It seems that Sony have won, Toshiba announced today that they have begun winding down all production of players and hardware.

This is a sad day, as in my personal opinion, HD-DVD was the better format. But hey, I have both, I only have 10 HD-DVD titles, so it’s not cost me the earth at least.

The Microsoft HD-DVD drive for the XBox 360 will just have to make do with the few titles I do have, and hey one of them is Transformers and I have the Bourn box set as well, so it’s all good.

It’s a pity that Blu Ray won though, Sony’s draconian values obviously were liked more by the studio’s than Toshiba’s more open format.

Muslix64 has released (as promised) version 1 of his HD-DVD Backup tool.

This little utill bypasses the AACS encryption scheme allowing you to backup your HD-DVD discs. The other benefits of this is that, with the HDCP DVI protection removed you can watch your HD-DVD on any computer that is capable of replaying the content.