The first HD DVD-equipped system to ship in Europe will be Toshiba’s Qosmio G30 notebook, which the company launched today. Toshiba confirmed the G30’s built-in HD DVD drive will not check for region encoding. The reason for the lack of region support is due to early HD DVD releases being mostly back-catalogue movies. Studios are not so concerned about those but once new releases start coming out on HD DVD, it may change.

The debut of pre-recorded HD DVD media looks set to be a low-key affair, however. Toshiba confirmed the G30’s built-in HD DVD drive will not check for region encoding, allowing it to play HD DVDs bought in the US and elsewhere, company officials said.

How come? Early HD DVD releases are almost entirely back-catalogue movies which the studios are less concerned about co-ordinating local release dates than they are will films that have yet to make it onto home-oriented media. Then, maybe, region coding will kick in.

That said, Toshiba insiders also suggested locally supplied HD DVD content would also be available in the April timeframe - one of the reasons, they implied, why the company has chosen to ship the new Qosmio at that point.

The G30, meanwhile, builds on previous models with the incorporation of an HDCP-compliant HDMI output port and a 17in 1920 x 1200 TruBrite LCD screen ready for 1080p HD content. The display is driven by an Nvidia GeForce Go 7600 graphics chip with 256MB of dedicated video RAM. The notebook has a 2GHz Core Duo T2500 processor on board, 1GB of DDR 2 SDRAM, an 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi radio and Bluetooth 2.0.

Source: reghardware.co.uk