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I chose a Toshiba HD-E1 HD DVD player not because of any deep conviction over its technical or moral superiority, but largely because of price. Although Samsung's Blu-ray player was available a month or so earlier, and I'd admired its output quality, I wasn't prepared to pay nearly two and a half times the price of the E1. I was also keen to escape the purgatory of region coding, one of the less well-advertised features of Blu-ray (although HD DVD does allow for regions in the future).

Toshiba's player is a delight, and the results are well worth the wait. Although I haven't tried to hack into it, it's clearly a Linux-based computer, enjoying a network connection for firmware updates and additional content. I'm sure someone will work out how to stream its video out to a network. Inevitably, as it's running initial release software, I've managed to get it to crash once or twice, but compared with the problems we had with early DVD players, it's impressive. It took several iterations of DVD hardware before domestic players had proper lip sync and could switch between layers without a noticeable pause.

The quality of the transfers I've seen so far makes HD compelling. Recent releases such as Batman Begins and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire live up to expectations, with exquisitely detailed and crisp images. Older, classic movies are also a revelation: Casablanca and Grand Prix are arguably better than viewing any but the most pristine of restored prints, and are a far cry from their fuzzy DVD antecedents. I hope specialist

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publishers such as the British Film Institute will bring similarly gorgeous transfers of other classics to the new formats.

However, making your own high-def discs remains a problem. DVD Studio Pro tantalisingly refers to burning blue laser media, and apparently supports it. Although domestic HD players can read red laser media, supporting standard DVD playback, neither standard gives much scope for playing HD from red laser media, despite DVD Studio Pro being happy to burn to that. The HD DVD standard allows for support of '3x speed DVD-Rom', but the good news is that you don't need to track down anything so esoteric for the HD-E1, as it will play HD content created with DVD Studio Pro and Apple's H.264 codec.

The snag is that for the moment you can't use menus or any of the trappings of the old DVD format: high-def players, when they do spot HD content on a red laser disk, assume that their menus and other content are in their new formats. For Blu-ray that requires BD-Java scripts, and for HD DVD, the hodge-podge that is known as interactive High Definition (iHD). The latter is a Microsoft standard, which brings together a subset of XML for playlist, markup and manifest files, CSS, SMIL and ECMAScript (close to Microsoft JScript), and isn't something that DVD Studio Pro will emit just yet. Documentation and examples come as part of Microsoft's iHD SDK, which you can only download to a genuine Windows computer, of course.

That said, these interface enhancements of the HD media are worth the trouble alone: menus pop up while the movie is playing, and HD DVD (not Blu-ray) offers the 'In-Movie Experience' - picture-in-picture commentaries that exploit large screens and high definition to great advantage. Apple is going to have an interesting quandary in future versions of DVD Studio Pro that do properly support HD media. Having apparently declared its hand for Blu-ray, will Apple's flagship disk creation system also support the very different and Microsoftian HD DVD format? It would be a shame if it didn't do so, particularly given HD DVD's clear superiority in terms of 'user experience'.