Toshiba HD-A30/35 1080p24 Patch Gives Headaches

You can’t blame anyone who bought one of Toshiba’s second generation HD DVD players for trying to get all the use they can from it. The latest patch from Toshiba that updates the HD-A30 and HD-A35 to v2.0, however, is causing some grief.

Toshiba’s new patch grants the HD DVD players the ability to play back 1080p at 24Hz. But it’s having troubles with 1080p24 playback of any AVC - MPEG4-encoded discs. Users are reporting severe aliasing or jaggies as it’s popularly referred to today. This is the stair stepping effects on the edges of some images.

The symptom does not occur if your HDTV isn’t capable of 24p display, only 1080p24 output is being reported on AVC or MPEG4-encoded discs.

You can see the problem clearly in chapter 5 of the Transformers HD DVD which was encoded in AVC-MPEG4. As the camera simultaneously pans and zooms into Bumblebee, jagged edges and flickering is severe at 1080p24.

The same results were reported of Toshiba’s XA2 firmware update awhile back. When viewing AVC - MPEG4-encoded discs in 24p mode you’d see visible jaggies, but it looked fine if you kept it at 1080i or 1080p60.

It just goes to show that it’s never a bad idea to wait a bit on any new firmware updates and look for second hand performance reports before jumping in.