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Well, along the lines of the Shatner/Lucas post from earlier... This had me rolling. I would love to see this as one of the interstitial scenes Lucas is planning on putting back into the original trilogy... Sorry if it's been posted before. I just saw it.

I've seen no indication that Blu-ray disks will be priced any more than $1 more expensive than HD disks, on the average. If that. Do you have a citation comparing the two?

While it's impossible to speculate on exactly what motivates various members of the DVD Forum, the list is made up of more than hardware manufacturers-- some of whom, despite this, have patent money in DVD (and by extension, HD DVD) technologies, and some of whom are of the opinion, "Cheap...

Short-sightedness, along with the fact that there are no native 2.35:1 devices in mass production-- or even planned in the near future. But to play the Devil's advocate, they'd have to incorporate extra scaling capability in the 1st generation devices to accomodate display devices which...

And I guess my response is that, yes, we're all aware of that. 1080p will only truly have 1080 lines of resolution on film material with an aspect ratio of 1.78:1 or lower. We call it "1080p" because that's the encoding scheme, not because we necessarily expect every pixel line to be filled.

I'm not sure what you think we're not noticing. That 2.35:1 films will be letterboxed? According to sources, there will be data on the disk which specifies the pixel area used, though not the ratio. In other words, there's supposedly an "xheight" and "yheight" measurement which will, in the...

Not true. They downconvert.

What high price in disks? Last I saw, they were looking to be ~$1 higher than HD DVD, on the average. High price on hardware... no argument there, though IMO in comparison to 1st gen DVD players, the prices are reasonable.

You can permanently download if you want, and copy the file to DVD, but you can only play it back on the original machine. I'm going with "Thumbs down", unless you want a cheap rental when your only screen is your laptop or a crummy hotel TV.

It's not bad for a rental (I thought I saw $0.99, but I could be wrong), but at 1.5GB at 480x320 resolution (or perhaps something different-- but it's ~150,000 pixels, whatever it is) I agree... the sale price needs work.

In my complete lack of an expert opinion, I believe it's 1125 (wasn't that the Japan high-def standard?).

Sure. I'd pay an extra $300 (worst case, with brand new OPU), provided it was a quality vendor (Denon, Pioneer... possibly even Samsung) and not LG. But it may take awhile to develop (or adapt) an OPU. I'll believe they're coming when they demo a model. Announcements with no details make me...

The video encoder hardware basically has blanking interval routines, with big blank spots marked "insert picture here" which are filled by the decoders.

Unfortunately, I'm not privy to the specifics, but the chipsets being used are on the order of $20 per. OPUs are several times that. The companies that design the chips (all of them, not just the ones who are jumping up and down saying "Look at us! We're universal!") aren't in the business to...

That's actually relatively easy to block, though. If you incorporate it into the picture somehow, the person trying to "remove" it needs to be much more technically apt and risks making the picture look worse if it's done wrong.

The chips are not the problem and never have been. It's the optical pickup unit that costs the money.

Hmmm... I seem to recall the cartoon from CBS was pretty close to the book. Haven't seen the BBC version in a long time, and don't recall it, but the latest film presentation added some stuff. The Fox, for one thing-- he appeared to be added to give Edmund some character depth; the ice...

A pity, as that one was my favorite. A Horse and His Boy might not play well with modern audiences... the analogy between the Calormenes and Islam is... well, it's not subtle. I mean, even less subtle than Aslan as Jesus. Mel Gibson might get it made, but I don't know that Disney will back...

Yes, but it's hardly a "war" anymore. It's not like consumers have to be careful to avoid incompatibility when buying hardware.

Juan has it right, though he doesn't go far enough. Any chipset which can be used to play HD-DVD can be used to play Blu-ray, and vice versa-- including the Intel one inside the Toshiba players. The differences are all in the software/firmware stack and in the optical units. I'm in favor of...

Wow. To me, it appears that the DVD has basically had a subtle blur applied (not-so-subtle, actually). Looking at the window panes, you can see twice as many on the rescaled HD image than on the DVD, and where the panes are a big smear of color on the DVD, they're individually shaded on the HD...

Hmph. I have two big concerns with downloads: 1) If it's a movie I like, I want to own a copy I can watch under pretty much any circumstances (as long as there's electricity to do so), on a robust and portable medium. So far, this is a shiny plastic disk medium. 2) Quality. Bandwidth...

No, it means that in Japan, they will not downrez at all, whereas in the US they can but many will not (at least at first).

Not to mention that it is one of the few legal defenses for breaking/cracking encryption in the DMCA.

Well... not exactly. Content owners have the legal right to restrict that activity with technological measures; however, should such a measure be violated in pursuit of the exercise of First Sale or Fair Use, the person performing the violation can use Fair Use or First Sale as a defense should...

It is pretty silly, unless you add in non-technical considerations like "Number of available encoding solutions available", or to put it more bluntly, "Number of available encoding solutions which Sony is willing to pay for". :)

Both formats have the potential to be a new Divx. The difference is that with Divx, you couldn't have the machine and use it (for Divx disks) and not have it hooked into the phone line. It was required, or it wouldn't work. BD and HD DVD don't require a phone line or internet hookup for mere...

Sure there will: it will be downloads, there will be no more physical format. Failure of the physical format will be "proof" to studio heads that Bill Gates was right, that people don't really want to "own" movies anymore. There is much good to be said for downloads, I will admit, but the...

Unfortunately, there isn't a bus which transfers information straight from the drive to the graphics card, else you're right, using HDCP protocols over something like an HDMI interface would probably be sufficient. The open construction of the PC is such that using the standard PCI bus to...

Not unless you apply the ICT or Digital-only flag to your own content. :) For that matter, AACS/PVP shouldn't make a difference, either. Your video card, now, coupled with a processor if you're using AVC or VC-1 codecs, should be totally sufficient to decode and display your own HD content.