Sony Completes First Full-Length Blu-ray Disc

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."

Comments

Why MPEG2

[Anonymous Coward]

i would have thought that we would have moved onto MPEG4-- This is a cutting edge media ;-) They could fit much more data with a better compression method.

Re:Why MPEG2

[Bad Boy Marty]

No, you don't get it. They don't want to put more data or better data on the disc. It only needs to have enough space to hold the lowest resolution they can get away with so that it will forever provide a tolerable experience, thus forcing people to spend $10/person to watch new movies in a theater. From the perspective of the content providers, you exist only to be raped.

Are any of you smart enough to vote with your wallets?

Re:Why MPEG2

[imsabbel]

I wondered, too.
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...

1080p or 1080i

[Physician]

Is the movie being produced in 1080i or 1080p format? What format will most movies be released in?

Who is telling the truth?

[bogaboga]

Didn't Microsoft and its colleagues say that the Blue Ray technology from SONY is more than a year away, and that it's not viable? Sony here disproves that. My problem with Sony is that I see Microsoft tendencies in it as well.

Re:Who is telling the truth?

[blincoln]

That was a bit of a stretch, but a lot of people interpreted it the way you did.

You can actually buy Blu-Ray writer/players in Japan, and at least one person is selling them and the blank discs on eBay.

MPEG-2?

[PhrostyMcByte]

Why is Blu-ray using MPEG-2? Wouldn't they get higher def or longer movies if they standardized around XVID or some other variant of MPEG-4? It seems like a terrible waste.

Test cases with different codecs

[tepples]

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

[TheRealFritz]

It's amazing that the mainstream media don't cover the coming era of DRM more. A true failure of the press in my opinion. Their responsibility would be to cover this topic in laymen's terms to make it understandable to the masses. This should make the nightly news instead of a review of your latest and greatest toothpaste. As it is, the public doesn't know about this and lawmakers don't understand it, so the content companies have a relatively easy time pushing their legislative agendas.

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/

Plotless

[Dog135]

They chose it because it's one of those movies that's better seen then heard.

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?"

Re:Plotless

[kalidasa]

I'll tell you what - compare the dialogue of Jar-Jar Binks to that of any character in any Harry Potter book (which was also always for kids), and tell me again how brilliant a writer of dialogue Lucas is (we're talking about dialogue, here, because that's what the fellow's wife was shocked by - the subtitles). Episode III was good. Episode II was ok. Episode I was a video game commercial with dialogue a six year old would find painful. Better yet, just watch that whole "Tell me, Master Qui-Gon, what are midicholorians?" exchange and tell me that was written by someone with a clue about exposition and plotting.

Sony - The hits just keep on coming!

[HangingChad]

First the rootkit debacle, now first Blu-ray Disc (BD) to contain a full-length, high-definition feature film. Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle

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!

[benwaggoner]

They've only JUST NOW finished the first completed disc? Crazy

  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.dm g.torrent?1C6B407CD6671B2BB03F55C49D67CEB584A74D90