Breaking news, sort of: “The Matrix” is finally coming to high-def DVD … and through a scheduling quirk, it’s format-exclusive.

As reported on The Digital Bits and Engadget HD, Warner Home Video has announced that it’ll be releasing the “Matrix” trilogy to HD-DVD on May 22nd, with a Blu-ray release to follow later in the year.

Will this provide the edge HD-DVD has been looking for? The “Matrix” films would be a stunning high-def experience … although it seems that Warner releasing them exclusively as a boxed set would work against them in any format, as I’m one of the few people who’d happily sit through the sequels again.

Paramount surely ran afoul of the same problem with their “Misson: Impossible” trilogy box last fall — seriously, who needs “MI2”? — which is why the first two films in that series are being released separately … on May 22nd.

Whoa.

Yep, there it is: Engadget reports Toshiba will be lowering the list price of its HD-DVD players as of April 1st, with the base model, the HD-A2, now sporting a suggested $399 sticker price.

This news arrives just a couple of weeks after Sony’s announcement of its $600 Blu-ray player, and exactly one week after Sony’s exclusive Blu-ray edition of “Casino Royale” became the first high-definition title to make it onto Amazon.com’s top 25 DVD sales list. (It was selling at #17, right behind the standard DVD edition at #16.)

The comments sections of various blogs are arguing over whether the price drop is a sign of desperation, with Toshiba making a last-ditch attempt to grab the cheapest end of the market, or a calculated strategy to paint Blu-ray players as needlessly expensive and exorbitant by comparison. (Even the 20GB version of Sony’s PlayStation 3 is still going for $500.)

But will it make any difference? With only a handful of A-titles being released on HD-DVD in the coming weeks — and Universal’s “Children of Men” and “The Good Shepherd” being the only ones you won’t be able to buy on Blu-ray as well — it’s looking more and more like the format war might be in its final throes.

Of course, we all know how much “final throes” predictions are worth these days. And as long as “Children of Men” is only available on HD-DVD, I’m gonna need something to on which play it …

My latest DVD column is up at Sympatico/MSN, featuring a certain Italian boxer fellow. I’ve written at length about the nostalgic and dramatic merits of “Rocky Balboa”, but if you missed it in its theatrical run — and judging from the box-office tallies, a lot of you did — it’s certainly worth a look on disc.

(Sadly, the alternate ending included in the special features is not the one I’d hoped for, with Mason “The Line” Dixon punching Rocky’s brains out through his ear for a spectacular gladiator’s-death finale.)

Consumer warning: If you’re considering the Blu-ray edition, step back for a second and think about whether you really need to see Stallone’s bulging old-man neck veins in high-definition. Me, not so much.

The arrival of “Casino Royale” on Blu-ray disc today has the potential to finish the high-definition format war once and for all.

This is the first huge hit with a massive, cross- generational following to be released on either platform; not that people in their fifties and sixties necessarily have any interest in buying a high-def DVD player, but if it’s James Bond playing, they’ll stop and watch in the Sony store, whereas the “X-Men: The Last Stand” disc just gets some weird stares and a muttered comment about Ian McKellen wearing a bucket on his head.

More to the point, “Casino Royale” is a knockout. Gorgeous transfer, pumpin’ sound, terrific movie. Expect to see a lot of people walking out of Costco this weekend with PlayStation 3s under their arms. (The basic model is going for just $549 — a bargain, really.)

Oh, and speaking of DVD: My latest Sympatico/MSN column is up, but the index page hasn’t been updated — so for the moment, if you want to read it, you have to go here. Sorry for the inconvenience.

So, just after delivering a pair of mythology-expanding episodes and ending on a crucial plot point (oh, so that’s how Peter gets his scar), NBC’s increasingly incredible “Heroes” is taking another break. There won’t be another new episode until April 23rd.

I ask you, is this justice?

More to the point: Is this any way to tell a serialized story? Six-week gaps between cliffhangers seems … unfair, somehow.

Sure, we’re used to longer breaks with movies — six months between the “Back to the Future” and “Matrix” sequels didn’t seem so bad, and nobody’s too torn up about waiting almost a full year for the third installment of “Pirates of the Caribbean” — but this is television, man! We’ve been taught to want our gratification instantly!

This is an apparently insoluble problem for TV network programmers, who’ve been struggling with the nature of episodic television for a while now. Do you alternate new episodes with repeats, as has been the tradition for decades, or do you run the shows straight through over 22 weeks, and then let your property sit unexploited for the other half of the year?

Fox seems happy with the latter solution for “24”: The season starts in January and runs straight through to May, after which the show just disappears. And in December, those episodes pop up on DVD to stoke interest in the upcoming season.

The producers of “Lost” tried something similar this season, running six new episodes in the fall and then vanishing into some unseen hatch until February. But the show’s deliberate pacing worked against that strategy; by the time the second wave of episodes began, a number of viewers — my wife, for example — had given up on the show ever explaining its key mysteries. (I can still get her to watch the new episodes, but I know she’s just indulging me.)

I’m beginning to understand the appeal of watching entire seasons of a given show on DVD. Of course, that assumes said show will survive long enough to merit a DVD release; the network graveyards are littered with promising series that were smothered in their infancy, and never finished their first order of episodes. Are “Day Break” and “The Nine” ever likely to appear in limited-run sets? I doubt it.

On the other hand, there’s something to be said for being part of the conversation while a show’s secrets are unfolding. I’m still enjoying “Lost” — and isn’t it intriguing that a show that appears to be about the battle between faith and reason demands the viewer’s faith in it all coming together somewhere down the line? — and I continue to look forward to each ridiculous new development in “Prison Break”, although I’m starting to worry that the material won’t survive the stretch to a third season.

And if you’d prefer more self-contained narratives, there’s always “House” — returning tonight after its own three-week hiatus.

Sounds like a great name for a band, doesn’t it?

It’s actually three of IMDb’s “Plot Keywords” for an old horror movie, William Girdler’s “The Manitou”, which is coming to DVD this Tuesday.

Check out the full list here, which is pretty spectacular (and, no doubt, the cumulative reason people still remember this film today — the thing reads like a grab bag of the era’s anxieties).

Just read down the list, and all sorts of fascinating combinations pop out.

Come to think of it, “Tense Tumor Nudity” is an awesome band name, too.

Working on a piece on true-crime movies for Sympatico/MSN, so I’m kinda busy today, but … hey, remember a few weeks back, when Blu-ray declared the high-def war over,with all of HD-DVD’s base belonging to them?

Well, here’s the latest salvo from the other side: Toshiba has perfected its triple-layer HD-DVD, allowing for a whopping 51GB on a single platter. It’s expected to be ready for replication by the end of the year.

Of course, that assumes HD-DVD will still be a viable product by the end of the year. And this doesn’t point the way to any additional studio support, which would be key to extending the appeal of the format. And, um, it’s still only 1GB more than a dual-layer Blu-ray disc.

So … um … well, it’s nice to have more storage capacity, I guess. But who’s actually using either format for storage?

More high-def DVD news: Engadget reports that Sony has announced the summer release of a second set-top Blu-ray player, the BDP-S300 — which, with a sticker price of $600 USD, will be considerably cheaper than its current player, the thousand-dollar S1.

Now, that’s still a couple hundred bucks more expensive than Toshiba’s baseline HD-DVD player, the A2, and slightly pricier than a PlayStation 3, but $600 is awfully more attractive than $1000. (In Canada, it’ll probably translate to about $750.)

Question: What’s Sony doing? I mean, I know what they’re doing, on a pure marketing level; they’re bringing in the affordable second-generation unit after wowing everyone with the gorgeous, obscenely expensive flagship player, just as they did in 1997 with their standard DVD players.

But why $600? Why not $400, the better to achieve price parity with Toshiba’s A2, and thus conquer the high-def DVD world?

Do they know something we don’t? Is another manufacturer — Panasonic, maybe — about to announce a really cheap Blu-ray player? And is this an attempt to subtly position Sony’s machine at the high end of affordability, as the company did previously with DVD and even VHS?

Meanwhile, HD-DVD plugs along. And if you’re in the Toronto area and want to pick up a player on the cheap, Costco is selling Toshiba’s first-gen player, the A1, for $350.

I considered grabbing one just the other day, actually … but it doesn’t output 1080p, and it takes a full minute to boot up. Might be worth the extra $150 to get one that’s a little further along the developmental curve …

Remember the other week, when it came to light that the AACS encryption system, the first line of digital defense on both HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs, was almost laughably vulnerable?

Well, the folks over at DVDFile.com — who are usually pretty level-headed about this sort of thing — have decided to stand up against the evils of hackery in this completely over-the-top editorial, which argues that the compromising of AACS threatens the very existence of the burgeoning high-definition DVD market, since studios will stop releasing their titles to either format if they know those titles are just going to be pirated as soon as they hit the market.

Money quote:

Such criminals threaten to destroy the home theater technical progress that can bring pleasure to millions. The mentality of such a sociopath is equivalent to those who release computer viruses and Trojan horses into the wild to wreak random havoc. They are anarchists intent on destruction. They are no better than terrorists.

Um … what?

Look, I’m as eager to see high-def DVDs enter the mainstream — with all the attendant affordability and breadth of catalogue that such success would entail — but this is just plain ridiculous.

Neither HD-DVD nor Blu-ray will live or die on the impregnability of its content protection; after all, standard DVD is about as pregnable as a female rabbit, and studios aren’t exactly hesitating to release their biggest titles to the format, as quickly as possible.

In a rather specious bit of reasoning, the DVDFile editorial argues that Fox pulled its March and April Blu-ray titles from its schedule because of the revelation of AACS’ vulnerability. That’s probably a bit of a stretch.

Fox did announce that it was rescheduling some of its March and April titles, but not all of them … and I suspect the rescheduling has more to do with Blu-ray replication facilities being pushed beyond their capacity than anything else.

Anyway. Just trying to be the voice of reason here. Carry on.