DVD

Matsushita Electric (Panasonic) has decided to create a "Hollywood Blu-ray Testing Center" within its current Panasonic Hollywood Laboratory.

 

What would one do in a "Blu-ray Testing Center?"

 

Matsushita thinks that there needs to be a place where Blu-ray discs can be tested for copyright protection before they are duplicated. The Center would serve as a place to verify discs for proper formatting and protection. They are also inviting members of the Blu-ray Disc Association to being in their BD-Video playback products such as Blu-ray players and recorders so studios can check and make sure their disc will be compatible with different manufacturers' players.

 

So is this necessary, and if so, where's the HD DVD Testing Center?

 

[via PC Authority]

There’s been an interesting update on the LG BH100 Super Blue high def DVD player, a new player announced at CES that can play both Blu Ray and HD-DVD high def discs. It seems that some people in the HD-DVD standards group weren’t happy about the concept, and tried to stop LG producing the player. Their problem was that the player doesn’t support the HDi  feature of HD-DVD, which some discs use to create fancy menus and the like. But it doesn’t seem that this will stop the player: instead, this Crave story claims it will be coming out, but without the HD-DVD logo on the front. It’ll still play both types of discs, just not the fancy menus on HD-DVDs. The BH100 will cost $1200 and should be available in February.

In a move that looks like an attempt to catch up some ground on Blu-ray, Toshiba are trying to get three-layer HD-DVD discs approved as part of the HD-DVD standard, which would increase the capacity of HD-DVD discs to 51GB. TDK still has the record, though: they have created a prototype 6-layer Blu-ray disc which holds 200GB of data.

 

[Via Tech Digest]

Engadget has the skinny on the details of the Warner Total Hi Def hybrid disc, which puts both HD-DVD and Blu-ray versions of a movie onto a single disc. I posted about this before, but Warners announced more technical details at a press conference at CES yesterday. It turns out that it’s basically a dual-sided disc: HD-DVD on one side and Blu-ray on the other. Unfortunately, they didn’t have any specifics on if the other studios are going to be using the new format.

LG announced a player that can play both HD-DVD and Blu ray discs last week, but they announced something else new at CES this morning: a PC drive that can read both formats. The GGW-H10N Super Multi DVD Rewriter is a 5.25-inch internal drive that will be available in the first quarter of 2007 for $1199. However, it’s not a complete solution: it can write to Blu ray discs (including the dual layer versions), but it can only read HD-DVD discs. It’s a step in the right direction for video editors looking to move up to high def, but it’s not the all-on-one solution that we might have hoped for.

There were two interesting developments on the high def DVD front announced today: LG announced that they will be offering a dual-format HD-DVD and Blu-ray player, and Warners announced a new hybrid DVD that can hold both a HD-DVD and Blu-ray version of a movie.

 

The LG player will be shown at the CES show in a few days, but its cover was blown by a press release issued in Korea. The press release didn’t contain any pricing information, but I doubt it will be cheap: the licensing costs alone will bump up the price, and LG will probably price it high to appeal to early adopters. But it will be the first of many: other manufacturers are likely to follow suit and produce hybrid players, in the same way that all recordable DVD drives on PCs can now record to both DVD-R and DVD+R discs.

 

The Warners announcement is also interesting: their new hybrid disc technology (which they call Total DVD) can hold the same movie in both formats, which would make life much easier for the movie studios: instead of producing two sets of movies, they could produce one disc with both formats. However, the NY Times story doesn’t cover how much storage the Total DVD discs provide: this may be a problem if they can’t hold the same capacity as single-format discs.

 

It also raises the interesting question of what happens if you put a hybrid Total DVD disc into a hybrid player: does it explode because it can’t decide which format to play?

 

[Via PC World and Engadget]

Well, that didn’t take long: an enterprising hacker claims to have released a tool that will decrypt HD-DVD discs, allowing you to copy the movies in their full HD glory. He claims to have done it by pulling the key used to encrypt the HD-DVD from memory when playing the movie on a PC. The program he created can’t decrypt any HD-DVD, though: it’s restricted to those where the key is known and is stored in the program’s config file. Engadget tried it, but it isn’t clear from their write up if it actually worked or not: they seem to have got partway through the process, then given up.

 

[Via Engadget]

China is increasingly blazing their own technological path, and DVD seems to be no exception to this: Chinese manufacturers have just launched their own high def DVD format called EVD. This has been caught in a legal dispute for some time (Wikipedia has the details), but this seems to have been sorted, and it finally seems to be gaining some steam: at a recent event in Beijing, 20 manufacturers unveiled players for the new format, which the manufacturers are hoping will supplant HD-DVD and Blu-ray in the huge Chinese market. What there don’t seem to be at the moment are any camcorders or recorders that use the new format.

 

[Via DV Guru and Information Week]

Looks like high def DVD authoring tools are starting to come into the mainstream: Roxio has just announced DVDit Pro HD, which (as the name suggests) can author and write high def home movies to Blu-ray discs. There’s no support for HD-DVD, but the $499 program can create up to 1080p discs that include all of the fancy-looking menus and other tricks that more expensive authoring programs have. You will need a Blu-ray burner to write the movies, though, and that will cost you around $900. The blank discs aren’t cheap, either; expect to pay about $20 each.

This will be an interesting test case: the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) is taking a company called Load N’Go video to court, claiming that the service it offers of loading DVD movies onto an iPod, is illegal under the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). The EFF claims that the MPAA may be using this as a test case to try and outlaw ripping DVD movies to iPods and similar devices. They claim that “Although this lawsuit happens to be aimed at Load 'N Go, the DMCA theory in the complaint makes it crystal clear that the MPAA believes it is just as illegal for you to do the same thing for yourself at home.”

Sony finally released their PlayStation3 console today, and the lucky ones were able to get one at midnight last night. So how good is the PS3 as a high-def movie player? Melissa Perenson at PC World has written an interesting article that describes the pros and cons of using the PS3 as a Blu-ray player. She seems to like it, but with a number of caveats: having to use the game controller as a remote control, for one, and the fact that you can’t tweak the output as much as you can with a standalone player. Sony will be offering a more standard remote control next month. But the big plus of the PS3 is that it’s cheaper than a standalone Blu-ray player; the PS3 costs $600, while a Blu-ray player will cost $1000.