I've been seeing an assortment of news crop up online today as CES kicks into gear, and thought it might be worthwhile to gather some of the news in one place here.

First, the obvious big stuff... Toshiba's HD-DVD players are apparently coming "as early as March" - the HD-XA1 will list for $800 and the HD-A1 will list for $500. Samsung is promising a Blu-Ray player (BD-P1000, $1000) in "early spring." That puts both formats launching set-top hardware almost simultaneously. Crutchfield even has Toshiba's HD-A1 listed for pre-order, although there are some blurbs in it that will be disappointing if they are correct: Dolby TrueHD may be limited to stereo for the entry-level player, and the multichannel analog output may be only 5.1.

Next, more of the big stuff - software for both formats. There's a bunch of titles getting mentioned from numerous studios. The announcements are scattered, and it'll probably be a few days before all of the studios get around to making their announcements. I've seen one report that Blu-Ray will launch with around 70 titles and could see a couple hundred by the end of the year, while HD-DVD so far is a bit more unclear and less numerous. Later this week I may try to compile a master list (assuming I don't find a good list somewhere on the web).