Can HD-DVD players do slide shows?

You can author the disc to do so (even using a DVD5 or DVD9 disc).

Why don't you try and report back with the results?

I've done several slideshows using Ulead DVD MF6+, but what you really end up with are EVO files ... MPEG2 HD video, not just JPGs being read by the HD DVD player. With MF6+, you can add transitions and background audio to your slideshow videos. First, use Photoshop or similar to save your JPGs at 1920x1080 pixels at 300dpi, then fire-up the MF6+ launcher and choose the slideshow option.

You can throw a disc full of jpeg images into most standard DVD players and you get a slide show. The Tosh HD players do not have this capability, however, from either HD or SD discs. To see HD images, they need to be authored into a HD DVD video.

Home HD DVD authoring software is readily available to put your HD images into a HD DVD movie and then burn it to SD DVD. If you already don't know, see http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=705146 for instruction (or use Brajesh's instructions above). You can get about 30 minutes of HD video on a standard DVD-R disc.

Now getting that HD movie on a HD DVD... I don't think consumer HD DVD burners are available yet (I haven't checked lately). It costs about $25K to have a disc house author/burn it for you, the first 1000 discs included.

Anyway, depending on what you have handy, it may be easier to use a laptop/PC/Mac (with an interface compatible with your display, not necessarily HDMI) to view the images. That's what I do, the image resolution displayed would depend on the capability of your laptop graphics card and the resolution of your display.

If you have a DIRECTV HD DVR, it can interface over a home network to a media center or media server. With some limitations, the DVR can grab images (as well as video and music) off the media center and send it to your display in slide show format via HDMI. Cool. Check over in www.dbstalk.com for info.