Do HD-DVD players play ordinary DVDs?

Question

Maybe this is a dumb question, but I don't like the idea of having to upgrade my DVD collection.

Answer 1

no sorry

Answer 2

Of course they play normal dvd's. i have a hd dvd player and it even plays copied dvd's.

Answer 3

They even play extra-ordinary DVDs!!

Answer 4

HD-DVDs duh! jackass

Answer 5

MAYBE

Answer 6

yes

Answer 7

Hi,

yes, it should have no trouble. Your owner's manual will spell out exactly what types of disks your player can access (CD, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD, DVD+R, DVD-R, etc.)

Basically, you can go down in scale (a regular DVD) with your HD-DVD player, but you can't go up in scale (to HD-DVD) on a standard DVD player. The formatting is different.

Obviously, you don't have all the features of a HD-DVD on a regular DVD, there isn't enough layers. Think of a regular DVD as a paperback and a HD-DVD as a New York phonebook, that is an idea of how much more storage there is on a HD-DVD.

Answer 8

my toshiba HD-E1 plays and upscales standard DVD's to 1080i. so no reason to beleive any other cannot.

Answer 9

Yes you can play dvd on your HD-dvd player.

and  you can play dvd's on a blu-ray player.

Some player will upconvert them to higher resolutions.

The problem is on hd-dvd's and blu-ray dvds, they are incompatible, read this from c-net.

Blu-ray, HD DVD, and DVD formats compared

Blu-ray and HD DVD are rival incompatible formats, a situation that recalls the Beta versus VHS battle that stifled the early growth of the VCR and home-video market in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Despite an attempt to unify the two standards in 2005, the corporate godfathers of the two formats--Sony for Blu-ray and Toshiba for HD DVD--failed to come to an agreement.

What that means to you is that no Blu-ray player will be able to play HD DVD discs, and no HD DVD player can play Blu-ray discs. If a movie comes out in one format, there's no guarantee that it will be available in the other. Certain studios could release movies in both formats, but you'll still have to be careful not to buy the wrong version of the movie.

Answer 10

Yes I've got one and it plays normal dvds so you don't need to buy special dvds but the grapics and the sound is better quality also its quicker to load.

Answer 11

yes!!!

Answer 12

of course you can, that's what makes HD DVD players so good