Lionsgate Brings Web Features to Blu-ray Disc
Posted by Dave Cowl
closeAuthor: Dave Cowl
Name: Dave Cowl
Email: dave@formatwarcentral.com
Site: http://www.blu-raystats.com
About: Originally from New Zealand, Dave now resides in the San Francisco Bay Area. With a doctorate in Electrical Engineering, Dave's day job
involves developing high resolution LCoS projectors.
Dave also has a strong interest in cinema and film making, and has
always been an early adopter - he still uses his Sony DVP-S7000 DVD
Player and also owns first generation Blu-ray, HD DVD and DTheater
D-VHS equipment.
Dave has been following the HD Disc format war since the beginning,
which resulted in the Blu-ray Statistics and HD DVD Statistics
websites, designed to track the studio progress with features as they
have released HD media product.See Authors Posts (350) on December 13, 2007
Filed Under: Blu-ray, Format War, Studios
High Def Digest is reporting that the January release of Saw IV from Lionsgate will have internet interactivity.
The ‘MoLog’ (short for Movie Blog) feature will allow users to blog about the movie from their BDLive Blu-ray player. This will be the second ‘web-enabled’ release from Lionsgate.
The question that remains is… will there be players? While rumours seem firm that the PS3 will get secondary video stream enabled in firmware soon, it is not clear if BDLive will be enabled at that time.
No related posts.
This is such a mess. It sucks that not every player out the box can take advantage of this. One area where HD DVD has a huge advantage. Of course, most blu-ray only people will tell you that web-enabled features are "no big deal" specifically because of this crappy situation with the profiles. But some of these features are really cool.
PiP is cool when its used the right way (See Bourne films as an example), but its hardly something that considered a must have. I guarantee that if the roles were reversed and HD-DVD was the incomplete spec, they would argue that it doesnt matter.I must applaud Lionsgate that they are making a solid effort to boost blurays interactivity.
I expect that the evolution of the HD Media players is far from over – that goes for both formats. There needs to be something new to get people to buy new hardware from time to time. For example, my HD DVD player does not output 24p (or anything p for that matter) – where some of the newer HD DVD players do…
… internet interactivity… yawn… I just want to watch the movie! (in peace!) I hope, if they update the PS3 to have BD-Live, they let you turn it off!
"PiP is cool when its used the right way (See Bourne films as an example), but its hardly something that considered a must have." I don’t think you know what "web enabled" features are…
"… internet interactivity… yawn… I just want to watch the movie! (in
peace!) I hope, if they update the PS3 to have BD-Live, they let you
turn it off!" Exhibit A
@Chris – that could be very interesting since (I assume like many people) my PS3 logs in automagically whenever I am using it. I wonder what the deal will be with internet and movies – since the disc may connect without you knowing it in certain situations… though I would assume it is something you can disable…
And so the "Superior format" continues to copy features from the "Inferior product." I think they’ve got their heads on backwards when it comes to which one is superior.
Kris you are certainly amusing. Based on the assertion that bigger is better and more is more, BD is superior due to capacity and bandwidth. On the other hand, HD DVD claims superiority due to PiP and internet features. Now that BD is clearly demonstrating that capability is not exclusive to HD DVD, you say they are ‘copying’ HD DVD? Seems that you are trying to create a ‘no win’ scenario – if they lack the features they are inferior – if they don’t lack the features they are copy cats? Does that mean that HD DVD TL51 is a ‘copy cat feature’ (assuming it ever actually happens…)? Or would that be some form of innovation in your eyes?
No I just get tired of hearing blu-ray fans say post after post after post, we dont care about those stupid features, all we want is the movie in high def.. but suddenly when they start to finally get those features, they love them and are shoving them in our faces.. To say that Blu-ray is superior because of bandwidth and space hasn’t really been too demonstrated.. look at Warner, they never give a blu-ray release a seperate video/audio encode than the HD DVD release.. with the exception of thsoe harry potter extras in highdef. TL 51 will be a reality and will bring the bitrate up to par with Blu-ray not that anyone can show a current blu-ray disc that seems to look better than its HD DVD counterpart with less bitrate. I actually own both formats cause of wanting all the movies, but think its absolutely retarded that I spent $449 for a blu-ray player that will not be able to do any of the upcoming PiP or web enabled features.. and that is my beef with blu-ray.
I still don’t care about the features, now that we have them. I’m just happy to not have to hear HD DVD fans go on and on about how we don’t have them. You must just hate seeing all these 1.0 players for under $300 though, don’t you! The superiority of higher bandwidth and space HAS been demonstrated, I could show you links, but I’m sure you would just call them biased, so what’s the point.
For myself I am not sufficiently interested in these internet and PiP features to go out and get a new player to support them. Luckily I also have a PS3 so I should be able to check out these features if I want to. It is clear that Warner agree with respect to the bandwidth issue – on the other hand DreamWorks does not and continue to release movies with higher video bitrate than Warner with a cost of lossless audio due to the bandwidth limitations. The 20.5 Mbps average bitrate of Transformers is a clear example of this. Also if the TL51 does increase the bandwidth I do not see how it can possibly work with the current install base of HD DVD players which were built to the original HD DVD specifications, which would result in some (possibly large) percentage of the install base being alienated by any title that used high bitrate TL51. It will certainly be interesting to see where that goes…
What’s interesting to me (and I already know the answer) is how BD has more capacity but all the box sets (Planet Earth, Harry Potter etc) have the same number of BDs as HD discs?
A Clockwork Orange is split over two discs DL for HD DVD and is on a single DL disc for Blu-ray. Planet Earth is on Dual Layer discs for HD DVD and Single Layer discs for Blu-ray. Is this the sort of thing you mean?