Slashdot Mirror
Future Blu-ray Movies To Come With Playable Game Demos
Audiofan writes "Enthusiasts have long suggested the PlayStation 3 to their family and friends as one of the better and most affordable Blu-ray players. Lately, prices of Blu-ray players have been coming down, but the PS3 is still one of the better options out there. Sony is taking advantage of this by starting to offer game demos on their Blu-ray offerings. While these demos will only be playable on the PS3, they hope the extra value will help drive sales."
... for the porn industry to whip up something fun with this.
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
Oh you crazy consumers...
You'll get a feature limited demo of our crappy sweatshop game, with ads on all the loading screens(also present in $60 full version and $80 non-resellable-DLC-fuck-you-gamestop edition), on the same disk as the average movie tie in.
And by god, you'll like it(or we'll blame piracy).
You forgot the trojan that gets installed if your player happens to be a computer.
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
I'm amazed you can exhibit such foresight from under that bridge!
I often scoff at marketing ploys, but game demos are a good thing. As long as this doesn't increase the price of the discs, this is more value for your dollar- it isn't as if you have to play the demo to watch your movie.
Now, just watch them bundle some highly anticipated game demo exclusively with some crap film- SURPRISE HOME MOVIE SALES HIT OF THE SUMMER!
Can't these companies get it through their thick skulls that Bluray is a dead on arrival format? That consumers don't see it as a necessary update to their plain DVDs, which they see as good enough even with the advent of HD televisions?
Companies are just trying to beat consumers over the head with Bluray for long enough in the hope that some day it might actually catch on, thanks to their wonderfully deep pockets (while they say that they're losing money due to piracy...), instead of letting the market decide what fails and lives. In the past, Bluray would have long been dead, but now Sony and other companies pushing this DOA format are stubbornly determined to make it succeed despite overwhelming apathy for it.
Let it die. Yes, a few people buy it, but no more than the normal amount of "early adopters" for any new technology. It's over, let it pass into history as yet another failed format nobody wants.
Anonymous Coward because I *know* there will be people accusing me of technophobia, hatred of new technology, etc, instead of seeing my argument as what it is -- basic common sense reasoning.
IMDB > Actor biographies
Google Images > Special Artwork
YouTube & Movies Sites > Deleted Scenes and Behind the Scenes Documentaries
Blogs > Director's commentaries
Apple/Youtube > Upcoming releases
Ripping Disc to cleanse the movie > FBI Warning
Watching mold grow > Overdone menus
Surfing the net on my own > Launching my browser with your dumpy "special access" software.
Root Canal > DVD Quizzes
And now...
Downloading Demos > Having them bundled
Hooray, I love more garbage that will make my movies seem even more dated when I watch them 10 years later.
Who am I kidding? They probably won't even put the demos on the disks...they'll just waste your bandwidth by using BD Live to download the demo.
Great idea! This'll be bigger than UMD Vide... oh...
Nevermind...
Oooh, that's a nasty, BOFHish, twist. I salute you.
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
It isn't a trojan if there is a cryptic reference to it somewhere in our illegibly tiny 55 page EULA...
it's only a matter of time that we'll be watching full blu-ray movies off the ps3 network, kind of like the itune store where we can pay couple dollars and keep the movie for 3 days or so.
Most people, I think, don't even know what a Trojan is, so why should they care about it?
As much as many here are too smart to be fooled by this, think back to when Dragon Quest VIII came with a pack-in demo of FFXII. I doubt much of the gaming populace actually bought DQVIII to play it rather than to play the demo (although I like to think that people bought it for DQVIII). However with downloaded demos a much bigger thing nowdays I don't see how this would work. If other demos work just fine when uploaded to the internet and burned on a CD (at least for the xbox 360) then I fail to see how that will be impossible to do here as well. Thus the demo will just show up on bittorrent sites for all to enjoy without wasting their money on District 9.
Most people outside of slashdot probably have a vague idea.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
The greeks did that to the trojans. The trojans had an unbreakable wall. I think that's the idea.
This is awesome. Most game demos have to give you enough to wet your appetite for more. Most of the time you can realize the game would suck, but the demo usually has a few redeeming qualities making the 30 minutes that you play the demo rewarding and entertaining.
So: I'm all for it.
Wasn't so unbreakable after all, was is?
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
The Greeks built the horse. The Trojans were dumb enough to haul it inside the city walls.
Paris, prince of Troy, started the whole bloody war when he seduced the already married Helen of Sparta.
I believe it is possible to do exactly this with Matroska, as described here.
--bornagainpenguin
Have a Virgin Mobile USA smartphone? Give VMRoms.com a try!
But who's really going to pay the price of a Blu-ray disc to play the game demo, even if they REALLY want to? I mean sure, if its on the same disc as a film you'd buy anyway... but to buy Terrible Parody Movie 9 to play the demo of the ohmygodsweetjesusawesome Halo (or any other highly popular game) game coming out the next spring... no.
Ah am not a crook! (\(-__-)/)
I really hope that bluray is the last of this shiny plastic disc phenomenon. I had a somewhat respectable VHS collection, then amassed a healthy DVD collection, jumped on the HD-DVD bandwagon with the HD player add-on for the 360 before that battle was lost, and now I've got about the same number of bluray discs.
We've been told time and again, when you buy an album, or a copy of a movie, you don't *own* that copy, you have merely licensed it. So I'm not allowed to make a backup for personal use of the copy of my license, when the new format comes out, I have to buy a new "license" for the IP I have already licensed.... I am sooo ready to simply "license" movies via a Netflix like subscription service....I'll pay $20/month (less than the cost of 2 premium cable TV channels) if I can "rent" any movie I like on the fly. I've already got a 20 Mb/s internet connection, and with DOCSIS 3.0 coming to my area next year, should be fast enough to stream reasonably compressed HD content. No more need to buy and keep track of fragile little discs...or have to re-purchase when the next format comes out 12 years later.
I'm just over it.
I think this is more of a case of "hey, we have extra space left over, we can sell that as premium video game advertising space!". Joe developer might not get much per disc to put a demo on a straight to video disc, but how much is EA, Valve, or Bethseda willing to pay to put Metal Gear Solid 5 demo, Grand Turismo 7 demo etc on something as big as Transformers 3 Blu Ray disc? The production studio/director probably sign away marketing rights on their DVD/Blu Ray already, so this is money straight in the distributor's pocket, pure and simple. On crappy B movies, distributors might make more money selling game demo ad space for games like Army Men 5: Melting in Iraq or Big Game Hunter 9: Return of Bigfoot or whatever crapware, than they actually do selling the movie on the disc.
Once the technology exists to play PS3 demo games on a blu-ray disc, this is like printing free money for Sony.
moox. for a new generation.
RTFA? Oh, wait, I forgot where I was for a moment. ;) :)
Anyways, yes this is almost exactly what they're doing. Bundling an *extremely* highly anticipated game demo with a reasonably successful film. In this case it's the God of War 3 demo bundled with District 9. A movie I want to own and a game I want to try. So as long as it doesn't cost any extra, yes I will be buying this.
Yeah - typical Greek view. He seduced her like she got no say in the matter. More likely she was just tired of being married to some old king who obviously wasn't a very nice person as he was willing to kill his own daughter to please Poseidon. Personally I just attribute the whole affair to Eris, she of the Golden Apple (Hail Eris!)
Anyway, we should enjoy our Greek Myth while we can. Hollywood is about to butcher them yet again.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
But this might be a little irritating to any blu-ray player manufacturers NOT named Sony.
"they hope the extra value will help drive sales"
Instead of increasing the value to "match" the price, they should simply lower their price.
Personally, this would annoy me. I hate trailers on discs. I (and I assume most people) only buy discs because we'll want to keep the movie and watch it again in time. And when I do, it's very irritating to see trailers for old movies pop up or (with the early Blu-Rays) a feature piece telling me how great Blu-Ray is. I would feel the same way about demos for games.
On top of this, a producer would be shooting itself in the foot by not making a demo available elsewhere, e.g. for download online. So if it's already available, then why would the people getting the Blu-Ray need a second source?
But mainly, I just want my movie collection to be a collection of the things I actually want. Not littered with rapidly out of date ads. If I wanted an ad-supported model, I'd find one. People who pay for content always resent finding the seller trying to make a quick buck by subjecting them to ads as well.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I agree the movie quality shouldn't suffer. However many disks do have some space left over so why not use it?
just about the only thing you can't do with a PS3 is use it as a DVR.
This might be true in the US, but in other regions the PlayTV hardware add-on enables you to do exactly that. PlayTV allows you to watch live free-to-air TV and HDTV through the PS3, and record those programs to the PS3's hard drive. I bought the PlayTV add-on (I'm in the UK) as it was cheaper than buying a standalone DVR for free-to-air broadcasts, and have found it to be easier to use and far more reliable than the standalone alternatives available here
I never understood why a condom brand would want to associate itself with the trojans.
New ad campaign: "Put on a Trojan and you'll get inside her walls"
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
So you are saying it is "Wear our condom, you are an idiot." How the fuck does that help?
1080p screen, PS3 player. Same movie on DVD and Blu-ray (both over HDMI straight from PS3 to screen), the Blu-ray version wins hands down. The difference is night and day. Maybe that points to my screen being a dumb 1080p monitor and not trying to enhance the crappy DVD picture quality. Some friends have really nice 1080p Sony TVs and their DVD quality (also through a PS3 over HDMI) is noticeable better, likely due to their TV doing extra image processing on the video signal that mine doesn't.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
That would have been awesome, Futurama blu-Ray with playable Game Demo...but NO! ;-/
Also check if your PS3 is doing any up-scaling. Your friends might have this turned on while you don't. I'll still agree the difference is night and day but I'd advise checking anyway.
Technically the gods killed the guy who said that they shouldn't trust the horse with snakes, and everyone else was afraid and hurled it in, so you can't really blame them.
They will go on the shelf next to all those dvds with the action viewable from different camera angles and lots of alternate endings and stuff we were promised when the same kind of idiots in suits were selling us a new more profitable format.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
I would feel the same way about demos for games.
It's just going to be another option on the menu, which won't even appear unless you have a PS3 (if they are at all competent anyway.) Or perhaps another trailer in the intro trailers, which you can skip or which don't play if you buy movies from non-jackasses.
But mainly, I just want my movie collection to be a collection of the things I actually want. Not littered with rapidly out of date ads.
So, uh, rip 'em down to the movies. Aside from the whole DMCA thing, it's still a legal act. If you're doing it solely for the purposes of backups, nobody is going to sue you. Or simply refuse to purchase media not provided on your terms, and enjoy staring at the wall.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I have a 32 inch 720p lcd tv and a 24 inch 1080p monitor. I also have a blu-ray player and hdmi. While yes I can see the difference between upscaled DVDs and blu-ray discs, its simply not worth paying triple the price for the blu-ray.
The problem is not the blu-ray discs the problem is the blu-ray player does such a good job at upscaling DVDs that on most 32 inch and smaller tvs it is "good enough" that you dont feel the need to spend the money to replace the DVD disc.
What the blu-ray fanatics arent saying when they describe about how their friends eyes are popping, is they are comparing watching their blu-rays on 72 inch lcd tvs versus watching non-upscaled dvds on an sdtv, the PS3 does not automatically upscale dvds unless you have the correct firmware and have the settings set for it , oops they didnt tell you that did they?
They also didnt tell you that upscaling on a ps3 is not as good as many regular upscaling dvd players let alone standalone blu-ray players because the system doesnt do that much postprocessing. Why would that be?
I guess sony doesnt really want people seeing upscaled content, that doesnt sell blu-ray discs does it?
You may be an idiot, but Aphrodite has given you a rather large endowment.
That is both fascinating and interesting but also total bullshit as a process. I don't want to have to hack DVDs. Maybe if handbrake had an option for it, but I've had very poor luck with MKVs made by handbrake anyway.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You don't have to break into if you can trick others into letting you in. That's the point of the trojan horse.
Circumcision is child abuse.
I like game demos. They overwhelmingly show me that I don't want to buy games. Sometimes they show me the opposite, which is rare, but leads to fun. I don't even mind ad screens; the only thing I do mind is when I can blow through the demo in less than an hour. But I guess since lots of people only want an hour, it's an effective means of getting money out of some of them. Unfortunately, there's usually not enough depth in such a demo to convince the rest of us to buy it...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Personally, this would annoy me. I hate trailers on discs.
Do you hate trailers, or do you hate forced trailers? I can't see how you can have any problem with trailers hiding behind a menu selection, or sometimes two menus (as a sub-item of an Extras menu).
This is a problem with DVD too, it's just that (from what I hear, not having yet drunk Sony's kool-aid) it already takes Blu-Ray what, 60 or more seconds to get where you can start watching the movie when the studio doesn't pull their arrogant "WE'RE SO AWESOME WATCH OUR FLYING LOGO AGAIN WITH CONTROLS DISABLED" crap?
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I prefer to download my game demos. This is the combination of two physical forms of media that can be completely digital and available over an Internet connection. I guess I shouldn't be shocked after they started offering streaming Netflix on the PS3 using a disc. Sony, once again you amaze me with your ability to not try very hard.
The same feature limited demo of our crappy sweatshop game that you can download for free from Playstation Store.
You are welcome on my lawn.
If I'd only known what a Trojan was a few years ago, I'd still be single.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Remember, the trojans did to young boys what the Greeks did to them.
Surprise!
You are welcome on my lawn.
The precedent is already there.
It's the only reason anyone bought Crackdown.
Young man, the original Clash of the Titans was one of the finest films ever made.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Then you cannot watch the movie until you have
1. watched all the advertisements
2. passed level one of the game.
Have a nice, romantic evening!
OT: The new Clash of the Titans is going to have Ralph Fiennes and Liam Neeson.
I always thought they were the same guy. It'll be interesting to see if they are in any scenes together.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I like demos, too.
I wondered why there was no demo for Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 until I played the game and finished it in just over 5 hours.
The demo would have been about 13 seconds long.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Your post is very whiny and not really relevant to anything.
By coupling a game demo to a movie, I am forced to forever have to keep the game demo, whether I like it or not.
Jesus, who cares? It's not like you ever have to play it again. This is like complaining that your VHS copy of Ninja Turtles 3 has out-dated ads for products you can't buy anymore. Deal with it.
This tells me that I am not getting a.) high quality video, b.) high quality sound
Why does it tell you that? Because the movie didn't fill up the blu-ray by itself? Then how would you expect them to get extras on your beloved purchases? Do you know how much capacity a blu-ray disc has?
If I buy a movie, I want a movie, with extras pertaining to the movie.
This is anecdotal, but I generally want to watch the damned movie when I buy it, not listen to asinine commentary or watch stupid videos about the catering for the set.
Especially since you can download them from the Playstation Store without having to shell out for the Blue Ray version of 2013 - This Time it's for Real starring Ralph Fiennes and Liam Neeson as reincarnated identical twin Mayan princes who travel forward in time to finish what their calendar only started.
You are welcome on my lawn.
What I don't understand is why you can't simply play your DVDs on your Blu-Ray player?
The larger, sharper TVs used with a Blu-ray Disc player show larger, sharper artifacts that in fact were always in the DVD media. When you upscale an artifact, all you get is a bigger artifact.
Apparently it was. You may want to remember that the Greeks didn't win by breaking the wall.
That was Agamemnon, not his brother Menelaus. Agamemnon's wife Clytemnestra got to show him what she thought of that when he got home from the war.
I have a Toshiba upscaling DVD player and a PS3. I have seen no indication whatsoever that the PS3 has any limitations or problems with upscaling DVDs. They look very nice on my 52" 1080p TV. I only bother with Blu-Ray for F/X blockbusters; for chick flicks with the wife I don't need to be able to read the notes on the refrigerator behind the characters.
Where, exactly, are you getting the information that the PS3's upscaling is gimped? At one point, early on, it didn't do upscaling. But that was fixed back in May 2007 (firmware 1.80), and there's been a couple improvements since then...
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Which was AWESOME by the way. Far better than the demo you bought the game for.
I thought the LEGO Batman/Indiana Jones games would be fun, because I like Batman/Indiana Jones, and I love LEGO.
I'm glad XBox Live had demos, saved me some money.
When the game sucks you release the demo weeks after the initial release, thus suckering people into buying the real product because they wont / cant wait, only to be disappointed.
Although, the recent trend has been to release a early beta and when you run into problems they say its beta and it will be fixed in the commercial release.
I agree in that I do also get my demos from PSN.. but recently, I am finding PSN is getting pretty crowded (not a bad thing, as it shows more games are available). Add to that the time taken to download a 650MB - 1GB demo (still takes time).
I woudl not "mind" if there is about 650MB spare left on the BD to also include the game demo... especially one linked to the film.
Have a nice day!
The point is parent said it wasn't possible to make a backup of his DVDs with menus, commentaries and etc, and I've just pointed him to a method by where it is indeed possible to do so. Could the process be made easier? No doubt, but that isn't the scope of this discussion--the discussion centers on the fact it can be done if he wants to do it so badly.
Personally I think parent was just being contrarian, since everyone else was posting about how they preferred to rip their DVDs to avoid the silly menu delays and animations so just to be contrary parent posted lamenting that he loved the DVD menuing and animations... But there is a way to do it and now parent knows how. If you think it should be easier, perhaps you could post an HOWTO making it easier?
--bornagainpenguin
Have a Virgin Mobile USA smartphone? Give VMRoms.com a try!
Uh, no, that page describes how to rip a DVD to Matroksa in order to preserve the actual video content, audio channels, and subtitle streams. There's *nothing* in there about ripping the actual menu structure, and AFAIK, the Matroska menu spec a) is in it's infancy, b) has no tooling to make DVD -> MKV w/ menus actually doable, and c) isn't supported by any players out there.
'course, I'd *love* to be proven wrong. :)
the studio doesn't pull their arrogant "WE'RE SO AWESOME WATCH OUR FLYING LOGO AGAIN WITH CONTROLS DISABLED" crap?
a.k.a. masturbation.
Some random text to get past the all caps filter.
Absurdity: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion. -- Ambrose Bierce
the only thing I do mind is when I can blow through the demo in less than an hour.
I honestly can't remember any demo on a modern system that was >= 1 hour in length. Most are only around 20 minutes--and many are even shorter (Heavenly Sword was 5 minutes, IIRC).
If you can't convince them, convict them.
"You forgot the trojan that gets installed if your player happens to be a computer."
Roger that. Nothing from Sony. Not now, not ever. I don't know how many sales I've steered away from Sony, but it has been a lot. Bad cess to them.
In times of trouble, the smell of frying onions usually gives confidence and comfort.
And that should do it. After a fair bit of disk-churning, you should have a Matroska file containing all of the elements from the original DVD title.
Some emphasis added. Also, although I recognize this would be considered anecdotal evidence I've in the past encountered MKVs engineered to work this way, with title screens, commentary, multiple audio streams, etc so I do know they exist and that it is possible to do so. While the article is intended for people who want lossless quality, I'm sure it is possible to adjust parameters when encoding to bring about the file sizes you want without ending up with junk. I've seen anime (yes I know anime is different, but still it worked so the files were) encoded to be a mere forty megabytes in file size while retaining their high definition quality.
So, yeah there's some work involved in it, but it is possible.
Also if you need a player and don't want to just use a PC hooked up to your TV with XBMC then you could always try popcorn hour, or some of the machines listed here. You might have to research for awhile but you should be doing that any way, right?
--bornagainpenguin
Have a Virgin Mobile USA smartphone? Give VMRoms.com a try!
I didn't realize that giving away something that's already free and plentiful can add value. Unless they're planning to create a scarcity of game demos -- which sort of defeats the point -- then this adds little or no value, except possibly for people without PSN access.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Right. The original DVD *title*. ie, the video content of the DVD.
Seriously, read the steps. It involves pulling out the various video and audio titles, and generating a combined Matroska container with that data in it. But nowhere are the *menus* actually ripped. Only the content itself is transformed in that process, producing a multi-program multiplex containing a bunch of programs composed of a video and multiple audio tracks.
Again, I researched this. Heavily. Last I checked, there was a script which attempted to analyze the DVD menu structure and then create a Matroska analog but it simply didn't work. Again, things may have changed since then, but that was the state of the world the last I checked, and the site you linked to provides no evidence that things have changed (that's not to say things haven't, just that that site doesn't address the issue being discussed).
Now, maybe in the last 6 months to a year some sort of MKV revolution has happened, and it's probably time I re-researched this. Here's hoping you're right and my information is out of date. :)
But the winning/non-winning was never the topic/point/question.
It was about getting through the wall. Which they unquestionably did.
And this is what makes it a bad association to a condom.
By the way: Wow, how did we get to condoms from blu-ray movies? Porn again? ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
It's easy to see why you got modded as Flamebait; I had an argument in my living room last night about CoD MW2. Well, *I* didn't really have it... One person asserted it was the best console FPS ever. The other asserted that it was boring (he'd beaten it) and that it had poor play control. The guy who loved it got all heated. He's the guy who gets all super butt-hurt when I tell him Sony is evil and must be destroyed for what they did to Lik-Sang, which in turn is something they did to all gamers everywhere, and for what they did with rootkits on Audio CDs, though, so I don't pay too much attention to his opinions.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"