The Future’s Bright, The Future’s Blu!

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Is the blu-ray format now starting to hit the sweet-spot in terms of mass adoption? Personally I think it’s definitely getting there. Players and HD TVs have come down in price massively (you can now pick up a very decent player that connects to the internet for additional features for less that £100 and a 42″ 1080p telly for around £300), pre-order prices on recent big releases have definitely come down, gone are the days of paying £20 for a AAA title on release. There’s a substantial back catalogue of titles available with prices starting at just over £4 and very recently, when in bargain hunter mode, I’ve actually seen a couple of films cheaper on blu than on DVD.

I have to say that early on in the HD war I was backing HD-DVD. At the time it seemed to have a lsight edge over blu-ray, the players, at the time, were cheaper, all the films were region free, the only extra thing blu-ray brought to the table was increased storage. A few years on though and we’re starting to see the need for that extra storage. Double layered blu’s are now pretty common as some films can have multiple lossless soundtracks on, and Peter Jackson still needed two blu’s to fit each of the extended Lord of the Rings films on (a decision that I wholly support, I’d rather have the best quality film than the convenience of not having to get off my arse to change discs!).

Negatives about blu-ray? There are still many discs that are coming out that don’t have a resume feature on! Apaarently it’s not something that’s built into the machine, it’s software on the disc so the publishers need to be bothered to put it on. I have discs that do resume when I stop them so it can be done. I’ve got several discs that not only don’t let you resume, but also don’t let you add a bookmark. Lets look at home video since time began. Cinefilm, stop the projector, start it up again and it plays from where it was. VHS, stop the tape, start it up again and hey presto you’re right back in the action. DVD (yes I know I skipped Laser Disc but I never had one so don’t know if they resumed or not), latter DVD players would not only remember where the current disc had been stopped, but also where the previous4 or 5 discs had stopped. How the ommision of this basic, but in my eyes pretty essential, feature came about I have no idea but for some titles we’ve lost a funciton that we’ve had since cinefilm! Having said that, I have noticed that more and more titles are resuming so for those of us that don’t have the time to get through a film in one sitting, I hope this trend continues.

All-in-all I’m pretty happy with the format. I can see a time when we’ll all be downloading our films, but as a collector, I like owning a physical copy (618 blus and counting!). I don’t trust hard-drives (I think I worked it out that I’d need about 30 terabytes for my collection and that’s without Raid5!) and our internet connections just aren’t fast enough yet. I’d love to be able to rip all my discs onto NAS drives and be able to stream them to any TV in the house, but until 10 TB hardrives are commonplace and affordable I’ll continue to get off my arse to change the damn disc!

What about you, do you feel that blu is now the adopted movie format?

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