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Blu-ray Hits Key Milestone Faster than Standard-Def
An anonymous reader writes "Slashdot has already reported on the go-go sales for the 'Casino Royale' Blu-ray on Amazon, but now comes news that the same Blu-ray disc is the first high-def disc to ship 100,000 units within the United States. It took standard-def DVD eleven months to reach that retail milestone (in 1998 with 'Air Force One'), but with 'Royale,' the nine-month old Blu-ray format now has done it two months faster."
Had to be asked.
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It would be interesting to see how many of these are owners of the games machine using the built in blu-ray drive, verses those who have purchased dedicated blu-ray playback units.
...I'll get a blu-ray player when I can easily rip the movies and do what I want with them including making standard def dvd backups, or transcode it for my video iPod.
Right now I can do a lot with standard def DVDs fairly easily. I'll need that functionality before I buy into any HD format. To me that functionality is worth a lot more than the extra resolution.
Is it just me or early-adopters focus on crappy movies??
Air Force One?? Casino Royale?
c'mon...
how long until
I see shipped. I'd like to know how many were sold. On an interesting sidenote, how many of those sold were to be played on PS3s?
I like to think of online DRM as something akin to a college -- you pay for lessons until you learn something.
The US population in 1998 was 270M, but 298M today, so one would expect a new format to hit some arbitrary number 10% faster, other things being equal.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Technology adoption has grown dramatically since that time. This is similar to the Vista outselling XP story. The truth is, since XP came out the PC market grew by a huge percentage, thus making the Vista sales claim bunk.
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Could it just be that Casino Royale is a better film that Air Force One?
Evil people are out to get you.
It's nearly ten years later. There are so many more people on the planet than there were ten years ago. Blu-Ray reached the same whole number in ~82% of the time DVD did, but nine years later, so I figure that makes up the difference. Looks like it's about on par with DVD to me. I wonder how VHS did back in its day.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
I wonder what percentage of those BlueRay drives are on PS3s? /meh
if you count in Blu-ray discs shipped in the form of PS3 games.
...for blu-ray burners to come down in price. Imagine being able to back up 50gb of data on one disc.
I have gas, but my car uses petrol.
This reminds me of all the whiners saying that in the 2000 US presidential election that Al Gore got more votes "than any president in history except Ronald Reagan".
My response was that Ralph Nader got more votes than Abraham Lincoln.
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
Time-to-unit sales measured against a particular title? Why not measure cost of implementation versus FCOJ futures?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
You mean more people bought Casino Royale, a widely acclaimed addition to the ever-popular James Bond pantheon than bought Air Force One, an implausible ho-hum action movie made with a cookie cutter? I am shocked!
Life needs more saving throws.
... in other news, Sony stuffs retail channel with blu-ray DVDs, then issues a press release bragging about it and hoping the gullible tech press will mistake shipments for actual demand.
If by key you mean some random arbitrary metric of the success of the format, then I suppose the title is accurate. If you mean a milestone with actual meaning, then I think the title is a little misleading.
Yeah, I'll bet that all those shipped Blu-ray discs are sitting at hundreds of Best Buy stores, right next to the towers of Playstation 3 systems.
Always someone has power over you. The thing to consider is this: Is the power good, or bad?
It's also available on usenet in 87 versions, including 2 HD copies (1 blu-ray) and 5+ languages.
... with each PS3 sold.
All this says is that a number of PS3 owners have registered online for their 'free' disk.
It's like Nintendo claiming to have won the console wars because of the 1-1 sales of Wii Sports..
And Vista has beat XP's numbers for the first month. What's the significance? Not much.
Given that some disappointingly high percentage of people don't even know what the hell Blu-Ray or HD-DVD are, much less the difference or that they don't work in normal DVD players, how many of these orders were actually intended to be SD-DVD purchases?
Rex is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Probably gonna get modded badly for this, but....... I've yet to see a real reason to care. My level of Apathy on the Blu-ray / HD-DVD thing is so high that, um, I'm not even interested in a witty euphemism.....
It's a marketing spin, and maybe, just maybe, Sony won't repeat the betamax/minidisk/whatever format stumbles they've done in the past. But, based on the companies history alone, you'd get good odds that blu-ray ends up a niche market product.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
..until they get the Blu-Ray v. HD DVD settled. Or I can buy a player that supports both formats for about $200.
Wake me up when that happens.
The closer to HD-DVD or Blu-ray are to winning the format wars, the happier everyone should be. I don't favour one over the other, I just want to see the whole thing resolved so that prices on high-def players can drop and we can make the transition to a new, better platform.
I must confess to a slight preference to Blu-ray, though, because then I could justify buying a PS3!
So is this a commentary on how popular the shiny new gotta-have-it Blu-Ray format is? Or on how much more popular Amazon is today 2007 than in 1998?
Study everything, you'll find something you can use - Jason Bourne
The price of blue lasers have come down too.
Where could you get a blu-ray player 9 months ago? Didn't they -just- come out a couple of months or so ago?
This article states that Sony was GIVING AWAY 500,000 copies of Casino Royale on Blueray to the first 500,000 people to register their PS3 after the European launch of the PS3, which was on March 23rd.
So how many people actually "bought" the movie?
Get off my website
i will not celebrate pointless milestones
I would think that this also has to do with the fact that the format, although new, is still somewhat familiar in terms of the media (looks like a DVD).
When the switch from VHS to DVD occurred (lets pretend Laserdisc never existed) people were going from a big plastic rectangle to a small shiny disc. I would expect some hesitancy there, even though people were accustomed to CDs at that time. But now the change is very small, a Blue Ray disc looks very much like the tried and true DVD disc.
I'll get Blu-Ray when I actually care less about the CONTENT of the movie and, God forbid, its production values, and care more about seeing if I can find a pimple on Bond's perfect, sexy, desireable, face, and...*breaks down sobbing*...why are people in movies always so beautiful!?!? In any case, I care more about content than quality in the case of most things media.
My PS2's DVD video playback always had a habit of freezing, stuttering through sections, or crashing to a black screen. "Unable to read disc". These were perfectly fine, brand new DVDs mind you, and my Sony DVD player plays them just fine.
Want to get lured in by the promise of a less-expensive Blu-Ray DVD player that's also a game console? OK, but in the end it may not be a player you want to rely on for movies. Then you'll still have a perfectly good game system, and you may buy a new DVD player so you can reliably watch movies, and all's well. Well, except did you make that game system purchase for the right reasons? Would you have bought that particular system if not for the lure of DVD playback? Possibly - but that's a question you should consider. Buy the game system as if it didn't have DVD playback features, and then see if it's worth it to you.
Of course, this whole post is gonna stink like FUD, and in a way it is - I had a bad experience with DVD playback on my PS2 and I'm using that to cast doubt on the PS3 because I would expect the situation to turn out similarly. Naturally, I could be wrong about the PS3. But after the PS2 I personally wouldn't bank on that - and so if I buy a PS3 at some point, I'll be buying a game system, not a movie player.
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
...considering how a lot of places bundled this movie with the PS3. What about the OTHER blu-ray movies that have been sold?
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How long before they begin to offer new movies ONLY on the new discs thus forcing us old timers to "upgrade or die"?
I have no use for this new hi-def stuff. My old legacy dvd players and TV's work fine, thank you very much and I don't and won't shell out for new equipment, period. People throw away old CRT TV's all the time, I just pick them up from the curb, repair them and "watch on".. It will be many years before I run out of old style legacy CRT's. I get them for free and it costs me just about as much to repair them.
Why should I go spend money on new stuff when what I have works fine?
Besides, most of the new movies suck anyway. Too much CG and "shaky-cam" and not enough real acting.
I'm perfectly happy watching Turner Classic Movies on my 36" CRT which looks most excellent!
for one.. the article and sony announcement do not say "in the US", just shipped. As another person pointed out Sony is giving away 500,000 copies for registering your PS3 in europe. http://www.siliconera.com/index.php/2007/02/12/eur opean-ps3-owners-get-casino-royale-for-free/
What fun are any of those activities if you don't get drunk before doing them? (Especially wood shop).
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
yeah, and you kids get off the grass too!
:)
sorry couldn't help myself...
- Mike
Once you've lost your temper, you've lost the argument - Me
This is even less impressive than Microsoft's claim that Vista is selling faster than XP did.
And it suffers from the same oversight...
That is, it fails to take into account the increases in market volume and buying power which would make it a useful comparison and instead uses the same raw number to compare two very different markets in two different eras. That raw number of 100,000 doesn't mean the same thing at the dawn of the DVD player as it does now at the dawn of the "BluRay player."
A useful comparison would consist of a ratio or percentage adjusted to take those differences into account. But it's obvious that an honest comparison isn't going to impress anyone.
After 12 years (I'm making an educated guess here), all they can say is that they beat the same raw number of purchases by 2 months?!?!
There's an old saying... "you can't polish a turd."
How does this number compare with the standard def sales of Casino Royale? Does this in any way show that Blu-ray is actually catching on? Could it just be that Bond has a larger appeal to everyone who already owns a Blu-ray player? How many people are purchasing the movie along with a player (which would indicate that the movie is drawing new customers)?
Could it just be that people finally have a compelling reason to actually purchase a hi-def format movie?
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Nice standard Slashdot proofreading!
there are no blueray hddvd usenet gr... (user is duct taped to chair and muzzled by greybeards)#*&^$)No Carrier.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Which is it? You don't care if all new movies are HD only formats because they don't use painted backgrounds and cameras on tripods or you're bitter because when they re-release Casablanca for the millionth time you won't be able to buy a new copy?
When a new storage medium comes out, I drool and think only two of these and my entire HD will be backed up! Just need to wait for prices to come down!
When prices do come down, I then have five times the storage I did, requiring 10-12 disks. Once again making back ups on to removable storage time consuming, cumbersome, and fault prone.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Yeah I'd say it's FUD because you don't own a PS3 and therefore can't have a valid opinion on the Blu-Ray functionality.
I do own one and the BR support is second to none. Furthermore since it's online, any time Sony finds a bug, they can sneak the fix in with the next firmware update. The PS3 will remain the best BR player despite what anyone else builds. Not only that but tons of magazines have already had showdowns with BR players and the PS3 wins every single time. Speed, ergonomics, correctness, etc. it wins in every category.
Now there are a very small handful of 'video purists' that criticize the lack of 1080p/24fps support which is true film and prevents 4:3 pulldown, but Sony can add support at any time via firmware. Not only that but I have yet to see *any* player support 1080p/24.
Blockbuster no longer rents or sells VHS tapes. It took less than 10 years for DVD to kill VHS. So, your probably OK using old SD-DVDs for another 8 years.
The sort of people who would accidentally pay $27-35 for the Blu-Ray version rather than the 15-20$ DVD version are the same type that voted for Buchanon instead of Gore in 2000. IOW, not very many.
People may be stupid, but they're also cheap.
(Someone makes this stupid comment in every blu-ray/hddvd thread)
You mean the way they were giving DVDs away with players 9 years ago?
Does anybody think that what happened to beta is going to happen to the blu-ray? Beta had better quality than VHS, but due to crazy copywrite laws it failed. Is blu-ray threatened in the same way?
There's not exactly a vast range of choice for Blu-ray owners, is there?
I think some form of Bayesian analysis is in order to adjust the stats so they're fair. I suspect just comparing straight numbers is highly skewed.
Who marked this insightful? It is not insightful, it is wrong. The article says 100k shipped in the US. The free movies are in PAL areas and is closer to the 500k figure if I remember correctly how many Sony promised to give away.
In the mean time, however, testimonials like yours may be more reliable than ones like mine, when dealing with the PS3.
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
In my opinion the Blu-Ray QC is already flaky with production studios pretty much doing what they want and not really following a standard. Not all discs give you uncompressed PCM, every disc has a different Live Menu, and the codec they choose to encode the disc is usually a mystery. However, it's nothing like the pathetic situation with DVDs where any kid in his basement can (poorly) author a disc.
5 3726
Thank god for AVSForums and their quality guide. http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=7
Maybe people are buying the BluRay version because the DVD version of Casino Royale is hideously broken.
Watching the movie on my Mac Pro with a moderately priced receiver and speakers, the audio level drops were so distracting it was hard to watch the movie. The first one I noticed was during Audioslave's intro song during the animation. It continued to happen throughout the movie. In action scenes, music would be loud, and just before a punch, the audio level would drop to 1/2 or less, and then slowly build back up.
I tried it on my cheap Sony TV and DVD player and didn't notice the problem, but it could be because the speakers are so bad.
Then I tried the movie in VLC on the Mac, and had the same problem.
Next I ran it on my work Thinkpad with Intervideo's WinDVD, and noticed the problem too. If you can hear an audio problem on laptop speakers, it MUST be bad!
It is possible that this is a result of crippling the DVD to prevent ripping -- MacTheRipper could not rip it for me to backup, something about not being able to view the filesystem tree. You can browse the DVD fine on the desktop, although the AUDIO_TS folder is empty for some reason.
However, I have heard others complain of the same thing, so I think I just didn't notice it on my 20" TV because the speakers are too crappy. On a real home A/V system I bet it would be just as distracting.
Sorry, Sony, this one's coming back.. I won't buy broken DVDs. I watch all of my movies on my computer.
What a shame, too, as it was an excellent movie.
I've tried using my PS2 for DVD playback, its awful.
I've also tried using my PS3 for DVD playback, it rivals a standalone DVD player from Toshiba I got two years ago. It even managed to play-through a really bad scratch on the DVD that the Toshiba just flat out locked up on.
Its also been pretty good on Blu-Ray disks.
I've enjoyed using it enough I went out and got the Bluetooth Remote (which functions just fine), and I'm ditching my stand-alone player, which also trims back 5 cables from the clutter (component+audio vs. the PS3s HDMI)
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
If rental stores are any guide, it'll be a 5 to 7 years before you see DVD's disappear from stores completely. I remember I got my first DVD player around 97 or 98, just when DVD's were starting to show up in the movie rental places on a little shelf. Now, you'd be hard pressed to find a VHS in a rental store and it's been like that for quite a while.
Still, your resistance to change attitude doesn't hold any water. You seemed to have ditched your VHS players for DVD with no problems and I expect around 2017, you'll be having another argument about your legacy Blu-Ray players work just fine and you're not ditching them for the [insert cool future product here] players.
Have you ever considered piracy? You'd make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts.
Depends on how you do it. My backup solution has a hard drive (well, a RAID array) that is replaced every year. The year-old drives then either get handed down to my gaming PC (on which a hard drive failure isn't especially critical), or they get wiped and sold. Upgrading the backup drives yearly keeps decently new drives where the new-ness is important, and I get bigger drives cheaper to accommodate my growing storage needs. Plus, they stay powered up regularly to prevent them dying from lack of use. I've found that drives generally tend to die in the first two weeks, or else they survive the year and more...I haven't lost any important data yet, this way.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
Slashdot hosting and editors aren't free, you insensitive clod!
Ranting makes people feel tough and in control, so go ahead and rant all you want about Sony rootkits, DRM, and viral marketing, but whatever you do, don't stop buying their products.
Did slashdot just become a Blu-Ray disc fanboy site? A while ago there was a link about Blu-Ray having Casino Royale in the top 100 on Amazon. Yesterday there were *five* HD-DVD titles in the top 100, Children of Men, Happy Feet, BBC Planet Earth, and the two Matrix box sets (three of these moves are in the top 50). There were only two Blu-Ray titles in the top 100, Casino Royale and Planet Earth. Claims of HD-DVD's death are premature. With recent talk on avsforum.com that sub-$200 HD-DVD players maybe coming this fall, Blu-Ray might be looking at a tough haul.
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The public are now switched on more than ever before. I can't describe it properly because my degree maths is fucked (reminds me of marge simpson saying how she'd never been able to calculate everyday calculus problems...).. But Log? Fuck modern day statistics, they'll always be out of tune with the last gen.
Oh, you must have one of those new line doublers than inserts resolution that wasn't there in the original source material.
Are they made by God?
No, they're made by GREYC Lab. That algorithm isn't real-time yet, but there do exist algorithms that can guess the high spatial frequencies that VHS and DVD-Video filter out. Specifically, upscalers with a cartoon mode may draw inspiration from hq3x. Can I get one for my VHS player, so my VHS tapes can look like 720p too? I haven't played with the GREYCstoration noise reduction algorithms myself, but it might be possible to tune them for the kind of noise output by consumer videotape equipment.of course, people are starved for content, didn't they sell 50k copies of the three stooges the day it came out ? :p
My PS3 did nto come with a blue ray movie Or a voucher for one. Not all packages sold had a free movie or a voucher.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
I've had multiple BR discs from multiple studios work really well on my PS3. DVD's look good too. You may fault Sony for a lot but the PS3 BR/DVD playback is very good. It upconverts well. The controller also works well as a remote. fairly intuitive. The only fault I can find is there is no "rip movie" button. If there was I'd have filled this 60 gig hd.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
I am a thoughtful poster!
And if YOU think that kick-ass TV is really adding ANYTHING other than the ILLUSION of motion, you must not know much about them either.
Moral: People pay for illusions that they find desirable.
I'm sorry. I think I've been spending a bit too much time of Digg. Knee-jerk reaction. ;-)
I'll chime and and say, that I also know from personal experience that 720P looks way, way better than SD video - upsampled or not. There is only so much you can do to upsample an image.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When Microsoft did not ship a console with an HD-DVD drive, and Disney and Sony both sided only with Blu-Ray - together, that decided the format war last year.
We're just waiting for Toshiba or Universal to sheepishly announce they were this generations DiVX platform (even if it failed for different reasons).
Sales figures also show the format was has been decided. My guess is four months before Universal announces they are also supporting Blu-Ray. When there are no exclusive studios left, what will the format do?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How long before they begin to offer new movies ONLY on the new discs thus forcing us old timers to "upgrade or die"?
Eight to ten years, at least. It's been nearly a decade since DVD's first came to market, and we've only recently reached the point where the major media companies no longer release their offerings on VHS.
I suspect by 2015 or so the idea that we need physical access to a round shiny disk in order to watch a movie will seem as dated as the audiocassette or the typewriter.
How many of those sales are from people walking into BestBuy, Circuit City, etc wanting to buy the Regular DVD and getting home with the BluRay version instead.
:) /ancker
Someone should do a study on how many of those 100k were returned or exchanged for standard def version.
Given the average 'savviness' of the typical BestBuy/Circuit City customer, and the BestBuy/Circuit City employees' usual attempt at selling you the most expensive of everything, regardless of whether or not you have equipment to run it, I'd be willing to guess 40% of those sales are to people who SWEAR that the BluRay version of Casino Royale looks better on their Standard Def TV, than the regular DVD.
Those discs you mentioned also all supported DVD playback, so there's no way to infer much from the sales figures of those discs. I actually think people that just bought HD-TVs are buying some of those expecting them to look better because they are "HD-DVD", illustrating the hideous mistake made in choosing such a similar name for a new format.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I can't even begin to count how many worthless posts I've read like this on slashdot since I started reading this site in 2000. Mod this post down! The same can be said of every technological advancement since the wheel. Who gives a fuck what people think who don't see the need for a technological advancement? No one with a brain, that's for sure.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Aie, as zordac says the "free" blueray disk's a promotion in UK only. I'd kinda assumed that it was the same deal in the USA too - it's extremely rare for us Brits to get any benefits from Sony.
Guess it's a loss leader to get people started on Blueray, which is more than made up for by the difference in retail prices (we pay more for the disks even after all taxes).
Who cares? It made 100,000 faster than dvd did and more importantly more fast than hd-dvd. When is hd-dvd going to hit a 100,000 mark? Yeah, I thought so. It is still good news for the blu-ray camp and gives me more confidence in buying a blu-ray player. I will be one to also add onto that 100,000+ number.
'You may fault Sony'
'The only fault I can find is there is no "rip movie" button.'
You do realize that Sony Pictures and Sony Entertainment are part of the same company that made your PS3? You will never be able to rip or copy anything through that device if they can help it.
'Furthermore since it's online, any time Sony finds a bug, they can sneak the fix in with the next firmware update.'
So what you are saying is that the moment someone finds out how to get around the anti-customer protections that prevent you from using the player to play backups Sony can slip in a 'fix' without your permission?
Thanks but no thanks. I have a rather extensive movie collection and I take care of them. Discs are just too fragile, especially children's movies. I have a backup of each of my hundreds of discs and I have needed those backups numerous times. I also have a number of movies that I digitized from VHS and encoded to DVD. I'll pass on any player that I can't safely hack on without having to worry about repercussions from an anti-consumer vendor. Especially one like Sony that doesn't merely cater to the vile music and movie industries but is actually a part of both.
Damnit, there is no real difference between Bluray and HD-DVD except Bluray costs more, and is being subsidized by Sony in the PS3. I don't plan on buying a PS3, so if Bluray actually comes through on top, in the end, and if someday I get an HDTV, I'll have to buy a bluray player, and it will be more expensive... For no techincal reasons whatsoever. HDDVD has more than enough capacity to store hd video when using a decent compression codec... I am not pleased.
--The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. --Tycho Brahe (Penny Arcade)
Nothing is stopping you (yet) from dumping a Blu-Ray disc within Linux on the PS3 then playing it back. Stripping DRM and other important things are up to you.
Also you seem to be proud of players and media formats without copy protection, but even VCRs had macrovision that made copies go all wobbly. Good luck on finding *any* high-def content with no protection.
While I'm in the same boat as you, and I honestly believe that any media I purchase is mine and I should be allowed to make backups, unfortunately the industry as a whole does not agree.
'Nothing is stopping you (yet) from dumping a Blu-Ray disc within Linux on the PS3 then playing it back.'
I admit I don't know about the PS3 but I have a hard time believing that the player isn't region coded and will play unencrypted discs.
'While I'm in the same boat as you, and I honestly believe that any media I purchase is mine and I should be allowed to make backups, unfortunately the industry as a whole does not agree.'
Fortunately copyright law still agrees with us. Just because the industry doesn't agree with us doesn't mean we have to spend money on devices and technologies that implement DRM schemes. That goes double for a device that phones home to ask for firmware updates in case the DRM scheme gets beaten.
Except of course this article is talking US sales where Casino Royale was never given away.
You know what? I don't care that the back drops are painted. So what? It's just the original way of doing it now. Now everything is computer generated.
What's the big deal you say? With modern CG type movies, the actors suck, the scripts suck, the direction sucks, the entire plot sucks. They attempt to disguise these facts with lots of shit blowing up (CG), extreme closeups and shakey camera shots (example, the new BSG shows).. With all of those distractions the audience doesn't care if the actors can't act, they are too busy having orgasms over the CG explosions, closeups, LOUD music and shakey-cam.
In the OLD movies the actors had to make you BELIEVE in what they were doing, you were engrossed in the plot, the actors/actresses convinced you that it was all real. You didn't care that the back drops were painted or the trees were fakes on a sound stage.
Try watching some classics on TCM sometime. Let me recommend North by Northwest and The Man Who Knew too Much (1956 Jimmy Stewart & Doris Day) for some real entertainment.
BTW, get off my grass!!
Surely it's aye, not aie? Isn't aie how french comic characters scream? Aieeeeeee!!!! Le chat est dans la piscine!
Two tears in a bucket. Motherfuck it.
DVD was quick to take off? I knew only one person to buy a player in the first 2 years, and probably 70% of people I know bought their DVD player in the last 3 years, more than 5 years after DVD's came out. That's not a brilliant benchmark to compare against. Plus a lot of people I know got their first DVD player in the form of a PS2 or XBOX, which only came out years after DVD's were available. Before then DVD players were just too expensive and had too narrow a range at the video libary etc. Once PS2 and XBOX came out DVD took off (at least here in Australia). Bluray only came out shortly before PS3 (at least in the US), and in Australia it's the cheapest bluray player available (or very close too). If they had only $Au1000 to $Au1500 stand alone bluray players for the first 3 years and then released the PS3 I would expect nearly nobody to own one in the first 3 years. It's obvious releasing the PS3 so early can be the only reason why any bluray discs have been sold yet.
UMD's shipped a ton too. How'd they sell? Oh right, so many people bought them that retailers pulled them from store shelves to reclaim shelf space.
Most of these Blu Ray so-called "sales" are actually heavily discounted or free discs that PS3 owners get by using vouchers. If you give away a million copies of a DVD, that doesn't make it the "top selling DVD" of the week. Sorry. The high def war won't be decided by the tiny percent of richie riches who purchase discs now. Eventually, just like DVD, 90% of US citizens will have a high def player. Compared to that market, 100 million households, the tiny percent who will have high def while it is super expensive don't matter at all. Either side can still win- whoever first sells a player cheap enough for Joe Average to buy it will be the winner. You early adopters just don't matter.
I don't think that DVD is going anywhere soon. The reason is that most people, atleast for a long time, are only going to have 1 HDTV and Blue-ray/HD-DVD player (if they have one at all). They aren't going to have HDTV's in their kitchen, office, bedroom, or whatever. The reason is that in order to take advantage of that, you need a big screen. Most people aren't putting 30"+ TVs anywhere but their living rooms. When your down to a 13-19" TV, there isn't any significant difference between DVD and the HD formats (unlike DVD and VHS, which was obvious even on a cheap 13" CRT). As such, people are going to be very slow at completely dumping DVD, atleast until the point is reached when the HD stuff is no more expensive, so you might as well buy that HD/Blue-ray player for the bedroom.
Same idiots who rate any anti-Sony comments +5, and any anti-XBox remarks troll. They rate every pro-Sony news as "overrated", etc...
Same people who support anti-Sony stories, but then when a positive one comes along, it's from Sony marketing. They don't realize they've been brainwashed by Microsoft's viral campaign.
I mean, you end up liking the film, the ending makes no sense. You cannot explain the ending in any kind of rational way unless you assume the female lead was complete nuts and did things randomly throughout the film.
I mean, I'll buy the film just for the action, but the director must've fallen asleep when he ended the last part of the movie.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Be careful with the term "better players". There's a standard, and then there are bugs. One could call IE a "better browser" because it handles degenerate HTML, but in fact that actually led to a reduction in quality of content, not browsers.
All I'm trying to say is if the ps2 or ps3 is the "reference" player, and they handle all legal streams ok, then there is nothing at all wrong with them and you should just buy a ps3 and not worry about it. If someone releases non-compliant blu-ray, then they need to recall their damn disc. I'm not clear on what failed to work on the ps2, but it doesn't make it a better player if it plays broken content, it only encourages more broken content.
At work, i feel kinda dirty. The guy bought it for no other reason than that it was a blu-ray movie. Theyre in the (small) case with the PS3 games and we only have X3 and the Italian Job (marky mark version). He asked if we had any and i pointed him to the case, i unlocked it for him and he grabbed x3 and then was looking at The Italian Job, he said hed never even heard of it and asked if id seen it. Then he asked if those were the only Blu-Ray movies we had... I though X3 was pretty good, but even if i had a blu-ray player (and i do have a 1080i TV), i cant see spending $30 for that, ill wait till its in the $5 bin. And honestly, if its a good enough movie are you going to notice the difference between the $5 DVD and the $20 Blu-ray, or are you going to be too wrapped up in the story? But really, i couldnt get someone buying a movie not because they wanted to have and watch the movie, but because it was a blu-ray movie.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
The amount of money ploughed into advertising the Blu-Ray version of "Casino Royale" was phenominal. It's also a damn good movie, so it's hardly surprising that it sold well.
Also, with the lack of decent games, movie playback is one of the few things that PS3 owners can fully utilise their shiny new console for.
You make an excellent point IMO - except that errors can be introduced by damaged media as well. For this reason it's important that players be able to handle errors well, unless the media collection is kept pristine.
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
Check out this link5 -22-handheld-movies_x.htm [usatoday.com]
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/gear/2005-0
According to Sony in 2005, it only took nine months (not eleven) for "Air Force One" to SELL 100,000. So now Sony says eleven months to ship (like anybody can't ship an arbitrary number of copies- it's sales that matter) in order to make Blu-ray not look like a flop. UMD took only a couple of months before it had two titles that SOLD 100,000 units. And they had the full support of Universal. So I guess we can logically conclude that Blu-ray will never be as "successful" as UMD is (was).