
HD-DVD DIDN’T give up the ghost “when major studios refused to back the [HD-DVD] format”.
It was crushed when Sony spent close to $8 billion in bribing the studios to drop HD in the form of ‘advertising kickbacks’.
Like virtually EVERY other format Sony have ever invented, they had to rely on coercion and bribery to make it a success, it simply wasn’t going to be able to stand up to Toshiba’s HD format with its lower prices, better (at the time) A/V quality, ease of refitting existing DVD production lines, and a name that everyone could grasp (seriously, most people still don’t know what bluray is), and the fact that HD was a mature well thought out standard that is still better and more full-featured than bluray’s version 2 profile.
Sorry to hear about Gidget/”Dinky.” Very funny ad campaign. Yo Quiero Taco Bell.
I have a Toshiba laptop and a few HD/DVDs that came with it. I wish I had more HD/DVD movies. BluRay players are still overpriced.
One story per post please.