Ok, so that's old news. Toshiba actually threw in the towel in mid-February, after American ginormo-retailers Best Buy and Walmart announced their support for the Blu-Ray format. And the last shipments of HD DVD machines were sent out in March.

But there's a new-ish wrinkle in the story, and Techeye is a great fan of wrinkles. Not so much of the centenarian sort, or the kind found on once-fat people who lost weight too quickly, but we're quite fond of other types of wrinkles. Especially technological ones.

According to an entry by journalist Ryan Singel on "Threat Level," a Wired blog, "Sony's victory in the DVD format wars was largely due to its embrace and Toshiba's rejection of a sophisticated anti-copying scheme that promises to be relockable should it be cracked at some point in the future." Well, the anti-piracy technology in question, BD+, now appears to have been compromised, which leaves us to wonder if Blu-Ray might not have been more appropriately named "Wite-Elephant."

SlySoft Software recently announced that it broke the BD+ copy protection, for the second time - it falsely claimed victory back in November, but it seems they've really done it this time. The firm's AnyDVD HD product is a "Windows-based driver that works automatically in the background to unprotect encrypted movie DVDs" and it works with both HD DVD and Blu-Ray films. SlySoft is confident it can keep BD+ hacked and submissive in the future. According to Peer van Heuen, the firm's head of high-definition technologies, "The worst-case scenario ... is our boss locks us up with only bread and water in the company dungeon for three months until we are successful again."

None of this will mean much for the average consumer, at least not in the near future, but the news has Techeye so impassionated that we've been rubbing our scent glands all over the neighborhood. SlySoft and Cryptography Research, the inventors of the BD+ system, will probably continue their rousing game of nerd-versus-nerd for a few months. Meanwhile, privacy and anti-DRM (digital-rights management) activists, not to mention hackers, are already toasting to success.

Blu-Ray hasn't quite taken off yet in Europe, but it appears poised to do so. One of the more interesting players is Pioneer's Elite BDP-95FD, which will run you upwards of zł.2,000. Although this gadget could stand to lose a few pounds, it supports HD video up to 1920 x 1080 pixels and offers true 24p playback. Provided you have the TV and speakers to back it up, the BDP-95FD will serve nicely as the backbone of your home cinema setup.