I was in Tachileik (Myanmar formerly known as Burma) the other day and I saw a range of what looked like Blu-Ray movies.  On closer inspection they are no Blu-Ray at all, neither are they HDDVD, no..these are HD-Disk!

Just about everything in Tachileik comes from the Chinese border which is only about 150km away, without exception every DVD or Music CD on sale in the town is counterfeit, but the police in Myanmar appear not to care at all as hundreds of shops openly sell counterfeit goods such as copy handbags, copy shirts, copy DVDs and copy CDs in their thousands.

Knowing this to be counterfeit I bought a couple anyway in order to see what they are and how (or if) they work.

I put one in my Mac and I was surprised to see that it played OK using quicktime (though it prompted me to download an add-on codec first), it’s full 1080p High Definition and using a HDMI to DVI cable I can hook my macbook pro up to the TV, the results are impressive to say the least.

The second movie is in a .ts format and would not play on my Mac, but it played on a PC no problem.

The back of the box has the following text (spelling errors included):

“Compared with Blue-Ray and HD DVD, HD DISK provide  you the same qulity and pristine picture in a easy and convient way!   HD DISK not only for Home Theater Personal Computer users, a various of HD players,Media Box, can also play it smoothly.  HD DISK delivers the greatest high-definition programs up to 1080p in all kinds of formats: MPED2-TS/TP, WMVHD, H264, XVID/DIVX…”

Further down the back of the box it describes 3 HD player devices that are compatible, they are:

• IPHD-DVD made in China
• HD Media Box made in Korea
• HD Player made in Europe

It’s worth mentioning here that the actual media is just a normal dual layer pressed DVD.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 19th, 2007 at 4:06 am and is filed under DVDs & Players, PC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.