Archive for the ‘Movies’ Category

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Is your computer capable of playing Blu-ray/HD DVD?

Friday, June 8th, 2007

When asked this question, the most common answer people come up with is a big resounding NO (or meh), mainly because you would need to be a brain surgeon or a copyright lawyer to be able to afford the Blu-ray/HD DVD drive. But things may not be so bad – with a little bit of research, tweaking and black magic, you won’t need many many thousands of dollars to get Blu-ray/HD DVD playback going on your PC – only a couple of thousand would do.

First, read my Is your PC High Definition DVD Ready? guide to familiarise yourself with what is needed to achieve Blu-ray/HD DVD playback. Don’t be too shocked at the system requirements, it’s still early days for PC Blu-ray/HD DVD, but if you’re lucky, you may only be a high definition reader drive away from watching 1080p movies in full resolution.

Assuming you’ve got a PC good enough for HD DVD playback, your cheapest option right now is to buy the Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on drive for $199 (has been sold for less, plus with bonus movies) and use that as your HD DVD reader drive – even if you don’t have an Xbox 360! Yes, it really does work and it’s officially supported by Microsoft too. Read this guide for full instructions. Of course, if you do have an Xbox 360, then the HD DVD add-on drive is an excellent way to introduce yourself to high definiton DVD (plus it works as a normal DVD drive too, so you can play DVD movies on it as opposed to using the built-in, disc-scratching drive on the Xbox 360).

Posted in High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Is your computer capable of playing Blu-ray/HD DVD?

Make your own DVDs and Windows Media Encoder

Tuesday, May 8th, 2007

I’ve just finished writing a guide for DVD Flick. DVD Flick is a really easy to use tool, especially for making DVDs from your DivX/XviD files (TV episode downloads anyone?). Best of all, it’s free.

It won’t create DVDs with beautiful menus and other fancy features, but things like multiple audio tracks and subtitles are not too difficult to add in. The output quality is quite good as well, although this largely depends on the quality of the source file. Give it a try and I think you’ll be impressed.

The other guide I wrote is about AVI to WMV conversion, trying to make these files playable on the Xbox 360. I used the free Windows Media Encoder 9 software, which unlike DVD Flick, is not as straight forward or well designed. It will work well when the input file is “Microsoft approved” (ie. WMV files), but for anything else (like DivX/XviD), it can cause a lot of problems. The software itself is quite powerful, with support for a lot of different types of encodings, including streaming and VC-1, but you can just feel that it wasn’t really designed for use by your average/newbie user (which is no surprise then that the URL for the software on Microsoft’s website has changed to add “forpros” in the URL), unlike DVD Flick.

Posted in DVD, Video Technology, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Make your own DVDs and Windows Media Encoder

Large DVD collections – storage pains

Friday, May 4th, 2007

My DVD collection is currently about 400 DVDs strong (628 actual discs). The biggest problem, apart from choosing what to watch, is organising and storing these DVDs.

I like to organise them alphabetically, which means shuffling everything around whenever I buy some new DVDs. But the biggest problem is storage, or rather, finding places to store them.

My DVD Collection

As you can see from the picture above, I’ve had to maximize all the storage spaces, stacking the DVDs in different ways whenever possible. I can probably still store about 200 DVDs in this way, but after that, who knows what I’ll do.

This is the biggest problem with having a physical medium. If everything was digital, then it would take roughly 5024 GB (each disc being 8 GB, which is quite a high estimate), or ten 500 GB hard-drives (until 1 TB drives are more available). To be safe, I should have a RAID-5 setup to ensure I don’t lose data, so I would an extra disk. These hard-drives would still occupy less space than a stack of 20 DVDs, and assuming I’ve done the hard work to categorize and tag these digital entries, searching and playback become so much easier and quicker.

Maybe one day…

Posted in DVD | 2 Comments »

DVD Pet Peeve #4

Tuesday, May 1st, 2007
Unleashed (region 4) - Not for deaf people
Unleashed (region 4) – Not for deaf people

English is not my first language, so while watching DVD movies, I prefer to have the English subtitles on. Obviously, subtitles are essential for people with hearing difficulties.

This week’s pet peeve is DVDs that don’t have subtitles. Back in the old days, when buying a DVD player would mean a week’s wage, many region 1 DVDs would not have subtitles, and only closed captioning support. CC support is completely useless to people outside of region 1, as we don’t have CC decoders in our TVs. But this is perhaps understandable, since these DVDs were never intended for sale outside of the US and Canada.

However, I’ve noticed that even today, several high profile releases do not have subtitles. The most recent one I’ve encountered is the region 4 copy of Unleashed (released by Universal Pictures in region 4). This DVD has a DTS track, extra features, but no subtitles. The region 2 version has English subtitles for the hearing impaired, while the region 1 version has at least closed captioning support. While I would be able to live with having no subtitles once in a while, but what about people with hearing impairment? Are they not entitled to watch this movie?

Posted in DVD Pet Peeves | 3 Comments »

HD DVD is the winner. No, it’s Blu-ray. No, it’s HD DVD …

Thursday, April 26th, 2007

So who should you believe?

Blu-ray Logo

A couple of days ago, the Blu-ray camp came out with some impressive figures for the latest quarter. According to these claims, 70% of high definition movies sold during the first quarter of 2007 has been Blu-ray movies, and sales have reached the one million mark.

HD DVD Logo

Now, the HD DVD camp has hit back and submitted their own figures, which show that HD DVD movies have only sold 2000 units less than Blu-ray, and will soon pass the one million mark as well. However, the significance of this figure has to be put into context, as HD DVD was launched earlier than Blu-ray and if Blu-ray has managed to outsell HD DVD in this short time, then the 70% figure might not be too far off. The offer of a free copy of Casino Royale for the first few hundred thousand registered purchasers of the PS3 might also have affected this figure (assuming they’ve counted these giveaways as “sales”).

As for hardware, if you do not count the PS3, than HD DVD has a clear 4 to 1 lead, with more than 100,000 units sold already. The PS3 is interesting as it is hard to determine if people purchasing the PS3 is using it for games only, for HD movies only or for both.

So back to the question I posed at the top of this blog? Who should you believe? At this point, no one. A million movie sales is nothing compared to DVD sales at the moment, and with giveaways and promotions at launch, it will take time for these figures to stabilise and show a true picture of what is happening. I personally don’t believe either camp will come out as clear winners, and us consumers will just have to live with dual formats, making us the real losers in all of this.

Posted in High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K) | Comments Off on HD DVD is the winner. No, it’s Blu-ray. No, it’s HD DVD …

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