Arguably one of the best features of HD-DVD is the fact that it lacks region encoding (more info at wikipedia). DVD's have had this since introduction, much to the dismay of all foreign film and anime fans. Blu-ray also will have it. But, HD-DVD currently lacks this "feature", leading some to believe that maybe HD-DVD actually "got it", that they understood region encoding does nothing but frustrate movie fans everywhere. Well, nevermind. In a DVD Forum meeting held earlier this week, it was decided to move forward with a region encoding scheme. Obviously this won't happen overnight, but it's yet another reason not to support this technology. With all players capable of being connected to the internet, it can probably be assumed that this will be downloaded to all existing players as a forced update. Thanks, DVD Forum! You're the best!