Bill C-unt should just shut up.

MOD NOTE: If you're going to make posts like that, then please stay out of this thread. -namja

Coming from Blu-Boy Bill I don't even consider this to be true. Since the next 4 months in PACKED with HD-DVD Movies, and I am hearing constant Radio ads for HD-DVD, I don't see it going neutral anytime soon.

I don't listen to much of what he says anymore, but he was right with that Universal list of HD DVD titles. I believe he posted about those first...

If this were Joe Blow nyc poster from here or at AVS, I would agree 100%, but it's not. I really do not want this to devolve into another Bill Hunt bash fest, but I believe he has credibility. If you do not, that is fine, but I still think this qualifies as news.

Nice...

I'm running into some problems with scratched Blu-ray rentals. I've rented about a dozen this month and 3 of them arrived with scratches. All of the scratches were fairly light, but 2 out of the 3 movies froze up part of the way through and completely hung up my PS3. It seems like the scratch resistant coating on these discs is not up to the job at least for a rental market.

Not only that, but it seems like one scratch is all it takes to ruin a BD disc. This is definitely an area of concern. You figure the rental market for these is light right now, but what happens if BD catches on and these discs get into heavy rotation. They will be chucking out a ton of discs.

Granted I have no idea how these scratches are occurring, but this is something to worry about. The durability of the coating they are using is heavily overrated.

Unless the rental I get from Netflix is a brand new release, I see scratches and fingerprints. The Durabis isn't that great. Of course, I've read plenty of posts on "other" forums declaring Durabis is the greatest thing ever and how resistant it is to everything. Yeah, okay.

Having said that, my PS3 has played everything fine.

Darkside,

I've complained how my PS3 leaves markings on my discs before. That has started to clear up. It's not scratches, but it looks like some sort of debris coming from the filter in the slot. I'll see it now and again, but for the most part, my unit isn't leaving anything on the disc. But to take care of that, I did buy a microfiber cloth from Circuit City for about $6. It removes this stuff without leaving scratches. So, you could buy one of those and wipe it on the rental discs to see if that helps. I know it'll remove fingerprints, but I'm not sure about the scratches.

I tried that, but these were cut in the plastic. Not very deep and about what you would expect to see on just about any rental DVD.

Open Season had two small half inch scratches and were the lightest of the scratches just barely there. This disc played fine.
Superman II had three straight scratches about an inch long. A little bit deeper than the ones on Open Season. This disc froze up within 10 minutes. I had to eject the disc to get the PS3 to respond. I tried skipping past that part, but it froze again 5 minutes later. I had the network thing off so that wasn't the cause. Also this wasn't a skip the PS3 completely hangs until you eject the disc.
Ice Age had the worst scratch. It was like a little oval was scratched in the disc midway and was about as deep as the one on Superman II. This one froze up 20 minutes in to the movie and that freezing point was repeatable.

I don't know what coating they are using (I have read a couple of times that it is not Durabis II as that was too expensive) but the coating is just not going to cut it for rental discs if this format ever gets popular.

None of the scratches I had trouble with would have been considered bad on a standard DVD disc.

It's sad people are too lazy to handle the disc by the outer edge.

We got open season from netflix (BD) and it froze in the same place repeatedly. Disc was scratched (these effing' clueless netflix renters are now abusing the HD format discs too it seems...) It made the film skip 3 x but the PS3 handled it after about a 5 second freeze each time, no need to power off or reboot.
Enjoyable (if goofy) film with amazing PQ.

Well isn't that just a little inappropriate, especially from someone who, on AVS, climbed onto a soapbox and proceeded to denounce profanity because it makes one appear uneducated. Gotta love hypocrisy.

I equate this at the same level as all of the crappy rumors on AVS.

I agree. "C U Next Tuesday" would've been more subtle.

Most people in the industry get/know things early. The Universal list was something was passed around to various places and could not be posted until a specified date. Bill decided to break that date. Now everything he says must be credible? Sorry, Universal was most likley NOT at the Blu-Ray facility. This is just Bill once again trying to get people to buy into HIS format of choice.

Next week's Identity BD has both an English AND German PCM track along with 4 other DD tracks and 22 subtitles. Looks like they're gearing these up for worldwide release.

Interestingly enough, Hellboy is apparently the same way -- PCM in English and German -- and yet the BD release in the UK has PCM tracks in English and Spanish. I wonder why that is.

The third season of FX's firefighter drama Rescue Me, starring Emmy and Golden Globe nominee Denis Leary, will become the Sony Pictures Home Entertainment's first TV release in the Blu-ray high-definition format. The four-disc set will sell for $79.95 versus $49.95 for the standard-definition version. It will include all of the extras present on the standard-def release -- but no more. There are no plans to release the first two seasons of the series in the high-definition format. SPHE marketing exec Marc Rashba told Home Media Retail magazine, "We're all working folks, and we're very mindful about asking [consumers] to put out more money for what they already have." The release date for the DVD set is June 3.

Your logic being that since Hunt broke the "street date" on legitimate news, now he is lying? I don't get it. Or that he should be less credible just because other people had the same news when he did.

Don't know if this has been mentioned, but here are the audio and subtitle options for Sony's BD release of Identity:

Audio:

• English PCM 5.1 Surround (48kHz/16-Bit/4.6mbps)
  
• English Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround (640kbps)
  
• French PCM 5.1 Surround (48kHz/16-Bit/4.6mpbs)
  
• French Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround (640kbps)
  
• German PCM 5.1 Surround (48kHz/16-Bit/4.6mpbs)
  
• German Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround (640kbps)
  
• English DES (Descriptive Audio Track)
  

Subtitle Options:

• English SDH
  
• Greek Subtitles
  
• Hebrew Subtitles
  
• Swedish Subtitles
  
• Hindi Subtitles
  
• Turkish Subtitles
  
• English Subtitles
  
• Polish Subtitles
  
• Chinese Subtitles
  
• Hungarian Subtitles
  
• French Subtitles
  
• Portuguese Subtitles
  
• Spanish Subtitles
  
• Korean Subtitles
  
• Czech Subtitles
  
• Thai Subtitles
  
• Danish Subtitles
  
• Arabic Subtitles
  
• German Subtitles
  
• Dutch Subtitles
  
• Finnish Subtitles
  
• Norwegian Subtitles
  

Granted, subtitle tracks don't take much disc space (meaning an HD DVD or DVD could easily do the same thing here) but this list is rather impressive.

if you're gonna sell discs in europe, and not insult a large chunk of your consumers, this is what you'll have to do.

I mentioned it a few posts up, but I missed the French PCM track.

Where the hell is pig latin? Im insulted!

I noticed from HD Digest's raving review of Identity that Sony used AVC for the encode. I know they did for new releases like Casino Royale and Pursuit of Happyness, but is this the first one for an older catalog title? Layer Cake was a BD-50, but used MPEG2. I hope they've made a full commitment now to AVC.

Yeah, Identity will be Sony's first AVC catalog title, unless the pushed up 3/27 release of Warriors Of Heaven And Earth is an AVC encode.

I sure hope Identity has the extras from the DVD. It's nice that they're going to AVC over MPEG-2, but then turning around and using up the saved space on dubbed PCM tracks is ridiculous if it means the extras have to be dropped.