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12 April 2007

HD DVD player owners aren't the only ones experiencing playback issues. According to a blog post by Dean Takahashi at the Mercury News, there are some playback issues with the Blu-ray release of Dragon's Lair. According to Dean's post, the disc would not load at all on his Philips Blu-ray player and there was no audio when he played it on his PS3.

Can anyone figure out what's going on here? I played a Blu-ray disc game that didn't work so well. It was the old Dragon's Lair title, remade for Blu-ray. You have to press the right button on the Blu-ray remote to make sure that your hero makes the right choice in this old cinematic game.

I put it into a Philips Blu-ray player and it didn't work at all. I put it into the Sony PlayStation 3 and it worked fine, but without any sound. Somebody smart tells me its a Java problem. Anyone know?

While the Blu-ray Disc Association has said that first-gen players won't become obsolete, its obvious that not all titles will play on them, at least without a BD-Java update. If you'd like to read more, Dean's entire post can be found here. Add a comment

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09 April 2007

Thanks to the folks at High-Def Digest, we've learned that Sony has released a new research report using sales numbers from Nielsen VideoScan for the week ending March 18th. What makes this report special is that it includes per-title sales figures for discs released on Blu-ray and HD DVD.

But while abstract ratios and percentages like these have been bandied about for several months now, the Sony report goes one step further, providing the first public release of hard sales figures for HD DVD and Blu-ray discs from Nielsen VideoScan, the home entertainment industry's leading source for competitive sales data.

Among the numbers revealed: as of March 18, VideoScan put the cumulative number of Blu-ray titles sold since the format's inception at 844,000 units, versus HD DVD at 708,600.

Take note that these numbers do not include include discs sold at Wal-Mart or some online stores. Nevertheless, it does paint an interesting picture, especially when you see that some releases have sold less than 200 copies. If you'd like to read more, the entire article can be found here. Add a comment

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10 April 2007

As expected, revoking WinDVD's AACS device key hasn't slowed down hackers very much. Wired has reported that people on the Doom9 forums have now found a way to expose a disc's Volume ID without AACS authentication. By applying a patched firmware to an Xbox 360 HD DVD drive, discs can be ripped or played back, even if the Volume ID has been revoked.

Well, it looks like you can stop worrying about Corel locking up your next gen DVD player. The clever bods at the Doom9 and XBoxhacker forums have managed to patch the Xbox 360 HD DVD to to play any disk without authentication.

HD DVD and BlueRay require that a disk authenticate itself with a Volume ID. A player can then be patched so it will not play any revoked disks.

What this hack does is bypass the check for a Volume ID you can stick any disk in the player and you're good to go, rendering useless any future revocations. It's still possible to lock out the actual hardware, but how long will it take the hackers to get around that?

People have already taken this hack a step further and have found a way to expose Volume ID's using an unpatched drive. While the AACS LA could, in theory, revoke the Xbox 360 HD DVD drive, Microsoft probably won't let that happen. If you'd like to read more, the entire article can be found here. Add a comment

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09 April 2007

While Blu-ray is dominating the market in the US, the Financial Times has reported that a number of Europe's independent film studios have decided to support the rival format, HD DVD. According to the article, this decision was primarily due to HD DVD's lower production costs and the belief that HD DVD players will come down in price faster than Blu-ray players.

About 35 European films are available on the HD-DVD format, compared with less than 10 for Blu-Ray. The larger European studios such as Studio Canal and Pathé in France, Filmax and DeAPlaneta in Spain, and Imagion and Nixbu in Germany have all announced plans to use the HD-DVD technology.

Although most commentators agree that the deciding battles in the format war will be fought in Hollywood, analysts such as Richard Cooper at Screen Digest say the importance of European independent studios should not be underestimated. European independent films account for only 30 per cent of the market in the UK, but 50 per cent in France, 40 per cent in Germany and 35 to 40 per cent in Spain.

While HD DVD has a market lead in Europe, this could very well change with the recent launch of the PS3. If you'd like to read more, the entire article can be found here. Add a comment