Audio Video News

Warner is behind HD on disc in a big way. On September 26th it will release a total of ten titles from the Warner catalog to the Blu-ray and HD DVD formats, including the recent Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride on Blu-ray.

Joining Corpse Bride on Blu-ray that day will be The Fugitive, Lethal Weapon 2, House of Wax (2005), Space Cowboys, and Swordfish. Hitting HD DVD on the same day are an “Ultra Resolution” remaster of Errol Flynn’s classic The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Dirty Dozen, Grand Prix, and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.

Warner’s support of both Blu-ray and HD DVD continues to prove interesting with respect to the jockeying position of titles on the formats. While all but one of the Blu-ray titles that will release on the 26th have been released on HD DVD, the notable exception is Corpse Bride, which has so far not been announced for the HD DVD format. In addition, High-Def Digest (www.highdefdigest.com) is reporting that these Warner titles will be packed with features and that Warner is breaking from form and encoding these BD titles in the more efficient VC-1 compression rather than the bit-hungry MPEG-2 that has so far been prevalent on Blu-ray releases.

The choice of video codecs is interesting in that Blu-ray Discs have thus far been hamstring in disc storage by the inability to replicate dual-layer discs. Dual-layer diss are scheduled to become available later this year, but the BDs released so far have been single-layer, 25GB discs. It’s been surprising that, in spite of this limitation, studios have thus far used the less efficient MPEG-2 compression for their titles, and seemingly sacrificed many of the special interactivity features that are supposed to be a hallmark of the format.