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Sony Fakes Blu-Ray Demo?
twasserman writes "Lance Ulanoff of PC Magazine reported on Sony's recent event showing the new VAIO AR desktop with a Blu-Ray drive, observing that Sony faked the high-def demo by using a plain old DVD+R of House of Flying Daggers. Even before the rootkit fiasco, Sony has seemed increasingly desperate, but the general consensus seems to be that Sony is looking pretty sad and pathetic." Update 03:07 GMT by SM: Many users are calling shenanigans on this one since there were two laptops side by side, one with the Blu-Ray demo and another for comparison. Independent confirmation or negation has yet to surface, so take with the requisite grain of salt required when reading any news.
In other news, Gearlog fakes news story by not mentioning that the DVD+R was being used for a comparison.
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
3) Why would Sony use a Verbatim DVD+R?
The other points have some validity, but different divisions of a single company don't stick to using in-house products. Even years before IBM spun off the drive division most of the drives they shipping in machines came from other vendors.
Agreed if you look at this: http://www.notebookreview.com/assets/12136.jpg It is quite obvious to me that they saw this DVD too, but actually noted it was a comparison like grub had said and quoted above. Just a plain hoax.
The US DVD distributor for House of Flying Daggers is Sony Pictures Home Entertainment; the US theatrical distributor is Sony Pictures Classics.
Somehow, I'm not sure "bootlegged" is the right word for Sony making a copy of this film.
Fake.
2 939
http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=
"It will work. It will be in the PS3. It will have a huge market just because of the PS3. It therefore will not go away. Yes sony sucks, but for some reason everyone and their dog will buy the ps3. It guarantees Bluray's success."
It will work. It will be in the PSP. It will have a huge market just because of the PSP. It therefore will not go away, It guarantees UMD's success....
Wait? They are stopping production of UMD movies? Ah... forget what I just said.
"The stupider people think you are, the more surprised they will be when you kill them..."
Found this as a comment on the site, who knows if its legit?
Sony Responds
Posted by: J Piazza, Sony Employee
I would like to clarify this issue regarding the content that was shown last night at the Sony VAIO 10th anniversary event.
The demonstration in question was a side-by-side comparison of Blu-ray Disc recorded content compared with a DVD recording of the same content. The identical notebooks were each playing the Sony Pictures release, "House of Flying Daggers"- one notebook showing the DVD format and the other showing the Blu-ray Disc format.
The photograph taken by one of the reporters attending the event was of the DVD version used for demo. The Blu-ray Disc media had no label.
I can attest that the disc in question was a Blu-ray Disc as I organized the event. The Blu-ray Disc media used, though not a final master, was encoded and displayed using Blu-ray Disc technology and rendered in true 1080p resolution. This resolution could not possibly have been duplicated using a DVD. I hope this clears up any confusion.
Chicken fried butter sticks? Do
One of the replies to the blog: Whether this was really a Sony employee or not, this argument is backed up by other sites.
Oh well. Never let the facts get in the way of a story...
I don't think anyone else has said this yet so I'll throw it out there. IIRC BD-9 is a format for Blu-Ray. This format uses existing DVD+/- discs and reads them with a red laser. This, obviously, defeats the biggest purpose of Blu-Ray discs because they have a much smaller capacity. However, for an early demo such at this, if Sony wanted to show a 20 minute clip of the video and was not able to get their hands on a Blu-Ray disc, then they would conceivably use the BD-9 format to put HD content onto a normal DVD. This would allow for 1080 HD content to be shown, and compared to the normal DVD on the other laptop. So the DVD+R could very well have been used in the Blu-Ray drive *and* also be producing true HD video output.
Boy do I wish I hadn't just pressed reply.
A DVD+R (the one shown isn't DL) is 4.5G of course. What's wrong with me thinking of CDs?
You're right. With H.264, at 4.5G for a 2 hour movie you could get very good results. With 9G (dual layer), I figure you could get nearly perfect results perfect results.
Boy do I feel stupid. I apologize. I musta had a brain lock.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
It all depends on what you believe the main contribution and technical risk of Blu-Ray to be. As I said, I don't think it's the codec
Blu-Ray is *much* more complicated than just a codec. The spec papers for it are several hundred pages long for a compliant player(one can easily find portions on the internet with google). As I mentioned in my first post it has it's own virtual machine just for playing content. It also has AACS a very highly technical cryptographic security system. Plus Blu-Ray spec supports more than one codec depending on how much space there is(MPEG-2, H.264, WMV9).
There is also the BD9 spec which will be helping the red to blue laser transition period. The spec is Blu-Ray format on Dual-Layer 9 gigabyte capacity DVD drives. here, and here