I've done an awful lot of reading and research on this recently and there's an awful lot of mis-information in this thread... which I think goes to show just how badly the format war is affecting the consumers ability to find out what on earth is going on...
Firstly HDMI 1.3, it doesn't exist yet, and yes it will be the first version of the interface that will allow the transfer of the native Dolby Digital TrueHD and DTS-HD bitstreams. Existing toslink and co-ax connections can't handle the data volume. The like of Denon etc, may implement their own connection such as DenonLink to maybe get there first with a TrueHD/DTS-HD decoder, but that won't be an open standard.
However, what it seems no-one has explained very well yet and is extremely important to all of us potentially are the new interactive features of the new formats. For example, one touted feature is the ability to superimpose a picture of say the director on the screen and listen to his explanations of what they were doing for the scene you're watching. On a current DVD, you can switch soundtracks to a commentary track, but usually that is a stereo track, you lose the surround sound and you don't see the director/actor speaking.
With the new formats what they're saying is that the player will mix the commentary into the playing surround sound, and also potentially super impose an image of the person speaking on the screen too. This can only be done if the *player* does the decoding. Neither HDMI or any other link will support an additional interactive channel decoding button presses from the player along with the DD or DTS bitstream for a reciever to decode... So, for high def discs, with interactive features, you can only decode in the player. If you choose to decode externally, you lose the interactive capability.
To me this is crucial (not the interactive rubbish
) as what they seem to be saying is that to get the most feature rich experience from the new formats you will need to either use analogue outs from the players or send a multi-channel PCM stream (mixed by the player to include whatever features you're using at the time) over HDMI 1.1 to your receiver...
This explains why they're launching DVD-HD and Blu-ray without HDMI 1.3 being even defined yet, and HDMI 1.2 not even available in products.
Now the downsides... Toshiba's new players do not support decoding of more than two channels of Dolby TrueHD (it's on their own USA spec page). The expensive player has 5.1 analogue outs, so it seems that 6.1 and 7.1 channel films aren't on the menu for those of you with 7.1 speaker setups, and because the player does the decoding, if you want to hear the HD soundtracks you'll have some fun. It does seem that most discs will also have standard DD or DTS or both tracks that existing receivers can decode as normal for 7.1 setups... but that's not very HD is it?
So initally DVD-HD seems a step back for the 6.1/7.1 boys in the sound department.
Blu ray is so far less clear. For example so far, Pioneer have only said their $1800 player will support DTS-HD, not Dolby TrueHD. If you look at any of the pictures out there of the player as shown at CES, then you'll only see the DTS-HD logo on the machine front... The dolby logo is a standard DD one, completely different from the TrueHD logo visible on the Toshiba player. The Sony player has no logo's at all other than HDMI.
Confused??
You really should be...
The only good news I can see so far is that if you have a receiver that accepts PCM sound in up to 8 channels over HDMI 1.1 then you are probably covered, assuming (and it's a huge assumption) that the PCM decoding works properly. I don't think there are any HDMI 1.1 8 channel sources out there as as far as I know, all 7 or more channel decoding is done outside of the DVD players... This may well mean that HDMI 1.1 receivers may only work with 6 channels of PCM audio...
Buyer beware. If you want the video quality go ahead. Sound format wise, well they've achieved the impossible. IF it wan't already hard enough with all the flavours of DD, DTS, DVD Audio and SACD, they've just made it twice as bad if not more.
