Great podcast as always Marshal.
You mentioned the new 'feature' on the Fantastic Four Bluray disc, and I can say it does play in some players without any firmware update needed. I just spoke to my brother who picked up a Panasonic BD player a couple months ago and he said it played fine. I suspect it might be a problem with older players and people that haven't done firmware updates since they bought their units. Is that an acceptable answer? No. I'm definitely not defending Fox or making any excuses for BD, but the disc does play fine in some players but seems to choke in others. I haven't picked it up yet since I wasn't that impressed with the first movie and planned on just getting it on SDVD. My brother did say though that he bought both SDVD and the BD version and he said the video quality is night and day difference between the two. Just wanted to pass that along.
The Venturer HD DVD player... their MSRP is a bit high at an estimated $249. That's close enough to Toshiba's MSRP on the A2 that I am sure people are going to feel more comfortable paying the little bit extra to get a name that has a higher consumer reliability image. Now, we all know there is a difference between MSRP and street prices, but again, Venturer and the resellers of these players must chop that price down to $150 almost immediately because the street price for the A2 is once again not much more than $199, in fact for those that don't mind buying online, the Shack's Electronics store has it for $214 new right now. I agree that they will settle in at $199 now with a big sale on Black Friday and then six months down the road the prices will start to drop.
Has Walmart officially said they won't be carrying these players? I've read a few news articles that said Walmart pulled the plug on them. I'm not too happy with a few Walmarts right now anyway. They finally started getting High Def movies, and one of the SuperCenters (it's an hour's drive though) is starting to get a bigger selection of both BD and HD DVDs but nowhere near what Best Buy carries. My local Walmarts though... they are 'hiding' their high def movies! I knew my local store had them but when I stopped by to check out if there were any new releases, I scoured the DVD isle and couldn't find one, so I asked. They are locked up in the PS3 case! Even the HD DVD discs were locked up there, well if you can say 'discs'. They had two HD DVD titles and around eight BD titles.