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Warm? 1st Gen HD DVD Player HD-A1 - $149.77 shipped

1st gen machines, be it CD, DVD, HD DVD player or writer, are generally slow and prone to bugs, and are easily surpassed by the later, and much cheaper, generations. The only upside is that because of the premium price, they are usually made from better quality materials.
 
They do continue to push firmware updates, so it might not be a bad deal.

http://www.tacp.toshiba.com/ta...ices/hddvdfirmware.asp

I got in on the HD-A2 at Amazon for $211 with 3 movies plus the 5 by mail in rebate, which seems like a much better deal. I updated the firmware on that one last night to clear up some HDMI->DVI issues and noticed the firmware update for the older model.

Also, I'll bet the 3rd gen players will be very cheap around xmas time.
 
I bought this when it came out, it has some upsides and down.
The major downside is that it's agonizingly slow. Its not an issue most of the times when i simply pop a disk in and can wait about a minute for it to spool up. But when I desperately need to get a netflix disk out as Im running out the door, i sometimes wanna shoot the thing. From what I've heard the newer players are better as far as response time, but still not blazingly fast. fwiw the response on play stop pause ff are instantaneous on this old player, its just ejecting and inserting takes forever.

The major upside is the audio. The second generation of this player (a2 and a20) lack the analog outputs for uncompressed audio. The newer players only output TrueHd and DTS -hd via the hdmi port, theres no way to do it w/o a hdmi recvr. This old player will output at least 5.1 channels via its analog outputs.
You'd have to get the higher end tosh player (xa2) to do the same.
 
Yeah, that's a major plus with this 1st gen player. I have the HD-A2 and TrueHD gets downconverted to DTS when using the optical connection.

I've been thinking about getting this for the HDTV in the living room that my roommate brought with him. That way everyone can watch all the HD DVDs I have/rent. When he moves out I can just give the player to my dad. He's been holding off on this format war.
 
Thanks OP. I think I'm in for one. I know it's slow, but the analog audio outs are sweet and no shipping and no tax makes it even better. I'm not terribly worried about not getting the 5 free movies, as none of them are terribly good, at least IMHO.
 
I had the A1 and sold it to get the A2, I hated the A1 remote and it was slow...I only paid $349 for it and sold it for $275, bought my A2 for $249 and received 5 free movies. I have a HDMI receiver so audio was never an issue with me. Get the A2 over the A1, Costco even sell the A2 for $249 and its worth it.
 
You're right, the A1 may not be the choice for a main player anymore... but I use my Xbox 360 for my primary playback device, and I've been wanting a better DVD player/HD device for my bedroom. This fits the bill. Again, thanks OP.
 
You're welcome. 🙂


Something kind of interesting I found... video of guy taking apart an HD-A1.

It appears that the HD-A1 is just a Pentium 4 2.2GHz PC with 1GB PC2700 RAM and an IDE HD DVD drive and runs a Linux OS off flash memory. The guy took the drive out and hooked it up to a computer and it was recognized.

If you were just looking for an HD DVD drive for your pc you could get this and sell the rest of the parts on ebay.
 
The remote that comes with this player is useless, it is not usable at all. With any decent universal remote, the response is just fine, like any other dvd player.
Again the major problem is the 60+seconds it takes to insert or eject a disk.
This is really the ONLY downside to this player.

If you guys aren't getting in the hidef audio action out of your hd disks, you are really missing out. I didnt think twice about the audio when i made the upgrade, but the updated audio on the hd disks are fantastic. Truehd and lossless pcm makes a discernable difference, like going from mp3 to cd. You normally dont hear the difference until you try the other format back to back, and the improvement is not subtle.

Its to the point where even my wife knows to go searching in the setup menu as soon as the disk goes in and select the better audio stream.

The draw here is that this player opens up the better audio to practically anyone with ht recvr.
 
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