First Blu-ray Drives Won't play Blu-ray Movies 329
aapold writes "Sony officially announced its BWU-100A product at its "Experience More 2006" event in Sydney yesterday, all the while acknowledging that there's significant room for improvement before the product is viable for integration into media centre PCs. Sony's product manager for data storage, told CNET.com.au that due to copy protection issues and lagging software development, the drive will only play user-recorded high-definition content from a digital camcorder, and not commercial movies released under the BD format." All this hullabaloo makes me want neither side to win. If only I didn't desperately crave HD content on my TV!
Re:Next media should be defined by the community. (Score:2, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_Forum [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_DVD [wikipedia.org]
It's funny to note that the following companies founded the DVD consortium:
Hitachi, Ltd.
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd.
Mitsubishi Electric Corporation
Pioneer Electronic Corporation
Royal Philips Electronics N.V.
Sony Corporation
Thomson
Time Warner Inc.
Toshiba Corporation
Victor Company of Japan, Ltd. (JVC)
Note the little "Sony".
Then Sony came in with BluRay and offered an alternative to the "standard" that was supposed to be HDDVD. Going against the wishes of the consortium they helped to create in the first place.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
http://focuscamera.com/sc/froogle-lead-1.asp?id=9
2.9 GB per dollar - Samsung Spinpoint: $55, 160 GB harddrive
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N8
And that is just the blu-ray disc, not the drive.
*cough* *cough* (Score:5, Informative)
Re: the demise of the disc (Score:2, Informative)
A high quality DVD rip of a movie is around 2GB. double the resolution, and you end up with at most a 8GB movie, ignoring any improvements in what compression techniques could offer, after all, a large splotch of black is still a large splotch of black, no matter what resolution you are recording it at.
8GB is a reasonable download size.
I really wonder WTF technology these companies are using to make their HD content look so crappy. Any DVD pirate who takes pride in his/her work does a far superior job on encoding than these "professionals" do on their commercial stuff.
Re: the demise of the disc (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong. A high quality DVD rip of a movie is around 5-7GB. Your definition of high quality must be lacking.
double the resolution, and you end up with at most....
I don't want to double the resolution, I want HD. 1080p video has double the frame rate, a higher colour depth and four times as many pixels as a DVD. With normal MPEG 2 your 8GB DVD becomes more like 64GB. Then factor in your newer compression techniques and we come back down to 30-40GB. You're not going to get a HD movie on a disc for less than 25GB.
Shit, the HD video I shoot with the HDR HC1 isn't even full 1080i res and it comes to 10GB an hour.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:HD is overrated (Score:5, Informative)
Funny you ask, we recently had a special edition of The Natural in the shop...
For picture, the best you can get is either an interpositive (which is just one generation down from the camera negative), or the camera negative itself. The camera neg is often in not great shape, though, since it's been cut and A-B rolled. Also dust on the interpositive looks black, whereas dust on the cam neg looks white, and camera neg doesn't have the printer lights from timing I recall (I'm a sound guy, if someone at a lab is reading, please correct me). Interpositives are low-contrast prints of the camera negative, on one strip, and they're usually only run thru a printer a few times, once to strike the IP itself, and once to strike a few internegatives (these are what release prints are struck from).
For sound, the sound optical is usually contact printed onto the IP, but we almost always go back to the original Dialogue/Music/FX stems, which are recorded on 35mm magnetic film. 35mm mag film actually has quite high fidelity, nearly 70dB dynamic range and at least 15 kHz on the high end, so often the the mag sounds a bit better than what is on the optical. As well, the stems will have the discrete speaker channels (particularly the center speaker and surround), which are derived from the optical but do not actually exist on it, so we can "widen" the original mix from it's original format (either 4-channel Dolby Stereo or less) into a true 5.1.
If the filmmaker is still alive, he/she'll often sit thru the mix (my end of it) and have some new sound FX cut to modernize the sound, and maybe even try to rearrange some dialogue he didn't like or tweak the music levels (since we have separated stems, he can change either DIA, MX or FX without affecting the other two.) The Superman DVD WB has out right now is a good example of this from a sound point of view (also a great movie).
Coincidentally, The Natural was released and is owned by TriStar Pictures, which was bought in the late 80s by Columbia, which was itself bought in the early 1990s by... Sony. (fair disclosure: Sony PIctures Entertainment is my current employer).
Re:You for got 4.5! (Score:2, Informative)
What I can't understand is why in the hell Bluray movies are being encoded in MPEG-2. They're currently using single layer 25 GB disks because the technology to mass produce dual-layer disks just isn't operational yet. With this limited amount of space (for HD content) it makes no sense to use a bitrate hungry format like MPEG-2. They would be far better off using H.264 of VC1. The use of VC1 and the 5 GB space advantage has given HD-DVD the edge in video quality. Numerous reviews have stated that HD-DVD movies are incredible in detail and clarity while Bluray is generally disappointing.