Not exactly the most "Japanese" news I could come up with, but since HD-DVD's primary backers are Hitachi and NEC, I think this qualifies.

Here is the HD-DVD logo, as approved by the DVD Forum Steering Committee:



Well, I'm not impressed. I guess they were going with some product recognition, because we all know how o­ne of the key features of HD-DVD is its backwards compatibility with standard DVD. Still, they could have been more creative to than just putting "HD" in front of "DVD."

In other news, the required audio codecs for "HD DVD video" have also been finalized. They are "Dolby Digital+", "DTS++ Lossy," and "MLP 2Channel Lossless." As an option, "DTS++ Lossless" is available. For those of you that forgot, the video codecs have already been finalized as MPEG-2, H.264 (MPEG-4 AVC), and VC-1 (Windows Media Video 9).

Here's the English press release:
http://www.dvdforum.org/27scmtg-resolution.htm [1]