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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."
...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.
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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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.
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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!
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... 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.
Try using the PS2 DVD player on a progressive scan TV. The quality is abysmal, deinterlacing artifacts everywhere. Every software player I've used on my computer has done a far better job. The PS2 DVD player is alright if all you've got is a cheap TV without component/progressive scan, but stick it on a good TV and it looks awful. I got a progressive scan Divx-enabled DVD player at Wal-mart for $37, and it beats the PS2 by leaps and bounds.
... 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?
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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.
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..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.
I currently use a PS3 strictly for a BD player and it works quite well. I have the BD remote control that Sony sells and it functions like a normal play would. It even boots up faster than the standalone players. However, the true videophile would say that because the source of the movie is 24fps and the PS3 outputs 60fps that you're not getting the best picture available. I'm not so sure if I'm able to tell the difference myself. Here's an article from that explains a little bit more.
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?
Much more probably is that there are only a handful of BR releases now and people want to buy something to play on their new expensive players.
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/
Every "professional" review I've seen comparing the PS3 to a standalone player all said that the PS3 was just as good, if not better, than the first-gen standalones. Keyword here is first-gen. The big plus for the PS3 was faster loading times than the standalone. Of course, the PS3 will always be the same with each new generation of standalone. The real question is how much HD is enough? Alreayd it's very difficult to tell the difference between 1080i and 1080p.
AUDIO_TS is almost always empty (I've never seen an AUDIO_TS folder with anything in it). I assume that's for audio DVDs. The video (and associated audio) is in the VIDEO_TS folder. Have you tried the newest beta of MacTheRipper? Just curious.
'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.