Some major Hollywood movie studios have stepped up and announced their support of HD-DVD, which is hoping to become the standard next gen DVD format. Warner Bros. Studios, New Line Cinema, Paramount Pictures, and Universal Pictures have stated they will offer titles in the Toshiba HD-DVD format but did not say which titles or give other details.

Big movie titles such as ‘Lord Of The Rings’, ‘The Matrix’, and ‘Harry Potter’ are possible for HD-DVD but because of the non-exclusive nature of the studios’ announcement, these titles have potential for Blu-ray release as well. Even without an exclusive deal support from U.S. film studios is important in this format war, especially since these four studios represent about 45 percent of Hollywood’s prepackaged DVD sales in the United States.

Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema are units of Time Warner Inc., Universal Pictures is a division of General Electric Co., and Paramount Pictures is a unit of Viacom Inc.

R.Hollis

Hewlett-Packard is stepping up their support of Blu-ray from financial to full on production. HP announced on Tuesday that their media center PC’s, desktop, and personal workstations will include Blu-ray disc drives by late 2005, followed by notebooks in 2006. HP is set to launch with three different formats; BD-ROM, a read-only format; BD-RE, a rewritable format for HDTV recording and data storage and BD-R, the write-once format for HDTV recording and data storage. The Blu-ray drives will have two read heads so it can be backward compatible to read and also write the consumers existing CDs and DVDs. The drives will also offer the company’s LightScribe technology, which allows professional quality text and graphics to be burned directly onto LightScribe-enabled Blu-ray discs using the same laser that burns to the data side of the disc.

HP is one of the first companies, in the long list of Blu-ray supporters, to announce their full commitment to Sony’s next gen DVD format. Even though this is PC support it is a huge step forward for the Blu-ray side. Of course, we still wait for the movie studios to decide before this format war is fully over. We may not be waiting much longer, hopefully.

R.Hollis

Sharp’s new $3000+ Blu-Ray recorder “BD-HD1000″ will be released on December 9th in Japan for 320,000 yen. The BD-HD100 will be the third recorder on the market to support the Blu-ray Disc format and the first Blu-Ray recorder to feature an internal 160GB hard drive. The recorder will have twin optical drives, one for Blu-ray and the other for standard DVDs. This allows copying of content, as long as it’s not copy-protected, between a DVD, Blu-ray Disc, and the hard drive. The machine can record onto rewritable single-layer BD-RE discs, which have a capacity of 25GB.

This basically means that you can transfer the contents of five DVDs (4.7GB) to a single Blu-Ray disc. You can also store 19 hours of HDTV content on the hard drive, which is more than six times the amount of HDTV that can be stored on a single layer Blu-ray Disc. It can also playback DVD-Video, DVD+/-R, DVD+/-RW, DVD-RAM, and several flavors of CD. The only thing it won’t do is record onto or playback dual-layer 50GB discs.

R.Hollis

This whole next gen DVD format war is getting ridiculous. It seems we are watching a soap opera in the HD world and the main plot is who is going to sleep with whom. The movie studios have yet to decide which bed to get in. There have been rumors that Warner Bros., Universal (GE), and Paramount Pictures are going to release movie titles on HD-DVD, but all these movie studios jointly own Movielink with Sony Pictures. It seems like to me that they would go the Blu-Ray route and help out a business partner. Not in this soap opera.

Although no official announcement has been made, the studios would more than likely want any deal to be non-exclusive, so they could put titles out on both formats. The studios are definitely playing the field and I don’t blame them. Who would want to put millions of dollars into production of one DVD format, just to have it become the next Betamax?

R.Hollis

In my ‘Introduction and Agenda’ opening article for this site, I hinted at having already picked my choice of format for high definition DVD. Well after reading mindless fan-boy drivel for Blu-Ray from major publications over the last few weeks, I’m ready to state my case. If hi-def DVD is to gain the needed saturation in the market place to succeed and elevate the video medium in general, HD-DVD is the one and only clear choice.

I know with those words many of you just lost interest in reading any further. I ask why? What has Sony ever done for you personally? Invented the Compact Disc? Do Blu-Ray fans have a ‘they did it once’ they’ll do it again’ mentality? Well, I hate to break it you but James T. Russell invented the Compact Disc Medium, not Sony. Do people long for their Betamax player’s? JVC won that battle and thankfully so. What the Blu-Ray fan-boys are trying to aid is the systematic homogenization of the home video landscape. Sony is basically strong-arming studios and manufactures into accepting their moderately technically superior format, as well as signing over the rights of millions of potential HD-DVD titles in the coming years.

I don’t want to see movies turn into the video game scenario. You have to own an X-Box if you want to play an X-Box game, same for PS2 and Gamecube. Do you really want that for DVDs as well? I don’t need Sony dictating to me that I can’t watch the James Bond catalog in hi-def unless I buy a Blu-ray player. I for one don’t want to see Sony hold our home entertainment hostage so they can have this bewildering desire to “own” a medium outright.

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