The guys over at AV Forums have scored an exclusive interview with Olivier Van Wynendaele, assistant general marketing Toshiba Europe and have posted a transcript of the interview. Some interesting quotes about HD DVD’s European launch and HD DVD general include:

AVF: So, can you tell us how much they differ from the US machines?

Tosh: Well, what I can say is that our European players will be based on our second generation chassis, so they will be quite different from the players already available in the US today. I can?t give too much detail but, a few of the drawbacks which were reported to us by users in the USA with our two players there will be solved and therefore additional features not available there will be added to the European players.

AVF: Are Toshiba ever likely to make a universal HD-DVD/Blu-Ray player?

Tosh: We?ll keep this very short ? no, we?re not planning to do so for obvious reasons ? we?ve developed with NEC the HD-DVD format. This format was involved with the DVD Forum as the next generation DVD format and because of that, we don?t see why we should make combined players which play HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. We believe in our format, we believe it will be the definitive format, so we have no intentions of making a universal player.

AVF: Why couldn?t the various developers and publishers of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray agree on one common format?

Tosh: Well, the position of Toshiba was to ensure the transition from DVD and we developed HD-DVD as the same disc structure as DVD. So, there was no question of us ever changing that point…..(continued)

AVF: You have 3 movie studios supporting HD-DVD. When will there be HD-DVD titles released from the other studios?

Tosh: Oh, we have more than three studios supporting us, you are of course referring to the US main studios, but we also have studios in Japan and Europe an so on, so there are more than three…..(continued)

Needless to say this was quite an interesting interview, head on over to AV Forums and check out the rest.

R.Hollis

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 9th, 2006 at 9:57 am and is filed under HD-DVD. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.