Releaselog

Warner Bros going Blu-Ray exclusive

Posted on 05.01.2008 at 02:21 in Tech News by RLSLOG

Looks like HD format war is finally over, Warner Bros will back only Blu-ray. Sad news for all HD DVD supporters, it is time to throw away your HD DVD :)

Time Warner’s Warner Bros. studio Friday said it would exclusively release high-definition DVDs in Sony Corp’s Blu-ray format, dealing a big blow to Toshiba Corp’s rival HD DVD technology. Warner Bros, Hollywood’s biggest seller of DVDs, representing about 18 to 20% of sales in the United States, was one of the few studios that backed both formats. All sides of the format war had agreed it was confusing to consumers and a stumbling block for a potential multibillion-dollar industry. Total DVD unit sales fell 4.5% in 2007, the first major year-over-year decline since the disc format debuted in 1997, according to Adams Media Research. Sales fell 4.8% to $15.7 billion.

“The window of opportunity for high-definition DVD could be missed if format confusion continues to linger. We believe that exclusively distributing in Blu-ray will further the potential for mass market success and ultimately benefit retailers, producers, and most importantly, consumers,” Warner Bros Chairman and Chief Executive Barry Meyer said in a statement. News Corp’s 20th Century Fox, Walt Disney, and Lionsgate are among studios backing the Blu-ray format. Viacom’s Paramount studios and General Electric’s NBC Universal release movies in HD DVD format.Warner said it would continue releasing in the HD DVD format until the end of May, although those releases would follow the standard DVD and Blu-ray releases.

Source: usatoday

* Comments(129)

Comments (129)

Feel free to post your Warner Bros going Blu-Ray exclusive torrent, subtitles, samples, free download, quality, NFO, rapidshare, megashares, sendspace, filesonic, filefactory, netload, crack, serial, keygen, requirements or whatever-related comments here. Don't be rude (permban), use only English, don't go offtopic and read FAQ before asking a question. Owners of this website aren't responsible for content of comments.
Pages: « 1 [2] Show All
  1. The One
    January 5th, 2008 | 17:34

    Blue-Ray sucks and so does Sony. Download for FREE! That’s hopw I show my support :)

  2. John
    January 5th, 2008 | 17:39

    Blu-Ray has uncompressed sound so BR>>>>HDDVD
    And before you try it the HD-DVD players cant play the duallayer discs so they’re stuck where they are at lol

  3. Blu-Ray is King
    January 5th, 2008 | 17:43

    Again , time to set things straight because the amount of misinformation is mind boggling.

    @99 Pooboy : Since when exactly is the RSX = a Geforce 6 ?? The RSX is based on the Geforce 7 architecture (7800 GTX more precisely) and not the NV45 so i don’t know where you got your info from but you are completely wrong.The 360 has an ATI chipset of the 1800 generation (which the Geforce 7 was slightly superior to).Man…….

    @101 Oscar69 : Yeah right and people said the same thing about never needing more space with 700mb CDs and then the 4.7 gig DVDd and after that the dual layer DVDd ect ect ect……So you may think that the extra space on the Blu-Ray is useless but history shows that the space will be needed and very useful at some point.You are just grasping at straws like the rest of the 360ers/HD-DVDers.

  4. oscar69
    January 5th, 2008 | 18:46

    @101 Oscar69 : Yeah right and people said the same thing about never needing more space with 700mb CDs and then the 4.7 gig DVDd and after that the dual layer DVDd ect ect ect……So you may think that the extra space on the Blu-Ray is useless but history shows that the space will be needed and very useful at some point.You are just grasping at straws like the rest of the 360ers/HD-DVDers.

    Well, man with the interesting nick which clearly shows how biased you are ;-) : Why are you here then?

    Plus: CDs were never meant to be used for containings films. You are wrong there. Next: Duallayer absolutely needed for “good picture quality”. Yeah, sure. That is why they are using it completely for the movie. And why duallayer dvds are always 99 % full with data. Oooops… No, they are not. Wrong again, dude. Plenty of space left on most duallayer dvds. And keep in mind: usually there is much more than just the movie on the dvd. And still: place left.

    So – you are wrong. Facts are against you.

  5. Peter Parker
    January 5th, 2008 | 18:46

    @Pooboy

    The only thing which lets the PS3 down when comparing it to the best gaming PC available to buy now is the GPU which is equivalent to an Nvidia 7900GT/GTX. It’s a 550MHz GPU with 24 parallax pixel pipelines based on the G71. Go read about it if you don’t believe me.

    The 360’s R500 is close to the Radeon X1800, maybe the model down is closer to it’s spec.

    The GeForce 8 (8800GTX and GTS) were launched 3 days before the PS3 was launched in Japan.

    If Sony and Nvidia were to wait until the G80 specification had been completed, the PS3 would have been launched a few months ago. Then you would say that it’s hardware is out of date because the G92 specification is currently available whilst GeForce 9 cards are coming out in February/March. The console had to be released at some point. How would your PC play (optimized) games if it had an 8800GT and a 7/8 core CPU running at 3.2GHz per core?

  6. Peter Parker
    January 5th, 2008 | 18:48

    @viranth and netdude

    Yes HD DVD has a triple layer 51GB disc however there are no plans for it to be used for movies at this point in time. In terms of providing the greatest capacity, the largest HD DVD disc to be made is 170GB. The current HD DVD reader and writer technology doesn’t support additional layers (that would be a 10 layer HD DVD disc @ 17GB per layer). Blu-ray has reached 250GB. Apart from a possible need of a firmware update, I don’t know if there are any other limits to the reading capabilities of Blu-ray technology.

  7. oscar69
    January 5th, 2008 | 18:49

    Maybe I should add: I own neither a HDDVD- nor a BluRay-player. And I do not intend to buy one. HD content on discs will not be “the next big thing” after DVD. The future will (unfortunately) be downloadable contents. Which might lead to pay-per-view. :-(

  8. Peter Parker
    January 5th, 2008 | 18:50

    @Blu-Ray is King

    In terms of uncompressed audio, HD DVD movies are required to use 2 types of lossless codecs (Linear PCM and Dolby TrueHD) whilst Blu-ray movies are only required to use 1 (Linear PCM). So your statement isn’t necessarily true, ALTHOUGH the larger size of the Blu-ray format does allow more audio codecs and languages to be included on each disc.

    I only have 2 Blu-ray films. The 1st has two English audio options (5.1 – in the mandatory Dolby Digital @ 640kbps and DTS @ 1.5Mbps and 5.1 Linear PCM). The other has 8 5.1 audio options with English being the only 5.1 Linear PCM.

  9. Peter Parker
    January 5th, 2008 | 18:55

    In fact, I remember lots of people complained about the bad performance of the Radeon X1800. The Radeon X1900 blew the X1800 out of the water. The X1800 was a bad card, much like the GeForce 5 range.

  10. Blu-Ray is King
    January 5th, 2008 | 19:10

    @107 Oscar69 : Your problem is that you only take movies into consideration in your argument when in fact Blu-Ray has a use for games and applications as well and therefore the extra space will come in handy at some point just like it did with every media in history so far.From CDs to DVDs to Dual Layer DVD to Blu-Ray/HD-DVD ect all because movies , games and apps are becoming bigger with each generation.It won’t be any different with Blu-Ray and you are only kidding yourself and ignoring history if you think otherwise.

  11. John
    January 5th, 2008 | 19:15

    @Peter Parker
    Blu-Ray also has Dolby true HD so you are misinformed or you dont have latest firmware updated…

  12. Peter Parker
    January 5th, 2008 | 19:20

    PC games are now on sale with multiple dual layer DVD’s because 8.5GB is not big enough. BlackSite Area 51 (around 11.2GB) and John Woo Presents Stranglehold (12.5GB) are two examples.

  13. Peter Parker
    January 5th, 2008 | 19:23

    @John

    Dolby TrueHD isn’t mandatory on Blu-ray. It is on HD DVD.

  14. enigma
    January 5th, 2008 | 19:53

    @117
    Are you sure? I just rented Danny the Dog on HD-DVD and it didn’t have TrueHD, so if its “mandatory” someone messed up there. I’ve rented other movies that do have TureHD, and it’s not the default, I have to manually select it… so now I’ve gotten in the habit of always checking…

  15. Peter Parker
    January 5th, 2008 | 20:24

    @enigma

    Unleashed (Danny The Dog) should have Dolby TrueHD although it doesn’t have to be default.

    The current mandatory audio codecs for HD DVD are:

    Dolby Digital @ 504kbps – lossy
    DTS @ 1.5Mbps – lossy
    Dolby Digital Plus @ 3.0Mbps – lossy
    Linear PCM – lossless
    Dolby TrueHD – lossless

    The mandatory Blu-ray audio codecs are:

    Dolby Digital @ 640kbps – lossy
    DTS @ 1.5Mbps – lossy
    Linear PCM – lossless

    Everything else is optional according to the current HD DVD specification.

    Blu-ray also supports higher bitrates in the all of the lossy audio codecs apart from Dolby Digital Plus, which supprts 1.7Mbps comnpared to 3.0Mbps on HD DVD.

    Whilst DVD had Region 0 allowing for world wide use, some Blu-ray films are encoded with Regions 1-3. I don’t know how many of them are done this way but there are a few.

  16. theman
    January 5th, 2008 | 21:29

    I’m not bothered who wins, I find both formats pointless, its just a last ditch attempt to make people buy media in physical formats, we are not too far away from having all of our media delivered through the internet, cd sales are declining year on year, once high speed internet becomes the norm, who is going to pay to buy a movie from a store? The only purpose blu-ray or hd-dvd will serve is just to back up data, and even then there will be better ways to do that.

  17. kingpin
    January 5th, 2008 | 21:30

    I’m not bothered who wins, I find both formats pointless, its just a last ditch attempt to make people buy media in physical formats, we are not too far away from having all of our media delivered through the internet, cd sales are declining year on year, once high speed internet becomes the norm, who is going to pay to buy a movie from a store? The only purpose blu-ray or hd-dvd will serve is just to back up data, and even then there will be better ways to do that.

  18. bert
    January 5th, 2008 | 22:14

    im glad blu ray is moving fowards.
    there are alot of ps3 haters out there, who dismiss the bluray drive and @ darth acron, why the hell are you mocking folding@home, if you even had a brain cell youd realise its a good idea.
    dell only sell bluray drives,no hddvd (here in uk anyway)
    i bought my ps3 for two reasons really, blu-ray and gt5.
    ive still gotta wait for gt5, but the quality of a movie is awesome, i like the fact that i dont have to buy some stupid external drive and faf around to watch hd, i also like that i can watch hd/dvd without having to pay for a remote, i also like playing all my games online for free, with no subscription.

    all in all, once youve bought hd dvd and xbox live the ps3 is a much much sounder investment.
    i might be the only one but im very happy with my ps3 and glad i didnt get a 360 as i almost did on many occasions.

  19. Jim Bob
    January 5th, 2008 | 23:56

    About time, I hope microsoft DIE!

  20. oneSh@DyTHUG
    January 6th, 2008 | 01:17

    F00k Blue-Ray and HD. I’m old school. I back my DVDs up on 4300 floppy disks. lol

  21. Peter Parker
    January 6th, 2008 | 06:57

    @enigma

    More news on the mandatory codecs:

    (Obviously) the players must support all mandatory codecs but each disc must contain one or more of them (for video and audio).

    This would be why Unleashed didn’t have Dolby True HD.

  22. LaughingSam
    January 6th, 2008 | 07:12

    I stopped reading after awhile but wanted to make these points:

    I support Blue-Ray over HD-DVD because I imagine that in 2 or 3 years, recordable discs will be cheap enough to use for semi-permanent data storage like many people do with DVD-R’s and before that CD-R’s. Blue-Ray has much more capacity. Do you want to burn 1 Blue-Ray or 2+ HD-DVD’s to store the same information? Using hard drives for storage may be cheaper but hard drives fail much more than burned discs. You can easily lose a 500GB or 1TB drive full of information with no warning. In fact, you should expect it to happen at some point, it’s so likely. Everything I’ve ever burned to CD-R or DVD-R is still accessible as far as I’ve checked.

    My friend supports HD-DVD because he had an XBox and now an XBox 360. Basically a low level fan boy mentality which I see mirrored here by a few people. A poster above basically said it doesn’t matter what the capacity is because movies fit on both formats. This is very short sighted thinking.

    Director/Producer Michael Bay believes that Microsoft has only supported HD-DVD to create confusion and to block Sony from success with Blue-Ray. Microsoft’s goal is really to get you hooked on downloadable content through their XBox Live. This does make a lot of sense to me. You can tell they have put a lot of thought into XBox Live which is actually very usable for a console based system. I would’ve liked to support Sony over the more traditionally invasive Microsoft by upgrading my PS2 to a PS3, but I went for the XBox 360 because of the extremely better online gaming experience. Sony has made the mistake of letting the each individual game company provide their own online experience for their games and it’s been much more miss than hit. I assume they are changing this, but haven’t looked into it due to a lack of games for the PS3 (a situation which has recently improved). I won’t be buying the HD-DVD player that connects to the 360 – If I really wanted one, I’d just get a stand alone player that won’t be useless if my 360 dies for a few dollars more. I recently read on a 360 fan site that Microsoft is planning on adding internal HD-DVD playability to future 360’s which should be an interesting twist.

  23. FamilyGuy
    January 6th, 2008 | 13:15

    People keep throwing around the word monopoly but if that is the case wasnt the dvd a monopoly as well? Sony might have created/started Blu-ray disc but they arent going to be the only ones in control of it so there is NO monopoly.

    They wont be and arent already the only ones making blu-ray players or blu-ray movies.

  24. JohnnyC
    January 7th, 2008 | 01:16

    I don’t understand why people would rather Blu-Ray win than HD-DVD. With Blu-Ray people like us would have to wait longer for HD rips, we would be stuck with Region coding, Blu-Ray also doesn’t have mandatory DTS HD, and in a couple of years your probably going to have to buy a new Blu-Ray player due to larger capacity discs. Add to that, these 200GB discs would only be useful for storage but Hard Drives read quicker and by the time 200GB Blu-Rays are out 2TB Hard Drives will be the norm and if companies released fims that took up 200GB then we would all need new HDTV’s, the resolution would be 9600×5400 or something stupid, if they released games that actually took up 200GB there would be a new game every 10 years!!

  25. Bigtex
    January 7th, 2008 | 16:27

    Could we please stop saying “It looks like the format war is over”, I can’t count the number of times this has been said in the last year and a half. The war is never over, both sides have billions of investing dollars. Just because 1 says they’re going 1 way, doesn’t mean they can’t change their mind later. It happens all the time. It was “over” when porn changed. Then it was over again when porn changed again, then it was over when I blew my nose.

    Also “throw your HD-DVD” away. Yeah, thats smart, because there aren’t hundreds of movies in HD-DVD to watch. Not to mention there are plenty more distributors of HD-DVD than just WB.

    The best news of this topic would be no news, as there isn’t a bit of news that can come out that will make a bit of difference to us. The “war” will go on forever.

    Having HD-DVD is excellent, the prices for these HD-DVDs are super cheap. Imagine if only Blu-Ray won? My god, I don’t think Sony can extract much more money from my ass than they already have, imagine Sony with no competition… HD-DVDs are nice and cheap.

Pages: « 1 [2] Show All

Leave a reply