Yes, this is an HD blog, but with the “Big Game” tomorrow and now Bo dying, I just have all these emotions running through me.

I enjoyed watching every game that Bo coached as I grew up.

He was always direct in what he said and he cared deeply for Michigan.

So I guess for the HD crowd the Game will be tomorrow on ABC-HD with pre-game starting at 3:00pm EST

NASA sent its first HD images down and it was shown on Discovery HD. I missed it, but I would believe that the shots should be nothing but spectacular. Hopefully we will get more content from space in HD.

Live HDTV From Space Makes History, Project Leader Says - Industries News by InformationWeek

My favourite super-hero is Spider-Man. My favourite Spider-Man villain is Venom. It looks like Spider-Man 3 will show the beginnings of Venom’s creation, though the main villain will be Sandman. My guess is that Venom will star in Spider-Man 4.

Either way, IFILM has the Spider-Man 3 trailer for you in HD, should you choose to view it.

Spider-Man 3 is coming May 4th.

I can’t wait!

IFILM presents: Spiderman 3

Blu-ray and HD DVD sales have not really met expectations, to say the least. Warner recently cut its expectations in half.

But now it looks like some retailers are actually starting to put HD DVD and Blu-ray on the front burner. The Video Buyers Group’s 1700 stores will be launching displays in November. Ultimate Electronics is shifting emphasis to Blu-ray in the fourth quarter. Their HD DVD stuff is moving into the normal DVD sections, which is weird. Target is also rolling out HD DVD and Blu-ray product, with signs pointing out the differences between the formats.

Which is nice. Most people walking into a Target store don’t know the difference between HD DVD and BD. My sister recently bought me an HD DVD disc, not knowing that I couldn’t play it. Signage displaying the differences between HD DVD and BD is good, but I hope that it also explains what the formats are all about in the first place.

Retail gives high-def more presence

So who’s the biggest of them all when it comes to selling HDTV’s? Best Buy? Fry’s? Wal-Mart?

Well, I don’t know if Wal-Mart sells the most HDTV’s. But according to this article over at TVPredictions, they definitely want to sell the cheapest, at least where flat-panel is concerned. Gary Severson, Wal-Mart’s chief of electronics and toys, says that Wal-Mart offers the cheapest flat televisions 88% of the time. And they’re working on the last 12%. I didn’t even know I could go to Wal-Mart to buy a 42″ Panasonic plasma, let alone that the price is $100 less than at Best Buy ($1,698).

I know someone who was a department manager at a Wal-Mart, and he says that getting the sale is the most important thing in the world to them. They will ruthlessly undercut prices, even taking a loss, to get people to buy at Wal-Mart instead of a competitor.

Hmmm. Makes me think that next time I need to get an HDTV, I should pick one up along with my Doritos. At Wal-Mart!

No One Beats the Wal-Mart?

The PS3 is just a few weeks away. Does anyone doubt me that Blu-ray will have the lead on Nov 18th? Currently there are only 2 HD format DVD devices out there. Each has sold well under 100,000 units. On Nov 17th there will be 500,000 PS3’s with a Blu-Ray movie in them (Taladega Nights). Overnight Blu-Ray video sales are going to go through the roof.

So can Sony wait for their player to come out?

Heck yeah it can because they will dominate the Blu-Ray landscape come Nov 17 with the PS3. Also, what company in its right mind would sell a blu-ray player after Nov 17th for more than $600 given the speed at which movies come up on the PS3 and the upgradeability factor. This is similar to the PS2 and DVD. DVD player prices plunged overnight because the PS2 was a viable player for less cost. In a few weeks this format war will be a footrace.

Oh yeah, and don’t reply back “what about the XBox360 HD DVD drive?”

It’s a $200 add-on and only for movies. They may sell upwards of 50,000-150,000 of these by March next year, but that’s only a drop in the bucket after Nov 17th. Microsoft really shot itself in the foot not waiting for a HD DVD drive and HDMI. A lot of finger pointing will happen when HD DVD falls and most of them will be pointing at Microsoft and their hasty production of the 360. I suspect Microsoft will come out with a Xbox360 1.5 sometime next year and it will briefly help HD DVD with an integrated HD DVD drive that still won’t hold games, but the nails will already be in the coffin with millions of PS3’s on the street.

Just like Gandalf said in LOTR:ROTK “It’s the deep breath before the plunge”

Blu-ray Will Win HDTV DVD War

I thought it was funny when I saw this, because my wife and I were just talking about this the other day. She likes the show “Ugly Betty”. I watch it with her because, well, I can! My laptop can go where I go. So I check out the web and stuff while watching the show.

And it’s true. Vanessa Williams doesn’t look that great on this show. Her age is definitely showing, and it’s not flattering at all. I should not really be saying things like that, because it’s not nice. But in an industry where looks are so important, I can understand why television stars are nervous about this whole HD thing.

Maybe we’re moving into a more enlightened age, where wrinkles aren’t smoothed over by low-res screens, and we can see things as they really are. Is that a good thing, or bad?

Ugly Betty Star: HDTV Makes Me Ugly

OK so I run across this opinion piece by Cory Doctorow which has almost every conspiracy theory out there about HD.

Now saying that, Cory has done some of his homework. He does have mostly good facts in his article, but some of the reasoning doesn’t make sense.

“The nervy broadcasters asked the commission to leave all that fallow spectrum intact, and furthermore, to allocate them even more spectrum, so that they could broadcast HD signals alongside of the analog ones. Once enough Americans had bought high def-receivers, the FCC could switch off the analog towers, return the spectrum to the American public and then, then it could be sold to the likes of Moto for mobile applications.”

Here, Cory trys to say that the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) gave broadcasters more of the broadcast spectrum because they were greedy, but in the same paragraph, he states they also at a future date (April 2009) are going to give back the analog spectrum. Well which is it? Are they getting more or less spectrum in the end? The answer is less.

I attached a picture of the US frequency spectrum from 2003 above. If you look at those big swaths of teal (blue-green) you will see they take up huge amounts of the spectrum. These swaths represent AM/FM radio and our analog TV of today so you can see why it makes sense to upgrade these and move to more efficient signals. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s just good common sense.

Then he gets into the broadcast flag, HDMI, and HDCP. You know from my other articles that I haven’t been a big fan of these DRM schemes either and since they already have been cracked (there is a German HDMI switch that sends out non HDCP signals) I don’t worry too much about this, but for the average user it will mean a full upgrade to a HDMI/HDCP HDTV to watch their DTV HDTV.

In some terms this is a good thing. Why? What was the last great thing (before this whole HD thing) you saw out of SDTV’s? PIP (Picture in Picture)? Whoop de doo! But since HDTVs we can now have a potentially better picture on larger screens and we have many technologies along with features that are competing for your $$$. Technologies such as LCD, DLP, Plasma, SED, Deep Color. These techologies and features have given many companies good profits and providing good paying jobs. Along with this it will also drive out all those old powersucking, glass laden, heavy TV’s. Have you ever picked up a 42″ glass tube TV? Bet it took more than two men to do it. Comparatively speaking it is a lot easier to pick up a 42″ LCD. It still takes two people, but its more about the bulk than weight.

Then Cory goes a whole new direction getting into the Blu-Ray/HD DVD debate and starts talking about AAC, region coding, managed copy, and the ICT (which hasn’t been implemented anywhere). I guess Cory doesn’t remember CSS. These schemes are there just so studios can sue some big underground distributer under the DMCA for “circumventing” their DRM scheme. That is the only reason. For the average Joe user they don’t care if you make a backup copy for home use, just so long as you don’t make another one for your neighbor ;>

Opinion: High-Definition Video–Bad For Consumers, Bad For Hollywood - News by InformationWeek

Look, there is all this talk out there that there isn’t going to be a combo player. There are rumors of contracts that state that they can’t make players for both formats. Yada-Yada-Yada

There WILL be a combo player and this format war won’t go down like betamax/VHS.

Why?

Unlike Betamax/VHS the two formats competing use the same standard disk, also 95% of the parts for each of these players can be identical. This format war is almost all done through software.

Now how will this play out? One of the formats will see the writing on the wall, my vote is it will be HD DVD, but who knows. What most likely will happen is that a couple of studios will back out of the format. Once that happens I think the HD DVD camp will amend their contract to allow a combo player. The other camp will see lots of $$$ through a combo player and not having a format war, and they will capitulate. This will be similar to the DVD-R+R-RW. Eventually, most DVD drives today can read all the formats and most consumers don’t know the difference between DVD-R and DVD+R.

So will this happen tomorrow? No. Lets take a walk. This year will have limited availability of players and software on both sides. Next year will be the big push with name brand players. 2008 will be the year of cheap players for both camps. By this time the market penetration will be felt and I think we may see the first combo drives in 2009, maybe CES 2010.

No go on combo Blu-ray, HD DVD player: LG — Electronics NEWS - about-electronics.eu

Internet has been down since Saturday. (Dang Rogers!) I’m typing this from work (tsk tsk).

Sorry about that.

I have a lot of respect for Joe Kane. I have used DVE (Digital Video Essentials) to calibrate my systems and it does the job very well. I read somewhere before he came out with the latest DVE that Joe had talked to Microsoft on the VC-1 codec and was blown away by what it supposedly could do for video.

So fast forward to today and Joe is showing off the VC-1 codec compared to the antiquated MPG-2. I guess he got lots of “ooo’s and ahhhh’s”.

I have never been a lover of Microsoft, but it seems they have done themselves proud with this codec. I would, however, like to see this against MPG-4 (h.263) and Divx. These two camps have also done some good things with their latest codecs.

Ultimate AV: The Look and Sound of Perfect With Joe Kane

Buena Vista has announced some details about their upcoming Blu-ray Disc (BD) movie releases. Disney is releaing Dinosaur, Eight Below, The Great Raid, and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back on September 19th.

We’ve seen that the quality of MPEG2 BD releases can be subpar, and usually are. We’ve also seen VC1-encoded Blu-ray discs from Warner that look quite spectacular, no different from the HD DVD versions of the same disc. But what about AVC/MPEG4?

We’ll find out soon enough, as two of Disney’s discs will be AVC/MPEG4 encoded - Eight Below and The Great Raid. The other two are still encoded in MPEG2.

Every disc will have a 48kHz/16-bit uncompressed PCM 5.1 surround soundtrack and standard DD 5.1 surround soundtracks. Dinosaur also gets a full 48kHz/24-bit PCM track plus a DTS 5.1 surround option. Why only Dinosaur? Beats me.

Buena Vista Unveils First Blu-ray Specs

The news for all you Samsung BD player owners isn’t as bad as previously reported. The Samsung player will be able to play dual-layer BD discs, whether or not the player has been updated with the upcoming firmware fix.

As well, Samsung’s firmware update, coming in October, will not only fix the Genesis noise reduction filter issue, but it’ll also add BD-Java support, so that you can make use of the BD-Java feature to be available on some fall BD releases.

You’ll be able to download the firmware update, or have a disc sent to you.

Samsung to Upgrade Blu-ray Player
Report: 50GB, dual-layer Blu-ray discs WILL play

So CEDIA has started and it has started with a loud bang! Some things that have come out so far.

• Sony has a new 1080p projector for under $5k see our previous article on this here
• Wireless HDMI extenders
• TheaterCurve screens!
• new Algolith video processors with the HQV® technology

I still haven’t seen any receivers that can decode DTS-HD or DD+. We’ll be pouring through these announcements over the next week and getting you the news you need to know. So check back here often!

Sony Pearl VPL-VW50 1080p Price
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