Tag Archives: Blu-ray

PlayStation Europe boss Jim Ryan has said discs aren’t going away any time soon, despite the PlayStation 4′s emphasis on digital content delivery.

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Technical re-jigging has reduced the original FFXIII’s three-disc requirement on Xbox 360 to just one disc for the remastered FFXIII-2. It’s like magic.

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Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has confirmed that Wii U won’t have support for Blu-ray or DVD playback.

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A bundle featuring both Dead Space animated movies has been revealed for both DVD and Blu-ray.
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Your PSN’s so fat, it doesn’t sit in your PS3 – it sits in outlying Sony products around your PS3!

That incredibly juvenile third grade holdover more or less describes the goal of Sony Network Entertainment, an upcoming expansion of PSN.

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According to a Nikkei report, Blu-rays with upwards of 33Gb are on the way.

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Sony has said that the transferring of Blu-ray films to PSP is a decision for Hollywood studios, not the platform holder.

Speaking with Eurogamer, a spokesperson for Sony stated that Blu-ray releases of Tropic Thunder and RocknRolla already support the feature for the handheald, but are viewed at a reduced quality.

This statement from Sony comes on the heels of a report from Blu-ray.com, which stated that the first two Blu-ray releases to feature PSP copies of the films will arrive November 10 in the US.

These movies are Godzilla and The Ugly Truth, and include a digital copy especially for the PSP but you will need to use your PS3 to transfer them.

More through the links.

id Software’s John Carmack has been discussing multiplatform trade-off’s with GameInformer and has said that putting RAGE on 3 DVD’s on Xbox 360 is a problem as the nature of the game won’t really allow for it.

“We would love to set the thing up where it filled one Blu-ray disc versus three DVDs, which is about the right mix, but the game just…we can’t cut it into a third like that,” he said

“We can cut it into two pieces. We’ve got two large wastelands on there. We just couldn’t make an arbitary cut.”

However, Carmack forsees no problem with Doom 4 being multi disk.

“Doom 4 is being set up so that it’s almost certainly going to be cut up to 3 DVDs versus one Blu-ray. At least they’ve got the ability because of the way it’s structured.” concluded Carmack.

Carmack also compared development on the two consoles:

“There’s a little bit more theoretical raw performance on the PS3, so we’ve got a little bit more headroom.

“The 360 was easier to certainly to get to where we are now. More sweat equity had to be put into the PS3.”

According to the Entertainment Merchant’s Association’s 2008 Annual Report on the Home Entertainment Industry, 87% of PS3 owners also use their Sony Living Room Devices as Blu-ray players.

An NPD survey last year claimed that 60% of PS3 owners didn’t even know their console played Blu-ray discs, so we imagine phrases like “Really? Cool!” and “Doh!” also reached an all-time usage high over the past year.

So, do you use your PS3 to watch Blu-ray movies?

Thanks, Engadget.

The Final Fantasy Advent Children: Complete Blu-ray discs have arrived in Japanese retail stores and you can see one retailer holding the box in is hand here.

A demo of Final Fantasy XIII is included in the pack, so watch for movies very soon.

Still no word on when to expect the game to hit the western market.

More through the link.

Update 2: It looks as though this isn’t the movie’s packaging, rather a placement case for pre-order. Thanks, gehasoku.

In an interview with techflash, Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Division, said that due to cost and compatibility, said that the Redwood giant has “no plans” to embrace Sony high def format, Blu Ray.

“It’s not a feature we get a ton of requests for. We really don’t,” began Bach.

“When you ask people the list of things they want to see us spending time creating in Xbox, Blu-ray is way, way down on the list.

“The second thing is, from a technical perspective, it doesn’t help us in the core of what Xbox does, which is in gaming. We can’t have publishers produce games on Blu-ray disc. Because then they won’t play on the 28 million Xboxes we’ve already shipped. So it doesn’t help us in the core gaming space,” he went on.

“The third thing, and this maps to all three of those, is that it costs a lot of money. And so the scenario is, OK, let me get this straight: I’m going to add something to the product that’s going to raise the cost, which means the price goes up, consumers aren’t asking for it, and by the way, my game developers can’t use it.”

Bach added that MS has it’s own high definition movie content to shift:

“I have an even better way for you to get high-definition content straight to your TV, between the combination of what we’re doing with Netflix, what we’re doing with (video on demand), we have a great Xbox Live solution. In a way it’s a little bit of a technology looking for an answer. We just have no plans in that space.”

Full interview through the link.

By Mike Bowden

Speaking at the ongoing Sony E3 conference at the Shrine Auditorium in LA, SCEA CEO Jack Tretton just said that, “PS3 drove the Blu-ray format to victory and now the Blu-ray format is poised to return the favour.”

“The PS3 is the most complete Blu-ray player on the market,” he added.

“We created a processor so power that IBM is using it to power their their new super-computer.”

He then went on to speak about the values and virtues of Folding at Home.

More soon.

This siliconrepublic piece on the uptake on Blu-ray in Ireland reveals that the PS3 has sold 110,000 units in the country.

It’s not often we get numbers from individual European territories, so we thought we’d share the love.

By Mike Bowden

Crunchgear is reporting that tomorrow at 9am PST (4pm BST) Microsoft announce a Blu-ray-touting 360 for pre-Christmas release.

The site also claims that the new SKU’s price will be less than the Elite.

We reckon the pinch of salt meter’s off the scale on this – but we thought we’d tell you anyway.

More Chinese Whispers through the link.

Surely this means the end? Wal-Mart is to completely drop HD-DVD players and movies by June. You can’t get much more final than that. The company officially announced its intentions today, saying, “By June Wal-Mart will only be carrying Blu-ray movies and hardware machines, and of course standard-def movies, DVD players, and up-convert players.”

If HD-DVD manages to survive after this, we’ll eat our hats. And we don’t have hats, so that tells you how final this is.

Another nail for HD-DVD’s already groaning coffin arrives in news that major UK high street retailer Woolworths has dropped the format following slow Christmas sales. Blu-ray will be the only HD disc format now stocked in the store.

“Sales figures clearly show that the market is moving towards one format of high definition DVD,” said Woolworths DVD buyer Steven McGunigel. “The main reason is the success of Sony’s PlayStation 3 machine. Because it plays Blu-Ray discs, there are over three quarters of a million homes in the UK that can view the new high definition format. There is nowhere near that number of HD-DVD players around. Switching to Blu-Ray only will provide one clear offer to customers in the format they want to watch high definition movies in.”