The company’s first Blu-Ray/DVD deck should arrive (in Japan first, probably) before Christmas this year, and “sources” say it’ll be called the BD-18 (we think. The Google translation is sort of sketchy). We don’t know anything else about the alleged player, but we imagine some Toshiba exec is sitting in a bathroom stall, crying quietly and cursing Sony. [Yomiuri via Engadget]

Well, at least half of those 11 million Blu-ray players are PS3s, which had a US install base of 5.7 million in December, meaning slightly less than half are standalone players. Nearly 75 percent of units are BD-Live compatible. Lopping off the 50 percent that are PS3s, that means roughly half of the standalone players in the US are BD-Live players, so they’re relatively recent purchases.

More to the point, that means a lot of them are Blu-ray players that do a lot more than Blu-ray, like Netflix—not to mention the PS3. So Blu-ray numbers might be up, but it’s on the backs of people who have short attention spans and post-$US199 players, which is exactly what Blu-ray’s backers didn’t want.

Oh yeah, DVD? Five million players sold in the second quarter of 2009. As in three months ago.

You win some, you lose some. Ask HD DVD. [Electronic House]

His Millennial Disks (say that 3x fast) can be read in regular DVD drives, despite being made with a secret sauce of “persistent” materials—he drops words like gold and obsidian, which makes it sound expensive. Indeed, they cost $US30. For DVDs. That you can never rewrite. A Blu-ray version is in the works (will they cost $US100?).

And it might be a lie! The plastic—his discs’ weak point, your discs’ strong point—could die before the disc reaches a thousand years old: “That plastic may limit us to a few centuries or a thousand years for now.” Is there a warranty? Plus, shouldn’t it be Millennial Disc, not Disk?

Also, will the slot-loading disc drives in the bellies of the invading aliens be able to read Millenniata’s Millennial discs in 1000 years? These are the kinds of compatibility questions we should be taking seriously today, before they become a problem tomorrow, like with magnetic tape today.

If only there was a way to copy data to lots of different places, so that if it died in one place, it would still exist in another place. That would be really super great. [Herald Extra via Slashdot]

This 1981 spot for the Maganvision 8000 was one Leonard Nimoy’s better roles, if you ask me.

A review by Marcus F. Wielage in March/April 1979 issue of The Videophile described it as a “sleek, low-profiled device (22″ x 16″ x 6″) encased in a rigid black and silver coloured plastic cabinet [with] a gleaming futuristic appearance that would almost make it more at home in the Jetson’s living room that ours in 1979.” Lifting the lid to load an optical disc was “not unlike a car’s engine hood,” which you had to do before you turned it on. It took 20 seconds to warm up to spinning the disc at 1800rpm—kind of like today’s speedier Blu-ray players.

And like today’s Blu-ray players and DVD players before them, it was the pinnacle of home AV quality at the time: “As I testified under oath in court recently, the MCA/Phillips player puts out a better picture than any home videotape I’ve ever seen, and is almost equal to U-Matic players as far as audio and video specifications go.”

The review concludes with a bit rumour mongering, an echo of Gizmodo in 1979: “As it is, rumours of a consumer disc player from Pioneer continue to abound, and I, for one, would be happier with a product from that company than from Magnavox, if only because of their fine reputation as a leading mass-market high-fi manufacturer.”

We can blame Pioneer for ditching the much more excellent DiscoVision brand in favour of Laserdisc when it released its player in 1980. [Laser Video Disc, YouTube]

Gizmodo ‘79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analogue age gave way to the digital, and most of our favourite toys were just being born.

The Asus SBC-04D1S-U External Slim is one of only a few USB-based Blu-ray drives that reads BDs at 4.8x, plus it can read/write DVDs as well. (Sadly, it’s tray-loading.)

While there’s no price/release date at this time, keep in mind that USB drives like this one tend to rely on your computer for the actual Blu-ray decoding. So while the SBC-04D1S-U will technically play Blu-rays, it’s up to Cyberlink software powered by your processor/video card to render the data. [Asus via EverythingUSB]

Ars Technica points out that in the recently released 118-page AACS Final Adopter Agreement, the AACSLA refers to the upcoming “analog sunset”—or the phasing out of AACS content playing back over analogue connections.

What’s this mean? By December 31, 2010, AACS licensed manufacturers are required to limit AACS-compatible analogue signals to interlaced SD resolution. By 2013, no AACS-compliant device will be allowed to have an analogue port.

So once again, what’s this mean? It’s about time to upgrade to HDMI. Oh, and stodgy DRM bureaucrats are still disillusioned that they can stop piracy in the digital age by censoring the technologies of yesteryear. That’s all. [AACS Final Adopter Agreement PDF via ars technica and image]

The Blu-ray players (DMP-BD60 and DMP-BD80) Bring BD Profile 2.0 to the range, something that’s been sadly missing from Panny’s lineup (although BD-Live is still somewhat inadequate). The BD80 also has DivX playback, and both feature Viera Cast. They have, howvere, been hit by the financiapocalypse and the crappy Aussie dollar, with the BD60 going for $549, and the BD80 for $719.

The portable Blu-ray player (DMP-B15) has an 8.9-inch screen, doubles as a digital photo frame, and is also BD Profile 2.0 (although that’s through a wired LAN connection, sadly). It comes with a HDMI socket so you can use it as a standalone player. It’s fairly pricey though, at $1,319.

All the players and recorders will hit stores in April, except the portable Blu-ray player which lands in June. We’ll be getting out hands on the Portable unit as soon as we can to give it a thorough going over as well.

[Panasonic]

Pioneer had continued to build players long after the format had been declared dead, largely because of the large LD collections that many Japanese customers had built during the years that the format’s popularity soared (comparitively) in that country. Enthusiasts make this story plausible, but the fact that the LD is dead, long live DVD! stories stopped showing up by the year 2000 and the fact that you can still buy a brand-new LD/DVD/CD player on Amazon for about $US1000 make it a bit surreal, too.

Anyway, uhh, they’re still available there, while supplies last! [Akihabara]

Those with The Dark Knight Blu-ray who’ve registered for Warner Bros’ free Blu-ray accounts have the opportunity to watch the film in sync with director Christopher Nolan while he answers questions and gives us that commentary we were so missing from the BD’s otherwise excellent extra features.

Slated for December 18th at 6PM Pacific, the community screening is open to the first 100,000 people who respond. But since Jason and I already RSVPd, that only leaves 99,998 spots left. Suckers.