Sony Completes First Full-Length Blu-ray Disc 258
john writes "Sony Pictures Home Entertainment announced that authoring has been completed on the first Blu-ray Disc (BD) to contain a full-length, high-definition feature film. Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle was compressed and authored in MPEG 2 full high-definition (1920 x 1080) and is now being shipped to BD hardware companies for player testing."
Why MPEG2 (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why MPEG2 (Score:5, Interesting)
Are any of you smart enough to vote with your wallets?
1080p or 1080i (Score:3, Interesting)
Who is telling the truth? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why MPEG2 (Score:4, Interesting)
Especially considering that hd-dvd wont use mpeg4, but straight go to h264...
Under that light, the "larger disc space" argument for blue-ray becomes a moot point, quickly.
I would rather have a 10GB h264 file than a 20GB mpeg2...
MPEG-2? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why MPEG2 (Score:1, Interesting)
Now, if 20th Century / Fox were to bring out the original, "Han shoots first" Star Wars, that would be more difficult.
But for as long as both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray have onerous copy protection/licensing requirements that would prevent me from ever making my own content to play on my own player, and prevent or greatly hinder piping the legally-purchased output through my stereo/switching system/computer and watch it how *I* like it, I doubt I'll buy one until regular DVDs and players aren't being made anymore. I can't see that happening for a decade, at least, perhaps longer, even if the initial release of the HD players and content doesn't flop.
And to think that I bought one of the very first models of DVD players made -- a Sony even. It cost almost $1000. Such is the financial cost of being an early adopter, but I really liked the idea that once I bought a DVD, it was going to last for far longer than a video tape. I took it home, and, surprise, Macrovision immediately prevented me from setting up my system the way I wanted. It's like buying a car and discovering it has an unadvertised governer that keeps its speed below 60km/hr. It took me only a few dollars to fix the problem, but, now or soon, doing that kind of circumvention might not be legal or financially reasonable for HD-DVD/Blu-Ray content.
So, never again. I've already been fooled once, and I'll stick with the system I've got until it is clear that a new system would have as much versitility.
Test cases with different codecs (Score:3, Interesting)
With all the buzz around H.264 (possibly due to me having a Mac), I would have thought they would have used something different....
Sony is probably using different Columbia/Tristar films to test different codecs (MPEG-2, H.264, and WMV9) to be included in each player's firmware. This makes error reporting easier: "Charlie's Angels screwed up" means a problem with one codec, and "Stealth screwed up" means a problem with another.
DRM and consumer backlash (Score:2, Interesting)
Personally, I can't wait for DRM to become widely used so that consumers are faced with a limitation of their rights.
Content companies need to learn that people like to consume. DRM is a barrier to consumption and thus doesn't make business sense. A great early example of this was Circuit City's Divx system which flopped very quickly.
Once consumers realize what's happening, DRM as we know it today will hopefully go the way of the Dodo.
--
http://www.gloryhoundz.com/ [gloryhoundz.com]
Plotless (Score:5, Interesting)
My wife's deaf, but she still likes to go the the theater every once in a while. Just goes to show how important plot is in today's movies.
Funny thing, she liked Starwars EP1 better BEFORE she saw it captioned.
"Is the caption messed up, or is Jar-Jar retarded?"
Sony - The hits just keep on coming! (Score:4, Interesting)
Sony Entertainment needs to clean house. Sell off the movie studios and record company. Fire the bean counter CEO and replace him with an engineer and go back to making the very best electronic devices in the world.
Follow up the rootkit with Charlie's Angels. F'ing brilliant.
Hey, I already made a MPEG-2 HD DVD feature! (Score:5, Interesting)
I was bored this summer, and made a feature-length HD DVD using MPEG-2 and Apple's DVD Studio Pro 4. In a weekend. Targeting DVD-9 media. Looked pretty good, and would have looked great if DVDSP4 supported using H.264 for 1080 content, or VC-1 at all.
I can't share that disc image unfortunately, but I can, once again, share this link to a HD DVD disc image I made before I tried the feature. A mix of MPEG-2 and H.264, 720 and 1080, i and p. Plays back perfectly in DVD Player 4.6 on a G5 Mac, and probably in other software players as well.
http://216.99.212.233:6969/torrents/HD_DVD_TEST.d
Re:DVDs are 480i, not 480p (Score:1, Interesting)
24p universal discs were one of the early dreams of DVD-Video that never transpired, mainly due to the cheapness of manufacturers and the dictates of the stupid regioning system.
I myself have encoded HUNDREDS or progressive mode DVD-Videos.
Re:Plotless (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Who is telling the truth? (Score:3, Interesting)
You can actually buy Blu-Ray writer/players in Japan, and at least one person is selling them and the blank discs on eBay.
MPEG4 is better in all scenarios except ... (Score:1, Interesting)
I store my video sources using XVID @ max quality. Final encoding bitrate is 8.7MB/s and it looks visual indistinguishable from the original MPEG2 video sources copied off DV at 1/3rd the file size.
Then after editing, I encode the final product back to MPEG2 for burning to DVD and even at bitrates like 6.5MB/s (~90mins of video for a 4.4GB DVD), the quality is clearly worse. I can see mosaic & dithering effects when playing back the DVD on the computer. (On a regular TV, you can't tell the difference though.)