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Svevan wrote:I'm terrified that the Criterions I buy during the upcoming bi-annual sales will become Blu-Rays in a month. What do I do?

But it's not September?

Svevan wrote:I'm terrified that the Criterions I buy during the upcoming bi-annual sales will become Blu-Rays in a month. What do I do?

Hoard food and ride it out crouched in a steamer trunk...

Email to Criterion On May 10, 2008, at 11:57 AM:

I'm wondering if any of the coming-soon and the recently released standard-def DVDs (spine 413 to 439 besides The Last Emperor) will be released on blu-ray. In the future, will titles get simultaneous SD and blu-ray releases? Or will the SD and blu-ray releases be totally different from one other, sort of like your laserdisc and DVD releases during 1997-98? Thanks for the blu-ray announcement and I'm looking forward to your first batch of blu-rays in Oct, which I assume will be The Third Man, Bottle Rocket, and Chungking Express.

Got the following reply from Criterion, which doesn't really answer my question. FWIW...

Hi there,

Thanks for your email! We have no plans at this time to discontinue standard DVD releases. I'm happy to hear you're excited about our plans for Blu-ray, and more information will be coming forth about that, so please keep checking our website and newsletter for the latest. I hope this helps, and thanks for supporting Criterion!

Sincerely,

Tamara

I have a couple of technical questions regarding the expected Criterion and MoC Blu Ray releases. I felt this is the better place to ask these than in a technical thread, because they are of general interest.

1. Those of us who have code-free DVD players can enjoy DVD releases regardless of region encoding. As I understand, no reliable players exist at present that will play Blu Ray DVD's encoded for other regions. Will Criterion and MoC Blu Rays be region-encoded? If so, will this limit their sales only to the regions for which they are intended?

2. Several Blu Ray DVD's are region-free, but the extra material is recorded in PAL (I live in an NTSC region). Can I see the Main feature of such DVD's in my Blu Ray player and the extra material in my code-free regular DVD player, or will the regular DVD player reject the disc as unreadable?

Thank you in advance for your response.

kekid wrote:I have a couple of technical questions regarding the expected Criterion and MoC Blu Ray releases. I felt this is the better place to ask these than in a technical thread, because they are of general interest.

1. Those of us who have code-free DVD players can enjoy DVD releases regardless of region encoding. As I understand, no reliable players exist at present that will play Blu Ray DVD's encoded for other regions. Will Criterion and MoC Blu Rays be region-encoded? If so, will this limit their sales only to the regions for which they are intended?

2. Several Blu Ray DVD's are region-free, but the extra material is recorded in PAL (I live in an NTSC region). Can I see the Main feature of such DVD's in my Blu Ray player and the extra material in my code-free regular DVD player, or will the regular DVD player reject the disc as unreadable?

Thank you in advance for your response.

1. We don't know anything about the region coding yet.

2. To be able to watch Blu-ray movies and both PAL and NTSC encoded extras you will need a Blu-ray player that is region free for DVDs and can convert both PAL and NTSC -which don't exist at least not that I know of. You can't play your Blu-ray disc in your Oppo.

Do you know why regular DVD players in Australia are region free but the Blu-ray players aren't?

davidhare wrote:And there is the ACCC (Federal Consumer tribunal) which made rulings (which are legally unenforceable) that region coding is anti competitive. (which it is but never mind that.) Because the market is so small here, there is no real muscle to enforce for instance region free BD machines , although it would be perfectly feasible. Nobody gives a fuck.

Which is a drag cos it's forcing me to import a Region A player when I go to Hong Kong in October, which is essential if I'm continuing to import BD titles including CC BD from the US.

Speaking of which, surely someone's mentioned it or thought of it before, but it'll be interesting to see how CC will handle their Japanese titles on BD, that is if the Japanese studios agree to licence them for BD releases.

What I mean is, say, if Toho or Shochiku insisted on region coding the Kurosawa or Ozu titles (so much so CC had to make a silent second printing for Good Morning), wouldn't they also insist on region coding the BD counterparts as well? But then if it's to avoid the CC versions imported back into Japan, region-coding the BD counterparts won't have much effect considering Japan and US are both in Region A.

Maybe that's why we don't see any Japanese films in the first batch?

(I love speculations...)

kekid wrote:Several Blu Ray DVD's are region-free, but the extra material is recorded in PAL (I live in an NTSC region). Can I see the Main feature of such DVD's in my Blu Ray player and the extra material in my code-free regular DVD player, or will the regular DVD player reject the disc as unreadable?

I may be wrong, but aren't PAL/NTSC issues non-existent when playing HD disks - even if the bonus material is in standard definition, that is simply MPEG4 (or whatever) but only at a lower resolution?

SimonI wrote:

kekid wrote:Several Blu Ray DVD's are region-free, but the extra material is recorded in PAL (I live in an NTSC region). Can I see the Main feature of such DVD's in my Blu Ray player and the extra material in my code-free regular DVD player, or will the regular DVD player reject the disc as unreadable?

I may be wrong, but aren't PAL/NTSC issues non-existent when playing HD disks - even if the bonus material is in standard definition, that is simply MPEG4 (or whatever) but only at a lower resolution?

MPEG-4 is a codec (how the data is encoded on disc) and has nothing to do with the video display resolution. 480p encoding = NTSC, 576p = PAL. I guess the question is if Blu-Ray players automatically upconvert either NTSC or PAL for output on an HD display, and the short answer is: I have no idea, but my gut is no.

To answer the other question, I would be shocked if your regular player could read Blu-Ray, for any number of tech reasons.

DDillaman wrote:I guess the question is if Blu-Ray players automatically upconvert either NTSC or PAL for output on an HD display, and the short answer is: I have no idea, but my gut is no.

I'm pretty sure my EP35 upscales everything it plays to its set output res (1080).

Apologies if this has already been done, but I did skim through the posts in this thread and did not find anything like this. FWIW I've done some investigation of the proposed Criterion BDs and found that the DVDs of the following titles already in the collection are region code 1:

• The Third Man
  The Man Who Fell to Earth
  The Wages of Fear
  Gimme Shelter
  The Complete Monterey Pop
  The Last Emperor

And these are all region:

• The 400 Blows
  Contempt
  For All Mankind
  Walkabout

The remaining titles have not yet been released by CC.

SimonI wrote:

kekid wrote:Several Blu Ray DVD's are region-free, but the extra material is recorded in PAL (I live in an NTSC region). Can I see the Main feature of such DVD's in my Blu Ray player and the extra material in my code-free regular DVD player, or will the regular DVD player reject the disc as unreadable?

I may be wrong, but aren't PAL/NTSC issues non-existent when playing HD disks - even if the bonus material is in standard definition, that is simply MPEG4 (or whatever) but only at a lower resolution?

Special features are "MPEG2" according to my computer. No info on PAL/NTSC, but I'm guessing it does conform to one of those standards as well. (All Standard DVDs are MPEG2, btw)

Is there any reason to think that we'll never see all region bluray players? I'd assume it's just a matter of time.

Basically, yes.

With Bluray and HD, one is expected to install "updates" from time to time, to play the new disks.
If someone makes a "region free" player, then the studios just need to release an "update" that reapplies the region-lock (and make sure their new releases won't play without it)

Quite wisely (and who am I to argue with this) Sony et al have made very sure that the only region free format available is Napster (or whatever it's current incarnation is) Well done, MPAA

The one semi region-free format is of course HTPC... But, that requires buying AnyDVD HD (which the studios insist will make you a thief, anyway) or getting DVD Fab Decrypter HD (which requires copying a HDDVD to your harddrive every time you want to play it (and, again, being a 'thief' anyway))
And, both of those still suffer from the 'update' issue... With AnyDVD HD, you'll still need to wait days or weeks to 'illegally' play your new (legally purchased) Bluray disk (as AnyDVD has to create a new updated crack, for every 'update' from the studios) And likewise with DVDFab Decrypter.

davidhare wrote:Just to remind you none of this was an issue with the "inferior" HD DVD format.

RIP.

Don't say it, David! There are so many SD DVDs I still need to pick up!

I agree - you only have to look at what has happened in classical music since CD replaced vinyl - thousands of hitherto lost historical recordings have appeared, courtesy of many new boutique labels; and the dominance of the big companies has been eroded by many new labels recording both new and obscure works. It has become a golden age. No reason, really, why the same can't continue to happen in the video world.

Or you could see it as the dark ages of classical music recordings. Each major label has a fairly low cap on the number of recordings they keep in circulation, and the number of recordings on LP that never made it to CD doesn't seem like it's going to diminish significantly in the foreseeable future.

davidhare wrote:Just to remind you none of this was an issue with the "inferior" HD DVD format.

RIP.

True, that. But, when over 75% of my HDDVDs were gotten for less than $10 (thanks to firesales) it does become a little bit harder to be bitter

Doctor Sunshine wrote:Is there any reason to think that we'll never see all region bluray players? I'd assume it's just a matter of time.

There are modified region-free players available now, and more options are on the way. Please ignore the misinformation above about these players' region-free state being reversed by an update and about HTPC being the only solution.

You can find more info about specific models with a simple google search, or at sites like www.avsforum.com.

Jun-Dai wrote:Each major label has a fairly low cap on the number of recordings they keep in circulation, and the number of recordings on LP that never made it to CD doesn't seem like it's going to diminish significantly in the foreseeable future.

But I see the majors as dinosaurs who would be welcome to become extinct; the likes of BIS, Naive, Chandos et al are showing how it should be done.

OTOH, DG has just launched its classical download shop including hundreds of out of print recordings; personally I have no interest in downloads but it does show how things are likely to evolve.

As for region coding, it's only relevant for folks like us. I'm sure the proportion of DVDs imported across regions is an absolutely tiny part of total sales, which makes me wonder why they go to all the bother.

davidhare wrote:One: they cost a mozza.

Two: why should anyone have to bother.

Prices will drop fast though. You can't blame the studios for going nuts with the anti-piracy and region coding measures. They've got to keep the shareholders happy. But the craziest ideas will quickly be abandoned--I'd never buy a BD player if I had to hook it up to the Internet for no other reason than to satisfy Big [Warner] Brother that I'm not cheating them out of more money.

Doctor Sunshine wrote:But the craziest ideas will quickly be abandoned--I'd never buy a BD player if I had to hook it up to the Internet for no other reason than to satisfy Big [Warner] Brother that I'm not cheating them out of more money.

That's an old myth, never panned out. There's no need to hook up to the internet if you don't want to. And far as I can tell, the connection is there just for same thing as any internet connection, which is the (in this case extra) content. And it makes the firmware updates easier.... [My HD-DVD player seems to have locked up any time after I've touched that extra content (or even during), so I'm rather unimpressed with that particular piece of technological marvel.]

Only thing that's still possible in the future is that at some point they could start enabling flags on the discs to disable full resolution unless you're using HDMI connection for video (more anti-piracy b.s.)...

what they need to do, in order to make this internet extra's thing viable, is make it able to connect with wi-fi... I don't have an ethernet cable anywhere near where a Blu-Ray player would be used. They could even go with Bluetooth technology... it'd be a nice tie in with both of their Blu(e) technologies (for the white collared folks buying the machines)

miless wrote:what they need to do, in order to make this internet extra's thing viable, is make it able to connect with wi-fi... I don't have an ethernet cable anywhere near where a Blu-Ray player would be used. They could even go with Bluetooth technology... it'd be a nice tie in with both of their Blu(e) technologies (for the white collared folks buying the machines)

I completely agree and that's the main reason I went with the PS3. I'll never buy a game for it, but it's a great Blu-Ray player and probably the cheapest one out there.

Blu-ray is in kind of a weird spot right now. In chicken-or-egg terms, its market penetration is being limited because it's still an expensive technology. My PS3's Blu-ray drive died in the middle of a screening of Saawariya last week. My first impulse was the same one I had every time one of my DVD players died — go out and buy a replacement! However, replacement standalone Blu-ray players are still at least $400, which is not an insignificant investment. And I understand that the first v2.0-capable standalones aren't yet on the market, so it's not the greatest time to buy a player if you want it to be future-proof on the audio side. (Maybe not the greatest concern at the Criterion forum, unless you're hoping that the Criterion Blu-ray version of Armageddon will be in the second wave.) So I don't really have any good options but to wait for Sony to send me a refurb unit. (I just got the cardboard coffin for mailing my sick PS3 to Laredo, TX, today.)

If people could buy a no-frills, $200 Blu-ray player it would go a long way to making it look like a viable purchase, especially in recessionary times.

P.S. I don't think it was Saawariya that killed my console. I think it was the hours and hours I had been putting into Grand Theft Auto IV that revealed whatever shortcoming in workmanship led to the drive failure. I probably spun my PS3's drive more in the last two weeks prior to its failure than I did in the six months previous.

According to a poster over at Blue-ray.com, Criterion is putting out a Blu-Ray release of "Salo" later this year.

Currently on last page, demoni » May 09, 2008 02:35 AM. Apologies if this has already been posted and I missed it.