Hollywood accelerating towards Blu-ray

 

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By Simon Aughton

Posted on 29 Aug 2006 at 10:29

After a slow start, Hollywood has begun accelerating the release of movie titles in the new high-definition formats, with Blu-ray the significant beneficiary.

More than a dozen studios announced in Tokyo yesterday that 75 films would be added to the Blu-ray roster, including The Da Vinci Code and Chicken Little, although only two of these, Warner and Paramount, also plan releases for HD DVD, alongside Universal which has until now eschewed Blu-ray.

As a result, some 80 per cent of high-definition titles will be Blu-ray, despite HD DVD having narrowly beaten it to be the first to have a player on shop shelves.

With so few films currently available, drawing conclusions from the early prevalence of Blu-ray discs is futile. Studios are likely to ramp up their releases for both formats as and when the technologies begin to be more widespread.

A clearer picture may also emerge when compatible computer drives become more widely available and more affordable, not least because Microsoft and Intel are committed backers of HD DVD.

That said, APC claimed last week that Microsoft's soon-to-be-released Windows Vista will not support playback of Blu-ray and HD DVD movies on 32-bit PCs, in other words on the vast majority of the world's computers.

APC quoted from a presentation Microsoft senior program manager Steve Riley made to a security forum in Sydney, Australia.

'Any next-generation high definition content will not play in x32 at all,' Riley said. 'The media companies asked us to do this and said they don't want any of their high definition content to play in x32 at all, because of all of the unsigned malware that runs in kernel mode can get around content protection....'

But Microsoft denied Riley's claim in its Windows Vista Team Blog.

'The real deal is that no version of Windows Vista will make a determination as to whether any given piece of content should play back or not,' it said. 'The individual ISV [independent software vendor, ie developer] providing the playback solutions will choose whether the playback environment, including environments that use 32-bit processors, meet the performance requirements for playback of protected High Definition content.'

It stressed that 'nothing has been cut from Windows Vista in this regard'.

Apple is a member of the Blu-ray Disc Association, but has made no pronouncements on high-definition support in its next OS X upgrade, Leopard, due to be released in spring 2007, shorty after Vista's debut.