The DVD player that I ordered last week arrived yesterday so I fired it up to play around with some of the features and I’ve been having some weird problems which, even more weirdly, seem to have fixed themselves a day later. It’s nice when problems just go away but it’s not common for technical issues to just vanish.

It does look very pretty (the blue light on the disc tray’s annoying but can be made bearable with some electrical tape) and is an impressively small player, around half the height of my current SD-220E. It’s also nice and quiet, and is pretty much inaudible when it’s running. Now for the bad stuff…

First of all, through SCART at least, PAL stuff looked awful. There was some weird grey effect superimposed over everything that was very noticeable in dark scenes, and it was on every PAL DVD I tried. NTSC stuff looked fine and by turning on the force NTSC option all DVDs looked OK, but since NTSC doesn’t look as good (it’s 480 lines as opposed to 576 in PAL) that’s not my ideal option. Even more annoying was that all DVDs would skip every few minutes. Just a tiny blip and a few frames, but it was distracting as hell and I couldn’t get rid of it with any of the options.

So I plugged it back in today and set it up for when I was going to call Toshiba and see if there was a firmware update or anything, but after turning the video output back to RGB (I’d put it on composite to see if the problems persisted) all was well. PAL DVDs looked nice and sharp and, touch wood, so far no skipping at all. I’ve got Dodgeball playing since it was one of them that was skipping a lot last night and it’s most of the way through with no problems.

Now that it’s working like it’s supposed to it’s good player with nice sound and picture, and the fact that it’s silent is good. When the TV arrives I can try out some stuff through HDMI and HD/progressive scan to see how that looks.

This is pretty big news for the UK games magazine industry – Highbury House Communications, the parent company of Highbury Entertainment (of GamesTM, Play, etc) is now up for sale having had its shares delisted and announcing that it’s £31 million in debt.

You probably won’t remember that Future Publishing was looking at buying them back in April 2005 (I talked about it here) so I’m sure that’ll happen now. The OFT might not have been happy before but a monopoly is preferable to a few thousand people being out of jobs, and now that Uncooked Media and Imagine Publishing are on the scene it might have even been allowed anyway.

The annoying this is that Highbury Entertainment is very profitable, but thanks to the parent company’s insistence on publishing an endless stream of cross-stitching and health magazines the whole thing’s in trouble. Hopefully it makes it through because there are some good guys and decent magazines there.

…and he shall appear.

I should have guessed that they’d announce an HD-DVD drive for the 360 the day after I went into a rant on the subject, but I’m still trying to work out how it’s going to work. Considering how slow USB hard drives are in my experience I didn’t think that a USB HD-DVD drive would be able to smoothly stream high definition video, but unless they’re doing something that I didn’t even think of I guess I was wrong.

The far more interesting news for me is the other announcement in that news story that Street Fighter II is coming to the Live Arcade. Capcom have some of the best arcade games ever made in their resume and the almighty SF2 (in HD, don’t forget) could only be the beginning. Even their retro console games like the Mega Man and Breath of Fire series would make great downloads for a few hundred points. Just look at this list and begin salivating…