[denisincalif]

Wayde,

This is turning out to be a real down day! As you pointed out, discontinuing the BD-UP5000 is a very bad sign for people counting on the firmware upgrades to support advanced audio.

I followed the link in your earlier post to engadgethd.com and traced through some of the posts there. There is speculation (no confirmation) that the BD-UP5000 cannot play TrueHD or DTS-HD no matter how hard Samsung tries with firmware updates, because the Broadcom chip inside the player has bugs. Unless Samsung comes out with an official announcement within a few days clarifying all this, fully committing to the firmware upgrades that have been promised, and specifying a realistic date for the firmware release, I will be canceling my order for the BD-UP5000.

I really, really want a good dual-format player. But right now I am having trouble believing such a thing will ever come to pass.

As far as the BD-UP6500 is concerned, given the state of the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD war, I think the 6500 is just a pipe dream. There has been no official announcement from Samsung about plans for it---just an unsubstantiated quote from a Samsung rep at the CES.