NPD: Interest in Blu-ray on the rise
Interest in buying high-def media increased last month after Toshiba’s HD DVD format lost the “format war.” This isn’t too surprising, but I did expect it to grow a bit more than it did.
NPD is reporting that DVD consumers who are likely to buy high-def optical media increased to 10.8% for week ending 20th February. Previous weeks were 9.4% for 13th February and 8.9% for the week of 6th February. Over the Christmas season these numbers were between 5% to 6.8%.
I assumed this number would have been higher now that there is a clear victor in high-def media. I’ve also seen a huge number of clients requesting Blu-ray players for their homes (which sucks because there is very limited availability of players right now).
The senior analyst of NPD, Russ Crupnick, notes that these numbers are for intent only – not actual sales. “The number is fairly conservative,” he said. “You can take this as an overall trend that more people are aware and inclined toward the format.”
Source: Home Media Magazine
Being in the UK I had my first taste of the archaic region coding on Blu Ray discs today.
I’m a huge fan of asian movies and have always sourced dvds from Hong Kong and Japan. I thought I would be able to carry this on in HD so have ordered the new Stephen Chow movie CJ7 on BD. Now I find it’s locked to region A (i’m B).
Simply means no more BD discs of any kind until I can buy a PC capable of removing this crap. Old style limitations like this is why the takeup of this stuff isn’t as fast and why people turn to piracy.
The majority of Blu-ray discs are not region coded. View this site for a complete list of discs and their regions: http://bluray.lindsite.dk/
Granted many US discs are region free, but most Asian ones are locked.
This is a big pain as a third of my movies are bought from the east (legal copies of foreign movies).
Yeah, the region coding does suck. Hopefully BD-R media will soon come down in price (so that we can rip BD-R’s, remove region coding & other nasty stuff and then reburn without paying an arm & a leg for a blank disc).
The reason why US discs are region free is that they are loaded in NTSC video format and discs made for other regions are loaded in PAL. In my experience (living in NZ), Asian players are usually dual format PAL/NTSC but players sourced from the US are NTSC only. I learned this fact the hard way when I imported a BD-P 1400 Samsung player from the US, along with a gaggle of discs from Amazon.
Since I am a bit of an audio/videophile, my next step is to upgrade my computer/network to include the following (I already own a Netgear EVA8000):
* BD/HD-DVD ROM drive
* attached storage via SATA-II; four drive capable; initial install with two 1TB drives
* AnyDVD version 6.4.0.0 (rips BD+ and HDCP off disc)
Note that while the EVA8000 isn’t for the squeamish, it does work generally well.
The Blu-ray Discs in every region has the same 1080p/24 encode (or they should have anyway. This is a standard in both NTSC (60fps) and PAL (50fps). They both use different pull-down techniques. The aspect and resolution is the same.
It would be the non-high-def content that would pose a problem.