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Sony Warns It Will Take $1 Billion Writedown, Blames Slowing DVD Sales (reuters.com)
Sony has warned investors that it will take roughly $978m writedown on its film business, blaming a goodwill impairment charge that dates back to an acquisition of a Hollywood studio almost three decades ago. From a report on Reuters: The impairment charge came as Sony cut its outlook for profits from DVD, blu-ray discs and other home entertainment operations in line with a broader market decline, the company said in statement on Monday. Sony has been working to revive its movie business. In November, the Japanese conglomerate's chief financial officer, Kenichiro Yoshida, said a turnaround was "progressing, but it takes time for the benefit to be realized."
DVD Video is 704x480* (24 or 30 frames per second) or 704x576 (25 frames per second) for 1.33:1 or 1.78:1 display aspect ratio. (Many players support only one of those resolutions, such as the PlayStation 2 that was popular during the early DVD market.) Video at "scope" aspect ratio is encoded with hard letterboxing, producing a lower resolution: 704x360 or 704x432 respectively. Chroma is encoded at half resolution (4:2:0). DVD also supports interlaced video, trading off vertical detail for high motion (50 or 60 fields per second).
* Stored as 720, including eight pixels of "nominal analog blanking" pillarboxing on each side for recentering the signal.
I tried playing a blu-ray and it fucking paused to download an ad from the internet before serving me the movie I bought. That is defective. Never buying one again.
MakeMKV + HandBrake (HandBrake can do almost all DVDs and some BluRays without MakeMKV, but MakeMKV is needed for some encrypted discs). MakeMKV is shareware (free beta period but reasonable to pay for if you don't want the hassle); HandBrake is open source. Both run on Linux, OS X and Windows.