Knocked Up HD-DVD Design Flaws

I'm not going to review the movie. Obviously I thought it was funny - I bought the HD-DVD. One of the advertised benefits of HD-DVD over Blu-Ray is the ability to download Web Enabled content. This is a neat idea but definitely has not come of age as demonstrated by the clunky HD-DVD features of this disc.

First off, I put the disc into my Xbox 360 HD-DVD add-on player and it gave me a red and black, "Loading" screen for several minutes. Eventually it flickered and then added a single "Cancel" button. I became impatient and restarted the system. Big mistake. After that it just kept looping back to the Xbox dashboard when I tried to play.

Turns out the issue is related to the web-enabled features on the disk. When you first put the disk in and if you are connected to the Internet, your player downloads an 11Mb cookie. This takes like 8-10 minutes which sucks. It is just done the first time you play the disc but a little more info on the screen would have helped. I ended up having to go into my system blade --> memory --> HDDVD and deleting the items I found there. Then I booted the disc again and waited.... eventually the main menu started up. I understand this same crap happens when you boot into the Heroes HD-DVDs.

It would seem that whoever designed this disc was either a huge Blu-Ray fanboy or someone who is simply retarded. There are numerous clunky components to the disc's presentation that are unbelievable in this day and age. What should have happened upon inserting the disc would be the display of a message like, "This HD-DVD contains web-enabled features. If you are connected to the Internet and wish to experience them please download the necessary components by clicking Continue". Then.... (hold onto your asses) it would show a flippin' progress bar so that you might know that your box hasn't locked up.

The extra content is pretty good - mostly deleted scenes and some trailers. Once again the Web-Enabled features menu on the disc leaves much to be desired. For one, you cannot queue up multiple items for download. This means you have to stay nearby and wait for one item to complete downloading before starting the next. Of course this would not be so painful if, yet again there were some sort of progress indicator. Inexcusable. The big clue that this disc was thrown together last minute by someone who just didn't care comes in the form of an advertisement in the top right-hand corner telling the viewer that Knocked Up is coming soon to HD-DVD! How lame.

Finally, to even download the content you need to sign up for a free account (why?). This wouldn't be so bad if I could use my Xbox Chat Pad connected to my controller - no such luck. An unresponsive web enabled virtual keyboard will have to do. So there you have it - the future of DVD watching. Blech! Put this back in the oven, its not done yet.