While on a family vacation to Disney World recently, I realized how bad the battery in my laptop had gotten—it would only work for about an hour of DVD watching, so I explored some portable power options. I found a few, but none that added more than a half hour to a laptop's battery time. Discouraged, I said "WTH" and looked at portable DVD players. I found a unique one listed on Circuit City's web site, so I had to get it - the LG DP889 "Portable DVD Player & Digital Photo Frame" (8" widescreen; $229, but I saved some with a 10% coupon). Instead of a lengthy discussion, a list of positives and negatives would be better:

POSITIVES

• Can view photos.
• Has a USB port; you can connect flash drives to view photos and listen to music. The manual is not accurate, as it states that a direct camera connection is not supported—it worked well with the two digital cameras I tried.
• Has a media card slot.
• Plays MP3s. I copied a bunch to an SD card for my future trips.
• 256MB onboard memory (used to copy music and pictures from USB or media card).
• A/V inputs—yes, that's right—inputs.
• Store a few pictures in the internal memory, set it to slide show, and you have a nice digital photo frame. It is not set up like most portable DVD players, where the screen is on the top and the DVD player is on the bottom; this one has the DVD player behind the screen. The thing that folds in this player is just a tiltable stand
• Two headphone jacks.
• Full, clean sound with serious volume.

NEGATIVES

• Not as efficient as a real MP3 player; will read MP3 tags, but will not index songs and artists by them, so grouping songs into folders is the only way to organize them. I also had to go through and strip out any artist names in file names, as they made song titles virtually impossible to read after being truncated.
• No Title button on the unit itself. If both music and pictures are found on the same media, it tabs Photos and Music. Not a big deal, except that to switch to the other [Music] tab, you have to use the Title button, which exists only on the remote. Another problem with this is that album art is normally hidden in Windows, but the LG still finds it as pictures, so the Title button is once again needed. I went through and removed all of the hidden album art so the player would only see music files.
• Battery will not charge if player is being used.
• Fingerprints are a constant problem.

Overall, I'm very pleased with this player. There are plenty of other options out there (bigger screens; longer battery life), but most of them only play movies. This one lets me also listen to music and view pictures...being able to connect my dSLR directly to it and view its photos is quite handy. And lastly, the A/V input capability—imagine being stuck in an airport, but having this player and a game console.

The bottom line—I highly recommend this one to anyone looking for a portable DVD player. This is much more portable (and practical) than lugging a laptop around just to watch movies.

It's done. For those of you who have been hesitant in buying one format or the other, now you don't have to decide. From High Def Digest:

Following several days of rumors, Toshiba has confirmed that it will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders, effectively ending the high-def format war.

In a just-issued press release, the company said that it reached the decision following "recent major changes in the market." Toshiba emphasized that it will continue to provide full product support and after-sales service for all owners of Toshiba HD DVD products.

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“We carefully assessed the long-term impact of continuing the so-called 'next-generation format war' and concluded that a swift decision will best help the market develop,” said Atsutoshi Nishida, President and CEO of Toshiba Corporation. "While we are disappointed for the company and more importantly, for the consumer, the real mass market opportunity for high definition content remains untapped and Toshiba is both able and determined to use our talent, technology and intellectual property to make digital convergence a reality.”

Toshiba said it will begin reducing shipments of HD DVD players and recorders immediately, with the aim of pulling all HD DVD players, recorders and disc drives from store shelves by March. The company went on to say that it would "continue to assess" the long-term viability of notebook PCs with integrated HD DVD drives.

Asked at a Tokyo press conference whether his company had any plans to adopt Blu-ray, Nishida said Toshiba had no such plans at the moment.

HD DVD first hit stores in April of 2006, and enjoyed an early sales lead against rival format Blu-ray up until the release of Sony's Blu-ray enabled PlayStation 3 later that year.

Though Blu-ray software outsold HD DVD throughout 2007, a series of tactical moves from the HD DVD camp kept the format in the game up until early this January, when Warner Bros announced it would drop its HD DVD support and would release its titles on Blu-ray exclusively, beginning this June.

In the weeks that followed, HD DVD backers vowed to fight on, issuing a series of price drops and embarking on a new marketing campaign, but it wasn't enough to convince retailers to stick with the fledgling format. Faced with the prospect of diminishing prominence at such top US retailers as Best Buy and Wal-Mart, insiders say it was only a matter of time before Toshiba would pull the plug.

Also at HDD, you'll find stories indicating Universal's and Paramount's official moves to Blu-ray.

If you've been following my high-def disc news (here, here, and here), you'll notice that I've been busy. After more research, I found out that there are now three "profiles" for BD players; more info here. Since the standalone player I had was a 1.0 unit and had no way to update to the new profile, I returned the Sony BD player and got the safest one—the PS3. Of course, not only is it a great BD player, it is also a good media center and can be loaded with Linux and used as a computer. Software updates for the PS3 are a click away. Oh, and it plays games, of course.