OT: Interesting talk about Blu Ray

busterkeaton wrote on 1/1/2009, 1:05 AM
At a New Year's Eve party, I talked with a friend of mine who works doing compression and authoring DVDs. She works mainly in Scenarist. She talked about authoring a blu ray disk and she said that a DVD project that would take a week to author, might take a month to author in blu ray. This might be one of the features that is keeping the prices of blu ray disks high. She said the problem was that you really couldn't really work from a template. Even something that looked like you could work with a template, would still need to be done individually. She also said Sony is going to invest in a new authoring/compression/replication place on the East Coast soon.

Also the host of the party had all sorts of conspiracy arguments against Blu Ray--that the licenses for the disks will expire and screw people over, that buying Blu Ray means you support Digital Millennium Copyright Act and a few other theories. He also made all the guests watch the "disgusting" anti piracy ad from Warner Brothers that starts at the beginning of the Dark Knight DVD. It was pretty ridiculous, it uses footage from Casablanca and Bogart is supposedly upset because as the smug titles tell us, "Ilsa has been pirating DVDs." His point was the Ad infuriated him so much, it made him want to go out and pirate DVDs. You can't fast forward through it either. It amazing how Hollywood would cheapen the value of their assets. You would think the same studio that just put out a deluxe Blu Ray edition of Casablanca would not want their audience to think of an annoying ad.

Comments

DGates wrote on 1/1/2009, 1:23 AM
While the cost of players have come down, it's the cost of the media that is stalling adoption. No one really wants to spend $30 for a movie.

BluRay is slowly building to being a moot point anyway. Digital downloads and movie files playing from media center hard drives are gaining momentum.
Chienworks wrote on 1/1/2009, 9:17 AM
Wal*Mart strikes again. I was browsing the titles over the weekend and saw a surprising number of new BluRay releases on the shelf priced from $24.95 down to $13.95. Some of them were recent hits too, not just a collection of oldies. Most of them included an SD DVD version as well.

'course, that still doesn't mean i'm ready to go spend a thousand or more on an HD TV and BluRay player.
Patryk Rebisz wrote on 1/1/2009, 11:07 AM
I agree with the host, sometimes the way they design the DVD where you can's skip the logo of the maker, or the copyright protection text (even though you saw the same text since VHS tapes came out) -- those thing are a true insult to our intelligence.
Chienworks wrote on 1/1/2009, 11:58 AM
Disney was way worse for a long time with their previews. I've got some Disney VHS with 20 minutes of previews before the movie starts. Some of the DVDs have over a dozen previews. With VHS at least you could fast forward over them (in some cases i opened the cassette and cut out that part of the tape). With a lot of the DVDs you can't fast forward, or you can only skip them individually, and the 'disc menu' button is inactive until you've gone through all of them.

And i sit there thinking ... these movies are for kids!!! And what kids have that kind of patience to wade through all that to get to the movie?

Fortunately they've wised up some and newer releases aren't quite so annoying.
Porpoise1954 wrote on 1/1/2009, 3:31 PM
Never seen "Clockwork Orange"? The advertisers WANT us to be FORCE-FED ads.
blink3times wrote on 1/1/2009, 3:54 PM
"Some of the DVDs have over a dozen previews. With VHS at least you could fast forward over them "
You can still do it with DVD. They may have locked out the forward skip button... but not th FF button. (at least for the previews)
Chienworks wrote on 1/1/2009, 6:59 PM
I played one just last night that had the forward skip and fast forward buttons locked. Couldn't do anything until the preliminaries had run their course. Fortunately on this disc it was only about 40 seconds' worth but it was still very annoying.

I think DVD players need a button that simply jumps to the start of the movie, no matter what else is on the disc. I'd pay big money for that.
cokecan25 wrote on 1/2/2009, 11:58 PM
Isn't it funny since HDDVD bought the farm that BR players have dropped in price but the movies have actually gone up?

Even Netflix had to add a 1 buck a month BR fee, which as petty as it sounds, probably helps them recoup some lost revenue of the studios bringing up BR to what it actually costs to produce VS undercutting Toshiba to win a war..

And copy protection will always be broken, always. When will they learn? Make it hard, put resources into it, but don't piss off your core peeps. They don't like it.