Long anticipated, the HD DVD release of the first season of the Sci Fi TV series Battlestar Galactica has finally been set for December 4.

The six disc set will list at $99.98, and will include the original pilot mini series, as well as the entire first season. The set will include a lossless Dolby TrueHD 5.1 track, in addition to the standard Dolby Digital + track. Exclusive to the HD DVD set will be picture in picture commentary by series creator Ronald D. Moore. In addition, the HD DVD receives an exclusive extra, Encyclopedia Galactica, which promises an interactive experience involving ships and locations from the series.

Ultimate AV has a new article regarding how HD DVD and Blu Ray players send multi channel audio tracks to av receivers and processors.

All HD DVD and Blu Ray players have onboard decoding of Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital +, and DTS. All HD DVD players feature lossless Dolby TrueHD decoding, it's part of the mandatory HD DVD specification. TrueHD is optional for Blu Ray, and only a couple of Blu Ray players have the feature. DTS-HD (DTS' equivalent of Dolby Digital +) is capable of better bitrate than the old DTS codec, but still lossy. Like it's lossless counterpart, DTS-HD Master Audio, it's still missing in action. HD DVD players advertise DTS-HD(core only), which means that they extract the standard DTS track present in all DTS-HD tracks for playback. DTS-HD and DTS-HD Master Audio will finally debut in the forthcoming third generation Toshiba HD DVD players.

Yesterday Onkyo released details on their forthcoming HD DVD player.

The Onkyo DV-HD805 will be a 1080p24 player with support for Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio, as well as DTS-HD and Dolby Digital +. In addition to allowing the player to decode the audio track and output as multi channel LPCM as previous players have, the DV-HD805 will also be able to output the uncompressed audio as a bitstream, to be decoded by an AV receiver or preamp/processor. The DV-HD805 will also contain a Silicon Optix Reon HQV chip for superior upscaling and deinterlacing ability.

Available Fall 2007 with a suggested retail price of $899.

According to Home Media Magazine, the Nielsen numbers are in for the week ending August 5.

In line with year to date Nielsen stats for overall sales, the Blu Ray version of Warner's "300" outsold the HD DVD version by a 2 to 1 ratio. This is a mixed bag as far as bragging rights between the two formats are concerned. On one hand, it's a clear victory for Blu Ray, who can claim to have sold twice as many copies of this blockbuster release. On the other side, Toshiba has to be pretty happy to hold a 35% share of high definition video sales in the face of a 10 to 1 installed hardware disadvantage.

Ultimately 2 to 1 is 2 to 1, and the powers that be behind HD DVD need to figure out a way to sell the general public on their platform before the format war slips away from them.