If you claim your disc format the winner of the format war, does it become true? High-Def Digest <A HREF="http://www.highdefdigest.com/news/show/Industry_Trends/Disc_Sales/Sonys_... </A>that Sony is seizing the marketing initiative with respect to the Neilsen Videoscan ratings and other indicators that showed Blu-ray as releasing and selling twice as many titles in January as HD DVD and will now market Blu-ray as the clear winner of the format war.
Buena Vista Home Entertainment (Disney) is rapidly proving itself as one of the companies that get it when it comes to releasing top quality Blu-ray Discs. The company is releasing consistently high quality BDs by employing both MPEG-2 and MPEG-4/AVC compression for its 1080p video transfers and using uncompressed PCM soundtracks. The extras are relatively thin, but that's easy enough to forgive when the principal mission of providing high quality picture and sound is met.
OK, I know the Blu(e) jokes are stale. Still, I had to call this Blog something to enter it into the system, so why not? Unless you've been under a rock you know that Warner and Paramount support both Blu-ray and HD DVD. Warner is unique in that it now encodes the video for its movies using Microsoft's VC-1 compression on both formats, encodes that are said to be virtually identical. But on the soundtrack front, the Blu-ray customer doesn't always get the advanced, next-gen sound that the HD DVD customer gets.
In one sense this film is an unexpected gift. I would never have imagined such intense, mesmerizing human drama could be culled from the story of two rival magicians trying to destroy each other personally and professionally around the turn of the century. Of course, in another sense the success of a film made from such a talented pool of people on both sides of the camera shouldn't seem surprising at all.
It's a big credit to this film that its subject matter is something that has not only been done, but been done very well many, many times. In fact, the film it reminded me the most of, in many ways, is the excellent if not great <I>Truman Show</I>. Yes, like that movie this one highlights the dramatic skills of a genius-level sketch comedy actor, only this time around it's Ricky Bubb-eee himself Will Ferrell. Instead of the being the unwitting subject of a reality TV show, Ferrell's Harold Crick finds that he's the subject of a novel being written by a self-and death-obsessed writer played wonderfully and obsessively by Emmma Thompson.
It would take a much better film writer than I to do justice to this film, so I'll limit the damage by being brief. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's <I>Babel</I> brilliantly intertleaves the lives of four families across three continents, and links them in way that are mostly believeable and emotionally captivating and compelling from beginning to end. Almost like Jim Jarmusch meeting Robert Altman in the Int'l terminal.
It’s curious timing for a new PS2 accessory, but this one is a dandy.
For those of you who just couldn’t wait for the debut of the PS3, or, more to the point, couldn’t afford to buy one of the scarce wonder boxes off of eBay, there’s no reason you can’t enjoy your favorite PlayStation titles in high definition right now, thanks to the Xploder HDTV Player for PlayStation 2 ($40).
German speaker manufacturer, Canton, has replaced the company's popularly priced LE series with the new GLE series of full-range speakers. Canton says the new speakers utilize some of the materials and designs from the higher-end Vento, Ergo, and Karot lines. The GLE series includes a total of six models: two floorstanders, two bookshelfs, a horizontal center channel, and an on-wall version.
There are ordinary mortals who throw Super Bowl parties. And then there is Pete Putman, occasional Home Theater contributor and the HDTV expert of hdtvexpert.com. He put the big game on nine different screens scattered throughout the house (and one outside it). So whose display chugged away in sub-freezing weather? Which had pride of place in Pete's workshop theater? How did the portable pocket projector do? And whose screen was featured in the bathroom, "positioned at an angle to viewers at the door, the sink, and on the throne"? Check out the fully illustrated story for yourself.
