If you've already laid down your order for one of the HD DVD writers announced at CES, you're probably in need of just two things: HD DVD-R media and more cash. While we can't exactly help with the latter, Verbatim has just announced that it plans to start shipping 30GB HD DVD-R media to the North American market "when HD DVD writers become available." Considering those drives are now finding their way to shelves, we'd guess these writeable discs won't be too far behind. Parent company Mitsubishi Kagaku Media has been shipping these discs for months to Japan, and Memorex has likely been holding down the blank HD DVD market thus far in the US, but we're not complaining with a little head-to-head competition.

Sure we said we wouldn't post about Fast and the Furious anymore until it came out but we just can't help ourselves. One minor detail released about this movie amongst all the hoopla at CEDIA 2006 was that not only will it include advanced iHD HDi features, it will be the first movie to ship as a quad-layer combo disc. With a dual-layer HD DVD on one side and a dual-layer DVD on the other, this should enable HD DVD viewers to view extras without having to flip to the DVD side, as they did with previous 15/9 combo discs. In a good or bad sign, it still has a $39 MSRP in line with previous combo releases, so no price increase but it will still cost more than a standard HD DVD or Blu-ray disc. Univeral Studios Home Entertainment prez Craig Kornblau sounded positive about its prospects in reaching people outside the current 25,000 HD DVD-equipped households, but we're still not sure many people will bite given the price premium.

[Thanks, Tyler]

Contrary to what you may have heard, Sony is making Blu-ray movies on actual Blu-ray discs. Really. Our friends over at CE Pro visited a production plant in Indiana to check and say it is so. They saw busy robots pumping out as many copies of Hitch as you could ever hope to watch (which apparently is a number greater than 1, who knew?).

It's not all good news however, as all the discs being produced are of the single-layer 25GB variety. While dual-layer 50GB discs are expected to hit shelves this fall, this presents an odd situation where while Blu-ray may be cheaper, HD DVD 30GB discs currently available will be larger. Remember those rumors about 50GB Blu-ray not being real? While "this fall" may not be the "many years" delay Microsoft alluded to , it certainly isn't as quickly as we'd hoped.