Matt Van Stone

Programmers have already figured out how to bypass the HD-DVD DRM and have begun extracting HD-DVD movies and putting them on bit torrent.

Right now if you search for HD DVD on thepiratebay you will see a few titles at the top including Pitch Black, Batman Begins and The Chronicles of Riddick all in their 1080p glory.

Each torrent is about 20GB and as far as I know the only way to play them is using PowerDVD on a computer. That is unless you have an HD-DVD burner, which you do not.

I would like to download one and try it on xbmc, but I’m pretty sure xbmc’s 700MHZ processor is not powerful enough to playback HD content.

I think that this along with the porn industry adopting HD-DVD as their main standard has pretty much destroyed any hopes BR had of surviving.

I’m hoping that maybe now we will start seeing some 1.4GB HD-DVDRip XviD files popping up. I wonder how a 4GB HD-DVDRip XviD file would compare to a 4GB DVD?