HDV compatibility questions

I have an A1U. Since it shoots 1080i I have some compatibility questions.

I have a panasonic HD tv, 720i; gets a nice picture.
If I want to play the DVDs I burn from shooting the A1U would there be a compatibility issue?
What kind of DVD player would work to play the DVDs. My Bose DVD player will not play my DVDs; it reads "format not supported"--
So, I'm willing to buy an HD DVD player, but the variety of format out there is really confusing. I'm running FCP, so is there something I should do in formatting?
Pretty perplexed at this point and need advise.

1) Your HDTV is 720p, not i, but anyway it'll play 1080i just fine. All recent HDTVs, to my knowledge, have built in scalers so it's not an issue.

2) When you edit your HDV stuff and burn to DVD, you're downconverting to standard DVD resolution. The DVDs you burn this way should play on any DVD player (but obviously not in HD). Some older players have problems with home-burned discs. I don't know what format you're burning to but if it's standard DVD it should play on your player. If it's some bizarre computer format it won't. Use the Standard DVD-Video preset in your authoring software.

If you are burning a HiDef data file, like m2t, this will play on some Blu-Ray players but no regular DVD players. You cannot, under any circumstances, get any form of HiDef out of a regular DVD player.

3) Blu-Ray Disc (BD) burners and players are cheap now so you should get both. Just make sure your authoring program or editor can do BD -- most can these days. There may be a few HD-DVD burners and players around, but as a dead format I wouldn't advise those. Get BD instead.

Of course, to make BDs, you need BD media, unless the files are really small.

For short files, you can burn m2t to regular DVDs and play them in HD, but you need a BD player and, of course, an HDTV.

FCP/Apple doesn't support BD, because of a silly licensing tiff between Steve Jobs and Sony, so you may have problems and will likely need a third party burner and software to make BDs.

Spend some time with your FCP and DVD Studio documentation so you know the best way to stay in HDV through your whole workflow. If you downconvert to SD at any point you lose all that lovely "HighDef-ness" and once it's gone, you can never get it back.