I'd just like to point out that not every movie contains solely 24 fps footage. Many popular titles run the CG in 60 fps.

There have already been deals for the Toshiba HD-DVD Player (the A2, I believe) for $211 with 8 free HD DVD movies.  HD DVD is priced to route Blu Ray if this is the holiday that people begin to adopt high definition.

 Yeah, look at the season for any season of whatever on HD DVD or Blu-Ray.  I know these things take up more room since they're in HD an all but that doesn't mean they still should take up seven discs.

1) Whoa!  Which 42" 720P tv at walmart are you alluding to?  Is that the Vizio VX or VW 42L?  If so, I'm in for sure... Just what I've been waiting for.  Currently that about a $900 set.  Yep it's only 1080i and yep I don't give a damn if it isn't 1080P.

 2)Whoa again!  Is there a writeup on this somehwere?  That should be a post all on it's own as I'm sure there are a lot of folks that would jump on it since the promo right now is basically giving up the farm.

Below is Evan Powell's (Projector Central) appraisal of the 1080i vs 1080p controversy.

"The truth is this: The Toshiba HD-DVD player outputs 1080i, and the Samsung Blu-ray player outputs both 1080i and 1080p. What they fail to mention is that it makes absolutely no difference which transmission format you use—feeding 1080i or 1080p into your projector or HDTV will give you the exact same picture. Why? Both disc formats encode film material in progressive scan 1080p at 24 frames per second. It does not matter whether you output this data in 1080i or 1080p since all 1080 lines of information on the disc are fed into your video display either way. The only difference is the order in which they are transmitted. If they are fed in progressive order (1080p), the video display will process them in that order. If they are fed in interlaced format (1080i), the video display simply reassembles them into their original progressive scan order. Either way all 1080 lines per frame that are on the disc make it into the projector or TV. The fact is, if you happen to have the Samsung Blu-ray player and a video display that takes both 1080i and 1080p, you can switch the player back and forth between 1080i and 1080p output and see absolutely no difference in the picture. So this notion that the Blu-ray player is worth more money due to 1080p output is nonsense."

Reminds me of the nerds that complain about the iTunes stores not encoding their audio at a high enough bitrate. But they fail to understand that for 99% of people it is a complete non-issue.

Twestern thank you for the informative link to the HD-DVD 360 player. When you do the math you basically realize that the player is indeed free. Your just buying nine movies for twenty dollars. That definitely got me considering the purchase. That is a fantastic deal. That is on par with a DVD player actually.

My only concerns were that I had to go through my 360 which as has been noted has reliability issues, and I have yet to get a HD-DVD television. The movie selection is pretty decent unfortunately I already own many of the better movies on the list on DVD.

My television is getting rather old it is only cable ready, and I know I have to update soon. I will definitely keep that link in mind. Might as well start thinking towards HD DVD movies and gaming now. I agree with many posters in that price does matter. The majority of people can afford to start investing in the format now. I am also not concerned about being abandoned. The truth is that I am sure that there will be a hybrid player in a couple years that will be backwards compatible with all the formats.

This suggests it could cost as little as $99

http://avzombie.com/blog/2007/08/28/first-sighting-of-super-cheap-chinese-hd-dvd-player/

People who believe 1080p makes movies better are just smart enough to be dangerous.  They know some of the difference between interlaced and progressive scan, but they don't get into the details of what is actually going on with the player, how things are actually encoded, etc.

I like HD DVD because the prices are a lot more consumer friendly, the standard is solid and has been around longer (the BD standard has changed) and you can get more than enough HD movie into 35GB, especially using advanced codecs that we haven't been seeing on BDs regardless of the standard's inclusion of them.

Film/TV show makers will never squeeze a series on to as few discs as possible.  That would force them to charge a lower price.  On the other hand if they use several discs that would make a higher price look justifiable.