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According to blu-raystats.com 17 Mb/s is the bottom of the line for the video bitrate alone, 40 Mb/s being the top.
The average for the video bitrate seems to be at least 25 mbits/s, add the audio and you get 30 Mb/s.

You got marked flamebait and yet I can prove the same thing double-blind using Blu-Rays and uncompressed audio as well (cf. http://www.blu-raystats.com/Stats/Stats.php).

I've flipped between audio inputs for several people while watching movies without telling them; often starting the movie at the lower audio quality, sometimes at the higher -- and they have all said, even totally non audiophile normal people, "what happened?" or "oh wow that sounds much better, what did you do?"

To be fair, this is usually 24bit 96kHz audio, not 192, but it really does make a difference -- everyone claiming otherwise probably has terrible speakers or a horrifyingly high THD rating on their stereo equipment (you should check).

My Yamaha has 0.02% THD and I use 14AWG plain copper speaker wire fyi -- headphone listening is with a beautiful pair of DT770s.

Selling half of the market? For Blu-ray players, yes, but that's because people look at the relatively small price difference, (usually) realize they can also play the DVDs they already own on their Blu-ray player, and say "Why not?". For media purchases, though, it's a completely different story. For the top-20 Blu-ray and DVD titles, the Blu-ray revenue is lucky to be a quarter of DVD revenue in a given week -- and that's with the higher price per unit for Blu-ray. For older titles the ratio is likely to be worse (given that many aren't even available on Blu-ray). Blu-ray is still getting *smoked* by DVD sales. The DVD:Blu-ray ratio of unit sales at retail is probably 5:1 or worse. Most people aren't buying Blu-ray discs for their players.

The players may be selling reasonably well. The medium sure isn't.

"a movie on your BluRay player that is even VC-1 encoded as it is the preferred encoding format for many studios. (VC-1 = WMV)"

Got a cite for that? I got one that says the opposite is true at this point:

http://www.blu-raystats.com/NewsLog/2009/01/15/codec-trends-avc-dominates-blu-ray-video-disney-sides-with-dts/

There all sorts of things that can go wrong in the signal chain. Especially when know-nothings in major stores are setting up things. White crush, black crush, multiple passes of scaling to the wrong resolutions, all sorts of crappy "enhancing" filters and "sharpness" etc. that will introduce artifact galore.

And of course, there _are_ Blu-Ray releases that are poorly done. Transfers can be bad. Mastering can be bad. And 31.87% of the current releases use MPEG2, for some tragical reason. http://www.blu-raystats.com/stats.php

If you compare _good_ DVDs played with a _good_ upscaler such as the Reon chip, with blu-ray, both playing on a well calibrated system in which the above mistakes are not made, the difference between DVD and Blu-Ray is night and day. Especially on large displays.

Most slashdotters seem to hate Blu-Ray, but it seems that none of you have seen it, at least not under the circumstances where it excels.

Remember that we're still at the beginning of Blu-Ray lifespan. This format might seem a little too "modern" or "excessive" to you, but if it is going to be the mainstream format not just for a short period of time, but for the next 10 years, why aim for less? Blu-ray will not seem like overkill in a few years. It will feel necessary and adequate.

There are only 3 for Blu-ray, and the US one includes North America, Central America, South America, Japan, Taiwan, North Korea, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia.
It's not nearly the same problem DVD region encoding was.

About 2/3's are region free anyway.

Most disc boxes will tell you the resolution information (usually 1080p), but they don't give you information regarding the video codec used. For that (and more) information, your best bets are the HD DVD Stats and Blu-ray Stats sites.

Blu-ray may have a higher storage capability but take a look a the stats for discs actually used... http://www.blu-raystats.com/index.php - approx. 60% use the 25 GB disc while almost all HD DVD movies are in the 30 GB dual layer format.

FWIW here are two links listing all of the HDDVD/BRD movies with some statistics (they are the same site):

http://hddvdstats.com/
http://www.blu-raystats.com/

If you want numbers, here's the site for you!

It only has Blu-Ray figures but since there's only one other format involved...

I believe it's run by the Blu-Ray forum, but the numbers on the page I linked to appear to be the same as the weekly NPD figures, every time I have checked.