Usher in the war of words. The HD DVD Promotional Group ramped up the rhetoric today by claiming the format controls 60 percent of the high-def media market. The Group claims its format is not only in the lead, but is growing ever so quickly with a new record of 75,000 discs sold in the last week of May.

According to reports, the spike in HD DVD growth is a result of significant price cuts on the HD-A2 player that saw the price reduced to $399. Even better the company claims, there is no slowdown in sales after the reduction.

Ironically, the Group chose to exclude any talk of video game platforms from the study, which could indicate two things: (1) the Xbox HD DVD players are not selling as well as expected and/or (2) Sony’s Playstation 3 was left out of the study to inflate HD DVD’s market share.

Either way, this sounds a bit fishy to me.

Via [Electronista]

So now the big thing is an HD-DVD crack. Some guy figured out the seven line code to crack the encryption on the discs and now it has opened the flood gates to DVD burning. Unfortunately for HD-DVD developers, all of their cease and desist letters were too little too late as the code was disseminated to several sites like Digg.com.

Now the great idea created by that guy is to market the code minus one line on black T-Shirts; as if this is going to be a way to go against the developers. Honestly, I think someone has too much time on their hands to create such a ridiculous idea. Obviously it won’t be too ridiculous if they make a lot of money, but still I believe that there must be something else that these geeks can do with their time other than think it’s cool to wear a black T-shirt with six lines of hexadecimal coding on the front. C’Mon.

Via [I4U]

Toshiba unveiled a new HD DVD player for cars at the Automotive Engineering Exposition 2007 in Japan. Toshiba is hoping to get their product into vehicles sometime during 2008. So now wait a minute, Toshiba is spending money to develop an HD DVD player for a not even 10″ TV screen. This seems a little far fetched. How could anyone pay extra for an HD DVD player, when they can barely see whats on screen now.

To be honest with you, this is just a waste of time. Yet, we all know someone is going to think this is the next big thing and actually support Toshiba and buy the HD system for their Minivan. Now little Suzie can watch Snow White in HD on a 10″ screen; like she will be able to tell the difference.

Via [I4U]