I spotted this one out at the Home Theatre Forum and read all about Matt Tucker’s experiences trying to set up a home theatre.  First, let me pause and give a special note of thanks to all the various spouses and girlfriends out there (and sometimes even boyfriends) who don’t really understand why we so desperately want a specific room to watch movies in and do horrendous things to in the process of making it ready, but are willing to accommodate anyway, just like Matt’s spouse.

Matt took a fairly normal room, even with a window, and uses some heavy red drapes and matching red valences to block off most of the light and cancel out the various light reflection problems.  He set up a projector and screen, along with a whole array of well set up, modular components, and he’s discovered some of the things we’ve already been talking about.  He’s discovered the importance of the chocolate brown finish as well as the importance of modular systems so he can upgrade later.

When he started, he had a Toshiba HD DVD player.  Ouch.

But he’s got a pretty sweet setup, as you can see from the pic above, and since he managed to do it on a budget it’s doubly worth our time to notice. Nice job, Matt–that’s one sweet home theatre setup.

After the death of HD DVD, Toshiba pretty much remained in limbo, focusing their efforts on upconverting DVD players rather than making the Blu-ray jump. They even recently announced their intentions to debut their BD-18 Blu-ray player early next year.

Well today we have word that Toshiba has officially joined the Blu-ray Disc Association which means we should see a plethora of Blu-ray touting hardware from them in the future.

Below is a statement from Toshiba themselves discussing their Blu-ray affiliaton:

“In light of recent growth in digital devices supporting the Blu-ray format, combined with market demand from consumers and retailers alike, Toshiba has decided to join the BDA. Toshiba aims to introduce digital products that support the Blu-ray format, including BD players and notebook PCs integrating BD drives, in the course of this year. Details of the products, including the timing of regional launches, are now under consideration. We will make announcements in due course.”

Read (Toshiba)

Toshiba may be considering a move into Blu-ray. If it occurs, the move would be quite a reversal for the company that developed Blu-ray’s superb (yet ill-fated) challenger HD DVD. The news came in a general meeting when Toshiba Corporation President Atsutoshi Nishida stated: “It makes no sense to decide not to enter the Blu-Ray market simply because we lost the DVD-format [sic] war. We cannot change the fact that we lost, but we would like to keep our options open.”

If Toshiba carries out these plans, the device would actually be a DVD recorder incorporating Blu-ray, though whether the Blu-ray capability would be record/play or playback-only was not clear according to the Nikkei Japanese press report.

Now here’s showing an initiative — It was recently announced that Warner Bros. is set to begin a program that will help remedy the woes felt by early HD-DVD adopters.

Apparently, if you have an HD-DVD that was put out by Warner Bros. you can send it in to them and for just $4.95 get a Blu-ray version sent back within 5 weeks.

5 weeks, huh? Oh well, at least they’re doing something to help those who got screwed by the format war.

Need a new HD:Hub from Kinetic? Well then you should take advantage of this one here. It comes with a Core i7 processor, up to four TV tuners, 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi, a Creative X-Fi Titanium sound card, a Blu-ray/HD DVD combo and Windows Vista in the background. We have no idea when the new Kinetics are coming so we don’t have any prices either.