Sony is kicking off its US launch of Blu-ray with seven movie titles. Samsung's BD-P1000 Blu-ray player started appearing on store shelves last week at a price of $999 and consumers will now have high-definition content to justify the steep price of entry.
The titles being released which include 50 First Dates, The Fifth Element, Hitch, House of Flying Daggers, XXX, The Terminator and Underworld Evolution. The titles will be priced at $24.99, but we'll just have to see how long it takes for retailers to start chipping away at that price.
The initial discs will be encoded in MPEG-2 rather than VC-1 or MPEG-4. Internal Sony testing found that MPEG-2 offered the best compromise in performance and with the reproduction of noise found in the original film master. "What makes the films most difficult to encode, actually, is noise. And to make the best approximation of it, you need to use the highest available bit rate -- that's one of the key differences for HD DVD and Blu-ray: We have a higher bandwidth available for encoding than HD DVD has. It gives us a lot of flexibility even when we're working with the most difficult video masters," said SPHE VP Don Eklund to PC World.
Also new to Blu-ray is its BD-Java (BD0J) disc authoring. It is a complex system that Sony feels offer a power platform for programmers that is superior to the competing XML-based Internet High Definition (iHD) used in Microsoft's HD-DVD disc standard. PC World reports:
BD-J has two different profiles. Sony's first content will be in what Eklund refers to as BD-MV, or "movie mode." "The menus will still be quite different than what you're accustomed to with DVD," he promises. "BD-MV is a powerful format for creating interactive menus, and it will give a better, more seamless experience than what users are getting from DVD. You don't have to jump around between menu pages as you do with DVD. We use a graphics layer to present all of the text information, so you don't have to go back and access the disc in order to access the menus. We also have a tool called a pop-up menu that the user can use to access disc features during the movie's playback, so, for example, you can get to a commentary track."