For those of you who have hoped to see your HDTV appear out of thin air, this may be for you, although this is probably not what you had in mind. To heck with this ridiculously thick “flat” panels! I02 Technology near San Francisco has an even thinner display.
Is there a hole in your computer waiting for an HD disc burner? You got some money to spend? Maybe Hitachi-LG fill that computer hole and put a hole in your wallet at the same time, with their new 4X speed BD burner. The model GBW-H10N only burns BD-R discs at 4X speed, so BD-RE’s are still going at a pokey 2X pace.
The burner is due to ship this month for an undisclosed price. My guess is about $1000, like most other BD burners.
Movie producers don’t like doing DVD extras. They don’t think it’s worth the time and money spent on them, and they’d rather just do away with them altogether.
Frankly, I don’t think I’d miss them. I rent a lot of movies through my zip.ca membership (zip.ca is similar to NetFlix). And I rarely, if ever, check out a DVD’s extras. I find all the making-of featurettes to be pretty boring. They’re just extra-long commercials for the film. If I wanted that, I’d just check out the trailer. Most of the other stuff I find boring as well. There’s only one extra that I really liked, and that was actor and director biographies. Remember those? And that’s one feature that nobody’s doing anymore. It was extra-nice when an actor’s bio contained film trailers containing that actor.
Ah well. What do you guys think? Are movie extras worth it? Would you miss them if studios stopped producing them?
Lionsgate has announced another batch of BD titles, this time due to arrive in stores in October.
October 17, exactly one month before the North American PS3 debut, will see the release of American Psycho, First Blood, Saw II, and Young Guns.
All will features Dolby Digital Surround EX and DTS HD High Resolution ES surround sound tracks. All, and seems to be standard these days, will also be encoded in 1080p.
List price will be $29.95 and, as is standard with list prices, you’ll probably find them for much cheaper than that when the time comes.
Congratulations Philadelphians…you finally can watch your local ABC affiliate nightly news in HD. You would have thought that this would be old news in a city the size of Philadelphia, but it is actually a first in the entire state of Pennsylvania! To help matters, they even included an entire HDTV FAQ on their website. Now if only such extensive information could be placed in retail consumer electronics stores so that customers and employees would have this basic information.
CDRinfo has a nice little comparison graphic comparing BD and HD DVD. For one, HD DVD uses AACS only for copy protection while BD uses the additional measures of BD+ and BD-ROM mark.
This neat little image isn’t all that’s there. They discuss AACS, BD+, BD ROM mark, and how all this stuff hangs together. An interesting read.
With reports across the net saying that BD doesn’t look as good as HD DVD, I wonder how much of an effect this firmware update will have. Will it put Samsung and its BD movies on par with Toshiba and its HD DVD movies? This question really boils down to this: does an MPEG2 movie stuck onto a 25GB disc look as good as a VC-1 movie on a 30GB disc? Obviously 30GB is plenty for a 2 hour movie that’s been VC-1 encoded, so then the question really really boils down to the 25GB MPEG2 thing.
We’ll find out when new reviews hit the net of the firmware-fixed Samsung. I can’t wait to see how this turns out.
American Hardcore starts off the latest batch of HD movie trailers from Apple. Seems to be about punk rock. 
Generally unheralded at the time, the early 1980s hardcore punk rock scene gave birth to much of the rock music and culture that followed. There would be no Nirvana, Beastie Boys or Red Hot Chili Peppers were it not for hardcore pioneers such as Black Flag, Bad Brains and Minor Threat.
Then there’s a thousand year tale, The Fountain, about the fountain of life.
An odyssey about one man’s thousand-year struggle to save the woman he loves. As a 16th century Conquistador, a modern-day scientist, and a 26th century astronaut, he searches for the secret to eternal life.
Paramount has announced some more details about their upcoming HD DVD titles. All will be 1080p discs with DD+ 5.1 and DTS 5.1 soundtracks. Some of the releases will have DTS HD and/or DTS ES 6.1 soundtracks. As far as extras go, they will be the same as those on DVD discs.
Paramount’s first three waves of HD DVD titles include: ‘Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,’ ‘Sahara,’ ‘Sleepy Hollow’ and ‘Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow’ (July 25); ‘Four Brothers,’ ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ and ‘We Were Soldiers’ (August 1); ‘Aeon Flux,’ ‘The Italian Job’ and ‘U2: Rattle & Hum’ (August 8th).
Which makes me wonder. Anyone out there with an HD DVD or BD player can help me with this. Are the extras in HD? Or SD? HD DVD and BD are big HD disc formats, so it would be nice to see all the content on the discs in HD. But I get the feeling from what I’m reading that this isn’t the case. Am I right?
Paramount Unveils Specs for HD DVD Launch Titles; First High Def Digest Reviews Up
I have a load of comic books in my basement that I never look at anymore. If I were the organizing type, which I’m not, I might look into using ComicBase, the leading comic book collection management software. Now it’s available in the BD format. It’s the first PC software available in PC.
Peter Bickford, president of Human Computing, says that “After years of waiting, we’re finally able to offer our massive library of full-color images without heavy compression, letting our customers view them at the same size, sharpness, and clarity that we do in-house.”
I find it cool that a company can make use of the space that the BD format offers. On the other hand, I have to wonder how many copies of this software they’ll sell, considering that BD is a new format and they’re just starting to sell BD readers and writers.
Apple keeps pumping out those HD trailers for us to enjoy. First up there’s Children of Men.
Envisages a world one generation from now that has fallen into anarchy on the heels of an infertility defect in the population. The world’s youngest citizen has just died at 18, and humankind is facing the likelihood of its own extinction.
Next up is an old favourite of mine, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Kowabunga!
After the defeat of their old arch nemesis, The Shredder, the Turtles have grown apart as a family. Struggling to keep them together, their rat sensei, Master Splinter, becomes worried when strange things begin to brew in New York City. Tech-industrialist Max Winters is amassing an army of ancient monsters to apparently take over the world.
Samsung says their Blu-Ray player has a bug in it’s HDMI 1080p connection. Seems that a chip softens the picture too much.
A few calls later and Samsung engineers determined that the noise-reduction circuit in the player’s Genesis scaler chip was enabled, causing the picture to soften significantly
Personally I did see this at BB when I looked at the picture. I suggested they try changing over to the component video at least so there could be a better comparison. The HDMI looked aweful.
I hope this can be fixed with a firmware update.
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