DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

So who should you believe?

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.

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.

NTSC Warning (circled in red) … not very visible or helpful

Why do studios insist on releasing NTSC content in PAL regions? Is it because they are lazy? Cost savings? Or just because they don’t give a rat’s arse about people who actually pay their salaries (us, the customers)?

A lot of people still don’t have equipment that can play or display NTSC content, and is it really that hard to produce a new transfer for the PAL regions, especially when there are so many countries that uses PAL (Europe, UK, Australia). Notable NTSC releases in Australia includes The Goonies, Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory (only the full-frame version is available as well) and my recently purchased copy of Dilbert: The Complete Series. Often, the NTSC warnings are not very visible nor helpful, since most people don’t even know the NTSC/PAL difference (nor should they be expected to know).

On a related note, if you have a Pioneer Plasma that has PureCinema mode, you should have an “Advanced” option which basically does 3:3 pulldown, playing back 24 FPS content at 72 Hz. 3:3 pulldown triples every frame to get the required 72 Hz refresh rate, and what you get is a slightly smoother picture compared to standard 2:3 pulldown (the “Standard” PureCinema mode) . I use this mode to play back all my NTSC DVDs. For my (3 year old) model, 3:3 pulldown only works when the input is interlaced, so I have my upscaling DVD player set to 1080i 60Hz mode when playing back NTSC discs, and then enable 3:3 pulldown – the improved smoothness of panning is immediately noticeable. PAL discs are at 25 FPS, so I set the DVD player to 720p (native resolution of the TV) @ 50 Hz.

This week’s pet peeve is stuff you can’t skip on DVDs. These include studio/distributor trailers, warning notices, anti-piract messags and even movie trailers.

Yes I would, if stealing a handbag meant that I wouldn’t be forced to watch this stupid trailer again

If the Internet has taught has anything is that people like the freedom of being able to get and use information without being limited to a particular process or method. The freedom, therefore, to choose what you want to watch and what you don’t want to watch is essential. Being forced to watch some stupid studio trailer (Universal Pictures, I’m looking at you) that you’ve seen about a million times, or being told that you are a terrorist because you made a copy of a movie for your mother, is just plain annoying. Sometimes you are forced to wait up to 5 minutes before you can get to the movie, and that’s just not good enough. Ripping DVDs to get rid of these UOPs (User Operation Prohibitions) seems to be the only method, except that it’s illegal in most countries.

Many studios don’t employ these heavy handed tactics to force you to watch things, and they need to be applauded for doing so. Others should hang their heads in shame.

A few more ideas that popped into head following my blog entry the other day (Legal DVD Quality Downloads – Dream or Reality?).

I think it would be great (if not somewhat ironic) that legal DVD downloads be distributed using bittorrent technology. It really is the best and fastest way to distribute large files, and it saves money for the distributors.

Digital downloads would also make distribution of hard to find/out of print titles possible. It is often not worth it commercially for studios to release old and rare movies, but if they do it online, there is no production cost involved.

And once bandwidth becomes faster and cheaper, perhaps HD titles can be distributed in the same way.

And since everything will be delivered digitally, why not allow customizations? For example, I could choose a different style of main menu, which language and subtitle tracks I want to be included in the download, and also which extra features to have (discounts available for choosing the movie only version perhaps). Exclusive material not found on the physical DVD version might also be made available, to be downloaded for an additional fee. The possibilities are endless, and I really shouldn’t be doing the studio’s work for them by coming up with these ideas (will sell ideas for money!!).

Most of the attention has been on the Windows Live Messenger support that will be added to the Xbox 360 during the next update (Spring Update, 7 May). But hidden (well not really) amongst the list of updates is the added support for H.264 video and MPEG-4 video:

• H.264 video support: Up to 15 Mbps 10 Mbps, Baseline, Main, and High (up to level 4.1) Profiles with 2 channel AAC LC and Main Profiles.
• Added MPEG-4 Part 2 video support: Up to 8 Mbps 5 Mbps, Simple Profile with 2 channel AAC LC and Main Profiles.

The H.264 support is fairly good, the 15 Mbps limit should be high enough for HD video. No multichannel audio is a shame though. MPEG-4 support is limited to SP (again no multichannel support). Better than nothing, I suppose. Still no DivX/XviD support, but at least it’s better than converting everything to WMV.

There are also a whole bunch of other video related improvements, such as improved skip forward/back (video is divided into 10 chapters automatically), switchable aspect ratios (Letterbox, Zoom, Stretch, Native). You can read the whole list here.