Community poll forum: 6.1 / 7.1 surround sound formats?

Your player can not play HD-DVD's anyway there is little chance Toshiba or any of their competion will make software to allow your player to play HD-DVD's because then they would not be able to sell their new $400-$500 HD players.

I think there may be a misconception here. the 5.1/7.1/7.2 etc formates refer to the audio aspects of the recording only. It does NOT involve any specific VIDEO aspects. HD DVD refers to a High Definition Video broadcast that enables your TV to receive (if it is capable of doing so) video formats in the 720P 1080P (P=Progressive scan while the "i" extension refers to interlaced modes). Most home DVD's are encoded with 5.1 channel audio capability. To this date I have not run across any DVD's at say Blockbuster that support High Definition formatting for either the Blue Ray compression or the Toshiba High Def compression, so these discussions, although interesting may be putting the cart before the horse... let's actually see how they perform in real life situations, before judging which compression will win out overall. In reality it will be up to the movie distrubutors to determine which format they will encode their disks with, and allow greater accessability to that technology in the first place. Them's my 2 cents... Big John