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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 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.
Could it just be that Casino Royale is a better film that Air Force One?
Evil people are out to get you.
Well, it's a good thing you don't have to wait. Every disk released so far is cracked. They are going to take a stab at improving the protection, but companies have been doing that since DeCSS came out.
And yes, I went out and bought a bunch of blu-ray disks after the cracks happened, for much the same reason.
I don't know about the PS3, but the PS2 was in a similar situation with its DVD drive. Ultimately, the DVD drive in the PS2 wasn't the best. It worked ok on simple movies, but it tended to get edge cases wrong on more complex discs. You'd see this as messed up subtitles on foreign films, "camera angle" changes that were handled incorrectly, menu choices that don't get translated correctly in the film and so on. Granted, a lot of these were bugs on the disc itself, but better players managed to work around the bugs and work correctly regardless.
I read the internet for the articles.
Imagine when everyone out there who knows he needs to back stuff up backs stuff up to a single Blu-Ray disc (all 50gb) and then the disc stops functioning.
Even if disc and burner prices come down pretty dramatically, I think we're to the point with hard disks that they're cheaper and more usable/recoverable after long-term storage and/or damage.
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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!
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 don't believe my newer slim-style PS2 is affected nearly as much as you say. I run progressive scan on it at 61", and for the most part it looks good with only a few de-interlacing artifacts. While I do plan on replacing it with a real standalone player (I'd love to hear what player you bought) I don't think the progressive upscaling is nearly as bad on the newest PS2s.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
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