Taking Sides - HD-DVD or Blu-Ray?

sadly no, not that I've found....I have a cheap DVD player that I region-code hacked to for those. No region code hack for PS3 that I've found.

Yeah, that could clinch it for me in terms of sticking with a standalone model, then; I don't have oodles of non-R1/all-region discs but I do have a chunk and I'd like to be able to watch them, obv. -- I use a Mac at home so AppleTV was going to take care of various streaming media needs on that front when it comes to my music etc.

i can't believe i've never seen showgirls. so am i going to have to get a blu-ray player or what? can't i stick with dvd?

About your first statement! (Yes, why HAVEN'T you seen that?) Is the DVD version out of print or something?

lol i rly don't know. i finally just watched "Cruel Intentions"

Got a blu-ray player this week along with "The Searchers" and "2001". They're both stunning. Crazy.

Good stuff :) I remember the first time I watched 2001 on blu I was blown away. If you can stand to double-dip on one film, then the Kubrick blu-ray box set is a real treat and thoroughly recommended.

So how long does Blu-ray have left to 'happen' before the next format wars comes along?

Bluray almost certainly the last optical media. Ultra HD is being trialled though it will most likely be as a streaming service which will need superfast broadband which will probably take 3-8 years to deliver.

HD-DVD ftw.

we're still not even close to streaming Blu-Ray quality, are we? when you stream "HD" from Netflix or whatever, i assume you're not transferring anywhere near the ~40 gigs of a typical BD.

xpost

Yeah, still a way off. tbf, HD video compression has come on a long way since the BR standards were set, but the thing that HD streaming cannot manage (currently at least) is uncompressed audio. Even my (UK) cable tv providers HD channels are still "only" Dolby Digital audio. I got a new AV receiver a while back which can handle DTS-HD Master Audio etc and this brings almost as much joy as HD video for me.

pixar films in blu ray are something to behold

^^^

Showing my wife Finding Nemo on Blu-Ray was how I convinced her we needed the PS3.

I just read that on the Bluray of The Apartment you can see the face powder and eyeliner on Jack Lemmon and Fred MacMurray. Exceeding the technological limits of the ers in which the work was produced has its drawbacks.

(ie, I don't want a Bluray player)

Back in the day you'd never have seen that detail on the big screen, what with all the cigarette smoke in the theatre, everyone blurry eyed through being stoked up on whisky and gin since breakfast.

Misread this as "Showing my wife Finding Nemo on Blu-Ray was how I conceived her" etc etc

I think the (kinda jarring at first) details one picks up on like makeup, wrinkles, obviousness of studio sets vs. location shots in a sequence, etc. become less distracting the more you watch. Also, if the film is just plain engaging these things do fade into the b-ground. Some of my SD DVD's upres'd thru my new blu setup look great as well, esp. Criterion stuff (later Melville, b+w Renoir).

However all the stuff I burned from 700 mb avi's originating off some c. 1983 vHS - many of my favorite films like hard to find Rivette/Tourneur/etc. - looks like blobby shit.

anyone seen any good Blu Rays lately?

Do you mean films that are good in themselves, or stuff that shows off the blu medium as well? If the latter then Hugo looks fabulous, as do Melancholia and the Tron set with old and new; Tron Legacy in particular is stunning. Don't know if you're multi-region equipped for blu, but the Criterion BBS Story boxset is *fantastic* and seeing stuff like Head and Easy Rider in glorious grain-heavy HD, with uncompressed audio is a total treat too.

Peeping Tom looks amazing on Blu-ray. Along with Alien, that's the one that has really stood out for me.

Road Warrior bluray is pretty a+

The Star Trek reboot looks amazing on blu-ray.

otm

Yeah, Alien is one I saw recently that was most O_O. Beautiful.

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.