Chris Lanier: Don’t Bother waiting for 1.3

It is hard to make a rebuttal in this case, I agree with what Chris has to say. However, I am sitting here knowing that I will wait for HDMI 1.3. Why? I think it is a function of the computer upgrade days. I want it to be future proof, even though I know 1.4 will be in the works as soon as I upgrade. It is not a logical condition I have, however, it is something I have to live with.

Of course, we like to banter around technical reasons not to get somethng. In the end, it is a compromise between budget and the WAF. 

From the blog post: 

On to audio codec’s, both HD DVD and Blu-ray include
increased audio codec support.  New lossless codec’s like TrueHD
and DTS-HD Master Audio can be used in HD DVD or Blu-ray titles. 
Currently HDMI (<1.3) and SPDIF can’t handle these bitstreams, so in
theory having an HDMI 1.3 player and AVR you would then have the AVR decoding
the audio.  However, in practice this also doesn’t work. 
HD DVD and Blu-ray titles that are authored with “Advanced” content will
flag the player to decode the audio itself.  This would mean you
end up with a multichannel PCM audio stream, which HDMI <1.3 can handle just
fine (and I believe most players can encode that to DTS to send over
SPDIF).  Almost all HD DVD titles do this, and Blu-ray also is
following.