Toshiba Presents Automotive HD DVD

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Attendees of the Automotive Engineering Exposition 2007 got to see Toshiba’s upcoming automotive HD DVD player and touch panel LCD.

The company is currently co-developing the automotive HD DVD player with Alpine Electronics, Inc. with the aim of releasing a product in fiscal 2008. Toshiba demonstrated the player by actually streaming video at the show. Meanwhile, the touch panel LCD was a prototype presented by Toshiba Matsushita Display Technology.
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My only question is why? I havn't seen any LCDs in cars are big enough to see the detail.
 
The Donut said:
My only question is why? I havn't seen any LCDs in cars are big enough to see the detail.
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+1

The only good reasons I see it better for is GPS mapping/features, or storage for tons of music once HDDVD-R's start appearing. A larger storage capacity on external disks could allow people to have entire GPS maps with all locations and newly updated business locations.
 
The Donut said:
My only question is why? I havn't seen any LCDs in cars are big enough to see the detail.
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I was thinking the same thing. My guess is that 99.% of the displays in cars aren't big enough to see all the detail in a DVD.

The only benefit I can see is if you stored multiple DVDs on an HD disc, or stored lots of music on an HD disk. Otherwise, it seems like a waste.

I guess this will give them an excuse to move DVD drives into all the head units. That'd good enough to store a fair amount of lossy audio on a single disk.
 
Yeah, wide screen DVD resolution is 852 x 480. I'm a Panasonic software engineer working on car entertainment systems and the highest resolution screen we currently use is 720 x 480.
 
gtg465x said:
Yeah, wide screen DVD resolution is 852 x 480. I'm a Panasonic software engineer working on car entertainment systems and the highest resolution screen we currently use is 720 x 480.
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Any idea what the screen res is in a typical SUV screen?

The only place I can see HD making semi-sense (and it's still a stretch) is in large limo that has a LCD or plasma TV installed...even then, I suspect it wouldn't be large enough to matter, even if it's capable of displaying full HD .

Nevertheless, if it pushes DVD drives (preferably with DVD audio support) into mid-level head units, that's a big step forward. I've wondered for years why they didn't have DVD drives in all head units. As I understand it, most now use computer drives, and there's not a big difference between the price of CD drive and a DVD-R drive.
 
The Donut said:
My only question is why? I havn't seen any LCDs in cars are big enough to see the detail.
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Look at it this way, when you start to buy all of your movies on HD-DVD, how will you play them in your car? You would then either have to buy 2 copies of the movies or re-encode a copy as a native DVD and play that in your normal DVD car player.
 
WS6 said:
Look at it this way, when you start to buy all of your movies on HD-DVD, how will you play them in your car? You would then either have to buy 2 copies of the movies or re-encode a copy as a native DVD and play that in your normal DVD car player.
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I'm thinking that most movies in cars are for kids. They can suffer with old, used DVDs ;)
 
We will not see DVD drives in head units without a display to show movies. The added cost to support only DVD audio and not video is not worth it. The average consumer doesn't even know DVD audio exists and they don't know you can make mp3 DVDs.

The newest thing in cars is hard drives. That sounds much more interesting to me than HD-DVD drives in cars.
 
gtg465x said:
We will not see DVD drives in head units without a display to show movies. The added cost to support only DVD audio and not video is not worth it. The average consumer doesn't even know DVD audio exists and they don't know you can make mp3 DVDs.

The newest thing in cars is hard drives. That sounds much more interesting to me than HD-DVD drives in cars.
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Alpine already sells head units with DVD drives that don't have displays (though I'm sure they can be hooked up to a display. I think they're still fairly expensive (unless you buy on the internet with a limited/non-existent warranty), but my guess is that a year from now they'll be
in units that are under 400 and perhaps under 200.

Honestly, I can't think of a single reason not to use DVD drives. Even if they don't support DVD-A, that's still up to 9gb of MP3s/WMA/AAC files, which is what most people buying a cheaper headunit are likely to use. As it stands, it's cheaper to buy a lower end model, buy an iPod(*) play from it.

(*) if other DAPs can connect directly, then that works too, but seems like most only support the iPod.
 
I was talking about OEM head units, not after market. Soon, if not already, it will not be beneficial to install after market head units in cars as you will lose many of the integrated features only supported by the stock head unit.
 
nilepez said:
Alpine already sells head units with DVD drives that don't have displays (though I'm sure they can be hooked up to a display. I think they're still fairly expensive (unless you buy on the internet with a limited/non-existent warranty), but my guess is that a year from now they'll be
in units that are under 400 and perhaps under 200.

Honestly, I can't think of a single reason not to use DVD drives. Even if they don't support DVD-A, that's still up to 9gb of MP3s/WMA/AAC files, which is what most people buying a cheaper headunit are likely to use. As it stands, it's cheaper to buy a lower end model, buy an iPod(*) play from it.

(*) if other DAPs can connect directly, then that works too, but seems like most only support the iPod.
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They don't have displays because they are meant to be interfaced to headunits which have screens.
 
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