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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."
I wonder how long it took for Sony to transcode the AVI torrent they downloaded off of The Pirate Bay into the format needed for a BD-ROM.
Had I known they were releasing this awesome movie in Hi-Def format, I'd probably have just skipped the download and just let them do the work.
No annoying dialogs just seamless integration
...the companies the discs were shipped to asked sony to confirm in writing that the disks infact did not contain any rootkit that would damage their systems.
At first I was horrified that such an absurdly bad movie was chosen for this "honor." But then I thought about the current market for this stuff: geeky guys. I suppose it makes sense, but they probably could do better with porn.
With all the films they had to choose from the one they pick to show Charlie's Angels 2? Nice way to kill the format.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
of all the films they could have chosen, they chose the one with the most boobs.....Good choice!
Monstar L
...that they would have been able to get this out sooner but had to overcome a lack of space caused by the oversized rootkit included.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
...will be brave/stupid enough to put the first Sony blue-ray DVD in his (not yet existing) blue-ray-DVD-drive?
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.
The rest of the news story, which slashdot didn't report: However, upon attempting to show the disc in public, Sony found that entire meeting rooms were vacated almost instantly. It seems no one wants anything to do with Blu-Ray, or even wants to be in the same room to see the disc play. Sony execs are still trying to figure out why.
Is the movie being produced in 1080i or 1080p format? What format will most movies be released in?
Does God treat us as servants or friends? Check my homepage.
If Sony misses out on the Christmas rush perhaps they, and the rest of the E! industry, will figure out that their customers don't like to be harrassed.
Columbia Records, Epic Records, Legacy Recordings, Sony Classical, Sony Nashville, Sony Wonder, Sony Ericsson, Sony Music, Sony Pictures, Sony Electronics & PlayStation.
First of all it's one of those spectacular blockbuster type movies with lots of explosions. So it'll be a good test for what the format is capable of. Second, and this is key, they won't have to worry about anybody trying to pirate the first Blu Ray disc because nobody will want it :)
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The reason they chose this movie is obvious. It's so bad, no-one would want to copy it.
That's the _last_ thing anyone wants in hi-def. Trust me - you _really_ don't want to see those people accurately.
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.
Will this look any better than a movie broadcast in 1080i and played back on an HDTV with 3:2 pulldown detection? I was under the impression that the pull-up done to convert 24fps film into interlaced video is completely reversible, and so 1080 progressive quality is already available through 1080i broadcasts.
It will be nice to have discs of HD content eventually, but I don't see what is so impressive that makes this worthy of coverage.
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.
I don't care what anyone says I will gladly watch Drew Barrymore in 1920x1080.
The Blu Ray video format specifies the maximum read capability of 36 megabits/second. The encoding codec used will allow content creators to compress nearly any resolution as long as it won't surpass 36 megabits/second.
Actually it's inaccurate.
The transfer rate for BD-ROM video application is 54Mbps (1.5x speed) according to the official BD-ROM physical format whitepaper:
3: Data rate
For high-definition movies a much higher data rate is needed than for standard definition.
With the BD format's choices for both NA and wavelength we have been able to realize a
format with 5X higher data rate while only doubling the rotation rate of DVD-ROM discs.
The following numbers offer a comparison:
Data bit length: 111.75 nm (25GB) (267 nm for DVD)
Linear velocity: 7.367 m/s (Movie application) (3.49 m/s for DVD).
User data transfer rate: 53.948 Mbit/s (Movie application) (10.08 Mbps for DVD)
The BD system has the potential for future higher speed drives.
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?"
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
This is a common misconception about DVDs. In actuality, all video DVDs contain interlaced fields, with no exceptions (I remember an old Usenet posting by Chad Fogg that explained why the MPEG 2's progressive-video flag was not supported). Thus, movies are stored as 480i @ 48 fields per second, and, for "normal" TVs, are translated into into 480i @ 60 fields per second for display. A progressive DVD player has to unify the fields for display, and while this is trivial to do for film, the resulting video does not have quite as high of a vertical resolution as true 480p video is capable of because the 480i video was filtered for interlaced display (this removes twitter on interlaced TVs -- e.g. a bright dot on a single line would flicker at 30 updates/sec, so that is not allowed to happen).
So, the difference between 480p@24 and 480i@48 is just a slight loss of vertical resolution (not to be confused with lines), but the difference is there.
..wayne..
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.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
They've only JUST NOW finished the first completed disc? Crazy
m g.torrent?1C6B407CD6671B2BB03F55C49D67CEB584A74D90
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
My video compression blog
This is not a stunt. I work at a company where I'm actively involved in Blu-Ray (and HD-DVD) related development. We need to be getting these discs (actually we needed them months ago) to verify a lot of the work we're doing, and to make sure we're optimizing in the right place. Blu-Ray may still be a ways off, but a lot of the software and hardware development needs well underway now to make that happen.