Audio Video News

Fox has announced its first wave of titles on the burgeoning Blu-ray Disc format, with an initial slate of catalog titles that "targets the early adopter" and a significant day-and-date release. November 14th will see the release of Behind Enemy Lines, Fantastic Four, Kingdom of Heaven (Director's Cut), The Omen (666), The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Speed, and The Transporter. This wave will be followed on November 21st by the day-and-date Blu-ray and DVD release of Ice Age: The Meltdown.

The press release specifically notes that Fox's BD titles will take advantage of the format's Java-based interactivity, and at least some of them will feature AVC (MPEG-4) video compression. All of the titles announced are to carry DTS-HD Master Audio lossless audio. In addition, Ridley Scott's 3-hour plus cut of Kingdom of Heaven has also been specified as being one of the industry's first dual-layer, 50GB BD titles.

Obviously, the fact that another major studio is getting into the next-gen game is big news, but there's more going on here than the obvious. First, Ice Age: The Meltdown joins Paramount's Mission: Impossible 3 as the highest profile, day-and-date releases to hit the next-gen formats. Retailers and consumers alike have been stuck in a chicken-or-the-egg syndrome with the Blu-ray and HD DVD releases so far. Consumers will be more likely to buy into the new formats if there are A-list titles available. But the studios won't release those big-time titles until the player install base is larger. Of course, M:I 3 and Ice Age will be hitting store shelves just after Sony's PlayStation3 stealth Blu-ray player enters the market on October 25th, so you can bet on a surge of installed BD players on that basis alone.

The presence of DTS-HD Master Audio on these discs is certainly welcome, but also raises questions. In order to even transcode a DTS-HD Master Audio signal to linear PCM, the player must be able to decode the format at full resolution. The Samsung BD-P1000 does not, and the current online specs for Pioneer Elite's BDP-HD1 and Sony's BDP-S1 Blu-ray players do not indicate that they will decode DTS-HD or DTS-HD Master Audio lossless at full resolution. Even if HDMI 1.3 (which transmits the new Dolby and DTS formats native digital) is supported in the Pioneer and Sony players, until compatible AV receivers and pre/pros are available to connect them to there would be no way to decode the new hi-res audio streams at full resolution. Both DTS-HD and DTS-HD Master Audio streams do contain a backward-compatible "core" 1.5Mbps DTS stream that the players will recognize, but these are lossy compression streams.

It might just be that we won't be able to decode these new hi-res soundtracks until next year, with either a new AVR or pre/pro, or a second-gen player. Hey, what fun would a format war be without this kind of stuff?

And the last point, excepting Ridley Scott's relatively new-ish and epic-ish Kingdom of Heaven (director's cut), it's apparent that targeting early adopters is synonymous in the studios' minds with releasing B-level action movies (or D-level in the case of the anything but Extraordinary Gentlemen). So, even if neither M:I 3 or Ice Age are my cup of tea as movies, at least they're new and perhaps a harbinger of more day-and-date new releases to come to the new formats.