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Low-cost Blu-ray drive announced

Philips and Lite-On Digital Solutions has just announced a new Blu-ray Disc drive for PCs at the low-price of $199. This is now the most affordable BD-ROM drive available. Frankly, it’s the cheapest Blu-ray player period.

The DH-401S plays all single and double layer Blu-ray Disc, DVD and CD (no HD DVD, obviously). BD-R/RE/ROM discs can be read at up to 4x. DVD±R and DVD-ROM discs at 12x, and DVD±RW at up to 8x speeds. CD-R/RW/ROM can be read at up to 32x.



The drive ships with Cyberlink PowerDVD and you can output a 1080p signal from your PC to your TV with an HDMI w/HDCP equipped video card.

Divx comes to PS3

Apparently this is a big deal, but DivX is working with Sony to bring their file extension to the Playstation 3. According to Ars Technica, Divx and the similar XviD codec is the de facto video format for online video. They go so far as to say it’s the “MP3″ of video. I must be crazy because I thought “MP4″ was the “MP3″ of video.



Seriously, I’m a pretty tech-savvy guy, but I haven’t downloaded a DivX file ever. I think I downloaded one XviD video once and found it too much of a pain to install the right codecs to bother with it. Is it really “de facto?” I could have sworn AVI and MPEG-4 were the video formats of choice - certainly at the websites I visit they are.

But apparently this was something a lot of people asked for from Sony and even from Microsoft’s Xbox 360 that they’ve added support. I don’t know anyone that uses DivX. I know pretty much every DVD player in existence supports the format but never figured out why (kind of like why PCs come with COM ports still).

But that’s the news, DivX and XviD are supported by the PS3. For those of you that actually use those formats, knock yourself out.

Buy 1 Get 1 Free Blu-ray Disc sales at Amazon

Amazon.com is back with another buy one get one free offer on select Blu-ray Disc titles. Two separate promotions are currently running, one for Sony Blu-ray Discs and one for Disney Blu-ray Discs. Unfortunately, you can not mix and match discs from the different studios. Each promotion is separate and specific to either Sony titles or Disney titles.

Check here for Sony B1G1 Free Blu-ray Discs and here for Disney B1G1 Free Blu-ray Discs.

Get your $10 Blu-ray Discs

Amazon prices some of these titles for as little as $19.99. So with this promotion, you can stock up your collection for as low as $10 per Blu-ray Disc. Some very popular Blu-ray Disc titles are included in this promo, including Casino Royale from Sony and the first 2 Pirates of the Caribbean films from Disney. You also might want to make sure to get your order up to $25 to qualify for Amazon’s famous “free super saving shipping”.

These offers started on Sunday and will only be available for a “limited time” according to Amazon. So get em while the price is right.

Armistice Day

Today is Armistice Day, the day set aside to commemorate the end of The War to End All Wars. While there are certainly wars ravaging all across the world, for some reason I’m caught up in the middle of the most trivial of all wars, the high-def format war. It’s not really a war at all, it’s more like two-year-olds arguing over the same toy. “Mine,” they say with that whiny voice while huffing with an air of disgust and fury.

Not a war at all. For surely there would be no war if it weren’t for the media’s inherent ability to sensationalize everything. Without the “format war” there would have been a year of “slow news days” or the poor “journalists” would have to fabricate some other random controversy to generate web clicks.

Here in the States we’ve changed Armistice Day into “Veterans Day” - and in the British Commonwealths to “Remembrance Day” - after World War II (The Great War). Apparently the entire western world was naive for the first half of the 20th Century thinking one war was going to be the last ever. It would be just as naive to think this high-def war would be the last format war as well. Certainly we would hope the mega-corporations would have enough sense to avoid another one, but egos always get the better of the two sides and it’s inevitable. This is how shooting wars start after all, two sides can’t agree on something so they start killing each other. Yes, it’s obviously the most ridiculous concept ever devised by humans, but it sure is good for the economy! (I say this in jest obviously.)

I may just be the only person watching this war who is jaded (I sure hope not), but I’m over the whole affair. It appears some in the industry are also growing weary. Sony’s Howard Stringer appeared to be tiring of the canard. Reflecting back to before he was CEO he declared that he wishes he would have stuck to the negotiations and unified the two formats. He blamed egos for the quagmire we’re in (isn’t it always one ego trying to prove something to the world?).

You may have noticed I haven’t posted last week. It was not because I was enjoying my amaretto sours while I wasted away at home, or because I am sick of the “format war.” It was because I was away on vacation. I was in Las Vegas where I had neither fun nor relaxation. I am back now and I will be writing more articles for your education or enjoyment. I will be enjoying an amaretto sour, however.

Over 90,000 HD DVD players sold last weekend

VideoBusiness is reporting that over 90,000 Toshiba HD-A2 HD DVD players were sold over the weekend, thanks to a massive price-cut that occurred at stores like Walmart and Bestbuy. These stores and others had the 2nd generation HD DVD player selling for under $100, an unheard of public price for a high definition format player, until now.
This promotion has given a massive boost to HD DVD format adoption and this is only the very beginning of the holiday shopping season! What is going to happen on Black Friday or during other ‘hot’ holiday sales? Can we expect to see the third generation HD DVD players hitting $99? No one knows for now, but I predict that the 3rd generation players will drop to at least $149 at some stores. Heck we’ve already heard reports that Sears is planning to sell the HD-A3 for $169 on Black Friday.

So will these low-cost players help HD DVD pull ahead of Blu-ray Disc in terms of content sales and format adoption? No one knows for sure at this time, but these sales are certainly helping the HD DVD format as a whole.

High Definition rumors squashed

From the multitude of high definition format websites and communities found online, there are always a good number of rumors and theories flying around pertaining to both HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc.

Two of the more recent rumors that have shook-up the online scenes have been the talks about Warner Home Video reevaluating their dual-format high definition support and another rumor detailing plans for a new Xbox media center with an embedded HD DVD drive.

Warner denies high definition format strategy change

The SVP of Strategic Promotion and Communication for Warner Home Entertainment, Jim Noonan, spoke with HighDefDigest to dispell the recent rumor. “I can tell you that Warner’s position has not changed, and I know that Dan did not intend to suggest that wasn’t the case. We support both formats and we have made no decision to alter that policy, nor are there any such announcements coming, or being planned.”

Microsoft denies HD DVD Xbox

The rumor regarding the Xbox media center with a built-in HD DVD drive has also been vehemently denied by Microsoft. Kevin Collins, the director of HD DVD evangelism stated “the company did not and will not bundle an HD DVD drive in its popular gaming console because Microsoft believes that gamers are first and foremost gamers.” You can read more about this in Home Media Magazine.

Really not really? Or really maybe?

Now that we’ve seen the official company responses to these rumors. I’d like to take a moment to state that anything is still possible. You may or may not have heard about Sony adamantly denying any type of PS3 price-cuts this year and then later issuing multiple “clearances” and price-cuts after the fact. This format war is an ever-changing battlefield and you never know what to expect next. The big Paramount HD DVD bomb is one example of a surprise announcement that no one saw coming.

Blu-ray Disc with BD+ back-up with Slysoft

Users of Slysoft Inc.’s AnyDVD HD have been reporting they have been able to backup Blu-ray Discs with the new advanced BD+ encryption layer. This security layer was claimed to be “unbreakable” by the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA).

BD+ recently became available and Fox was the first to implement it on such films as The Day After Tomorrow and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. Both HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc (BD) use the same AACS encryption but Blu-ray added another layer called BD+ with dynamic encryption keys supposed to prevent piracy, and is a selling point to the studios from the BDA.

When AACS was cracked, Fox and MGM halted their BD release schedule for six months while preparing BD+. Now that this layer is also allegedly cracked, I hope the studios don’t drop out entirely.

Currently there are numerous legal battles in the courts of North America and Europe over the legality of creating persistent copies of CSS encrypted DVDs. The Digital Millennium Copyrights Act (DMCA) makes it technically illegal to break the encryption. Previously courts have sided with the consumer’s right to back-up their owned content, so the DMCA has been challenged by consumer advocates. Ripping a copy and distributing it for non-personal use has always been considered illegal.