As soon as you pull it from the carton, you know that the Toshiba HD-XA1 HD DVD player means business. Its 17-inch rack-size width and 20 pounds of heft beckon to a day when men were men and DVD players were both taller and heavier than a slice of white bread. While the boxy design won't win awards, the player's motorized aluminum door and glossy black display panel give it a sleek modern look that should make any early adopter proud. There's a large power button with a backlit collar that glows green or red to denote On or Standby and two small buttons to operate the door and disc drawer behind it. Lowering the door also reveals transport keys and a pair of USB ports earmarked for game controllers to be called into play by future software titles — the first real indication that this is not your grandpappy's DVD player.

Around back are all the jacks you'd expect to find on any of today's better upconverting DVD players and a few things you probably haven't seen on this type of product. (See "Hook Me Up" for a full description of the player's connection options and some setup tips.) Among the latter is an Ethernet port that can be used with a broadband Internet connection so the player can link to Web-based extras from a disc, such as movie trailers, games, shopping, or other content. It can also allow Toshiba to add features going forward through firmware updates to the HD-XA1 from a dedicated Toshiba Web site (though this can also be accomplished by ordering a disc). I set up this connection on my test sample, but none of the first discs had any live links in their Extras menus, and Toshiba's upgrade site was not yet active.

Another unusual connector is the RS-232C port that enables you to control the HD-XA1 via fancy whole-house remote systems. This jack, along with the motorized front-panel door and a more substantial, backlit remote are the primary differences between this model and the $499 HD-A1 (which we did not test).

Perhaps the HD-XA1's most revealing back-panel feature is its full-height fan vent. Don't get me wrong — the fan was appropriately quiet for a viewing-room — not whisper quiet, but by no means objectionable or even noticeable during play. But its mere existence on a DVD player speaks to the architecture of the HD-XA1 and its "personality" that emerged.

As I said in my main review, this HD DVD player isn't so much a player as a computer. That's not hyperbole — inside the box there's actually a Pentium microprocessor. Which explains the HD-XA1's remarkably slow start-up and the general sluggishness I cited. The instructions for many functions that normally reside in hard-wired logic circuits in a typical DVD player are in software here. Every time you turn the player on, an equivalent of the BIOS program found in any PC tells the microprocessor where to look in the player's flash memory to boot up its operating system, which eventually instructs the player to perform all its other tasks, such as checking the disc drawer for a disc and then loading and playing it.

Toshiba technical experts I consulted with say the player's initial boot-up time — about 30 seconds with no disc in the drawer — can be improved somewhat with future firmware upgrades, though the 50- to 70-second disc load time is more closely related to the disc itself. We hope firmware upgrades will also address some of the HD-XA1's general sluggishisness and quirkiness. Pressing the Stop button for example, results in five annoying seconds of additional playback (with a "PLAYBACK STOPPED" flag on the screen) before things go dark. And calling up the Setup menu yielded a several-second delay and a short flash of the menu onscreen before it finally came up for good.

Remote Control
The handheld remote control supplied with the Toshiba HD-XA1 HD DVD player has a solid, 10-inch metal body and a slick vibration-sensitive backlight that turns on for about 10 seconds when you give it a little jerk or hit any button. Without illumination, though, the legends can be difficult to read — something bloggers have pointed out about the remote on the less expensive A1, which has the same layout and faceplate but no backlight.

More critically, the remote relies on a poorly executed eight-position navigation rocker to move about the player's setup and disc menus. Toshiba is correcting that problem for future production. Apart from the glitchy rocker, however, I found the remote comfortable to use, with the key buttons in easy reach of my thumb and a thoughtful nub protrusion on the Play button that let me quickly discern it from the Pause and Stop buttons that surround it.

The remote also has four buttons marked A, B, C, and D, earmarked for unspecified use by studios or game makers. For now, Warner, at least, has tapped the B button to engage its bookmark function, which allows you to store any location on a Warner HD DVD permanently in the player's memory for instant recall.

Setup Menus
Toshiba took advantage of the processing power in the HD-XA1 to provide attractive internal graphics for the Setup menu, which is as pretty to look at as it is extensive. You even get a choice of three different "skins" for the menu system (though I greatly preferred the default skin "1" for its legibility). The menus expand out horizontally as you make selections, with submenus opening to the right as you go deeper and deeper.

The accessible and unintimidating main menu offers five selections. Here's a closer look at what you'll find in each when you get inside:

PICTURE: Used to select the default aspect ratio to match your TV and to activate the Enhanced Black Level option, which sets black at 0 IRE rather than the 7.5 IRE used in North American NTSC television. (This setting should always be turned on when the player is connected to a properly adjusted HDTV set.) A Picture Mode button offers Film, Video, and Auto options to activate 2:3 pulldown compensation as needed; Auto is the recommended setting.

AUDIO: You'll spend a bit of time in here getting things set up once you've determined how best to wire the player for sound with your existing equipment (see "Hook Me Up"). Your selections determine what type of digital audio signals will come from the HDMI and SPDIF (optical and coax) audio outputs, and this is where you can set the speaker level, distance, and bass management options for the player's 5.1-channel analog outputs. There's also a Dynamic Range Control button to bring up low-level sounds when the volume is turned down for late-night viewing and a Dialog Enhancement mode to goose the dialog if you're listening on TV speakers or a system without a dedicated center speaker.

LANGUAGE: To select preferred defaults for the Setup menu, disc menus, subtitles, and dialogue track. English, French, and Japanese can be selected directly, but you can type in codes to select from a total of 136 languages for all but the internal Setup menu.

ETHERNET: Here's one you don't see everyday. Since the player can connect to the Internet, it has its own IP address and all the functions you need to access and manage that connection. See "Hook Me Up," for additional details.

GENERAL: Here's where you can change the menu skins, set parental controls or the internal clock, and activate the screen saver. You can also turn on a confirmation bleep that tells you when the player has received your IR commands from the remote. Most interesting is the Maintenance option, which lets you reset the factory defaults or, if you have a live Internet connection, activate the Firmware Update sequence. Engaging the sequence brings you to an onscreen Terms & Conditions agreement that you have to click off on, which will then start the download from Toshiba's Web site (once that service is rolled out).

Some Final Notes
Toshiba obviously put a lot of effort into making its HD-XA1 HD DVD player as complete and future-proof as it possibly could. It's worth noting, however, that because of the wait for final specifications for, among other things, the next iteration of HDMI (known as version 1.3), both the HD-XA1 and its sibling the HD-A1 lack two key technical features that will eventually find their way into HD DVD players.

One is the ability to provide video output in the 1080p format that is actually being used to encode all of the first HD DVD titles and that is the highest-resolution HDTV format now available. But it remains to be seen how much, if any, benefit will accrue from taking 1080p straight off the disc and into a 1080p display that can accept this type of signal, of which there are still only a handful. The alternative is to do what I did with our test sample, feeding 1080i from the player into a 1080p display. In this case, the player interlaces the 1080p signal on the disc to the 1080i format used by most broadcasters, then the TV deinterlaces the 1080i signal internally back to 1080p for display on its screen. For film-originated material, converting between 1080i and 1080p (or vice versa) involves fairly simple processing that doesn't degrade the image if done correctly, and I can't argue with the amazing picture quality we got on our well-tuned big 1080p DLP rear projector. Frankly, it's hard to imagine it getting much better.

On the other hand, the enthusiasts most likely to be the earliest customers for the Toshiba HD-XA1 may bemoan its inability to decode internally or pass through via any output the Dolby TrueHD surround soundtracks that will appear on future discs. TrueHD is a new high-resolution lossless audio format that can provide up to 7.1-channel surround sound. Future A/V receivers, or possibly the multichannel surround processors built into future HD DVD or Blu-ray players, will have the ability to decode this signal without downconverting it to another, less pristine format.

The HD-XA1 will decode two-channel stereo from discs encoded in TrueHD — just not surround sound. Of course, future discs will also have alternative surround-sound tracks, in most cases Dolby Digital Plus, that the HD-XA1 will decode and play faithfully through its HDMI or multichannel analog outputs.

RELATED ARTICLES:
Hook Me Up
Main Toshiba HD-XA1 Review

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