Taking Sides - HD-DVD or Blu-Ray?

Some recent purchases that look great: "Mysteries Of Lisbon", "Ronin", "Kuroneko", "Seven Samurai", "Excalibur".

There is a simply AMAZING slapfight going on at Jeff Wells's "Hollywood Elsewhere" over the upcoming Criterion Rosemary's Baby blu-ray disc and the proper aspect ratio for the film: http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2012/07/criterion_cleav.php (It's being mostly propagated by Glenn Kenny.)

(Note: Wells has not called anyone "fat" yet, but "fascist" has been busted out nearly a dozen times.)

Yeah that whole thing is v entertaining!

I'm purple-faced with rage. I've got stomach acid. I'm spitting saliva on the rug.

lol jesus

Who cares? It's not 48 fps so it'll suck.

I liked when Wells got in a tizzy over the Anatomy of A Murder edition and how someone at Criterion dug up a photo taken from the audience perspective at the film's original premiere that proved they were using the correct A.R. and uploaded it to Facebook.

Wells admits he was misinformed, talks about steak, harasses a widow

Oddly enough, the actual ratio was 1:1

all the reality shows out there and THIS isn't televised

priorities

haha, was Wells called a fascist by Polanski?

http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2012/07/letter_to_polan.php

Recommendations for a long-lasting, low-end BR player?

Still not decided on this

How low-end, Morbs? A $100 Sony BR player should last pretty much forever.

Yeah, that LG I ref'd upthread (purchased early 2010) is still going strong. If you go too no-brand and cheap it'll probably have a lousy UI and disc mechanism (= noisy). $100 will get you a fast, reliable player that's nice to use.

Seriously guys, do I go with BR or HD-DVD? I wanna know

I got a Samsung for around $80....

And so you can all have a laugh, it never occurred to me that this wouldn't work with my hardy tube TV. So now I need to get a flatscreen, and fuck this world.

Or perhaps there is a way to do it, at least with some models.

My wife and I have an older flatscreen we might be getting rid of, but it doesn't have an internal tuner - you have to have a cable/satellite hookup to watch TV, you just can't get over-the-air channels. But it's great for BRs and DVDs.(It's 720p resolution.) If you can hang tight I'll see for sure if she's OK with getting rid of it, if you want it. I'd rather give it to someone that can use it than just throw it away.

I watch Blu-Rays, via my PS3, on a non-HD, non-flatscreen TV - this is in the UK, obv.

I recently asked a local dealer about multi-region bluray players, and was told that because of the online link/upgrades on bluray discs, multiregion bluray players can only play non-home-region dvds, not blurays - can this be true? there are def region 1 only blus that I wld to watch/own at some point.

There *are* true multiregion blu-ray players, mostly from the company Oppo, but they're expensive (still several hundred quid at least).

There's very few that support changing the blu-ray region via the remote control (unlike dvd, which lots will do), but I recently upgraded my no-brand multiregion unit to a Toshiba BDX3200. This is an "old" model and I had to get it from eBay, but with a firmware tweak it will play any region of dvd AND br disc.

The online link/upgrades thing is not a red-herring though as I can imagine that if the player downloaded and installed new firmware it might lose the multi-region functionality. Simple solution is that I don't have it connected to the internet.

Thanks Bill, v. helpful

thx PD, but I think this will be resolved shortly one way or another. Also, I have to watch something and write about it by Sunday.

"Pristine images," feh.

one CAN buy a converter from HD for a tube TV, but that's $70-75, so kinda pointless.

The idea of watching a BR on a tube tv is very strange.

yeah, i wish i could turn back time and never commit to one.

what have you against televisions that were made in this century?

found mention of this on the criterion boards --

http://www.searsoutlet.com/Blu-ray-Player-SR212S/d/product_details.jsp?md=ct_md&pid=105725&mode=buyUsedOnly

all-region blu-ray player for $50; found one at my nearby sears. havent set it up yet & tried the code, etc but assuming all goes smoothly there'll be a whole new world of movies to acquire and aggregate in stacks and put off watching!

http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/1/5670786/sony-earnings-adjustment-impairment-charges

I'm getting leery about buying blu-rays because i know i'll have to upgrade everything again when the 4k/8k TVs become a thing.

Kinda of a random question here but: recently got a basic Samsung SE-506 ODD for my MacMini, partially because I just needed a new one, but also because it handles Blu-Ray. Now I know Mac and Blu-Ray aren't always happy with each other but I figured what the heck, especially since I am between TVs for the present. Anyway, the drive works perfectly with CDs and DVDs just fine, so clearly the Mac recognizes it -- I'm running El Capitan as well FWIW. However, it's not recognizing any Blu-Rays, and I did download a trial version of this as a test:

http://www.macblurayplayer.com/features.htm

As you can see from this:

http://www.macblurayplayer.com/how-to-play-bluray-on-mac-os-x-10-11-el-capitan.htm

The program is supposed to recognize a disc via step 3b, for instance, and recognizes a DVD as mentioned. But again, no BD disc appears either in the program menu or on the desktop. So is it simply best to assume that while SE-506 handles other discs just fine, it's just not recognizing Blu Rays at all and is simply defective? Answers on a postcard etc (and thanks in advance!).

Can't believe it's been 10 years since this format war. Difference between DVD and Blu-Ray/HD-DVD was so minor compared to VHS vs. DVD. HDTV's and players/Xboxes/Playstations were super expensive so until very recently, I'd never had a decent sized HDTV and a Blu-Ray player. Sorta going nuts with the compulsive buying. Fuck Barnes & Noble and their amazing 50% off Criterion sale.

My Panasonic bluray player started getting jittery when playing discs after just three weeks. Does it need an update? Surely a bluray player shouldn't need updates just to play discs?

I don't know the specifics, but I believe part of the blu-ray system runs on Java, and I remember instances where players had to be firmware updated to play certain discs (Avatar, among others)

but the issue you're describing sounds more like perhaps a faulty unit that should be returned for repair/switch?