I am impressed. This afternoon I turned on my Toshiba HD-XE1 HD DVD player for the first time in a month or so. Aside from playing my collection of fifty or so HD DVDs, I find it useful to check the audio decoding capabilities of home theatre receivers since it can deliver Dolby TrueHD, Dolby Digital Plus and DTS-HD Master Audio as bitstreams over HDMI (the remains the one major weakness of the Sony Playstation 3). Once I’d completed my checks I did a firmware update check via the setup menu and what do you know, but the firmware started updating (over my home network’s ADSL Internet connection). After twenty minutes or so the firmware was now 3.0 rather than 2.9.
Toshiba only says vague stuff about what it does (‘This firmware update improves network connectivity for supporting the download of web-enabled network content associated with certain HD DVD discs, improves certain video and audio processing capabilities, and also addresses certain disc playback and HDMI/DVI related issues identified by Toshiba.’) and I couldn’t see any differences. Still, its pleasing that even though the format is defunct, Toshiba continues to provide support to those who dove in.
UPDATE (A few minutes later): A quick search on my database reveals that I have 72 HD-DVD titles. Of course, some have multiple discs (eg. Star Trek, Heroes and the five disc Blade Runner).