Netflix has been offering movies to rent on both high definition media formats, HD DVD and Blu-ray, will now be exclusively supporting just one technology: Blu-ray.
Citing the decision by four of the six major movie studios to publish high-def DVD titles only in the Sony-developed Blu-ray format, Netflix said that as of now it will purchase only Blu-ray discs and will phase out by roughly year’s end the alternative high-def format, HD DVD, developed by Toshiba.
Paramount and Universal are left as the only major film studios supporting HD DVD.
While I think Blu-ray is the superior medium in terms of capacity and encoding, its hardware isn’t priced competitively with HD DVD and the player technology is about a year behind HD DVD’s advancements. The film industry, rather than the consumers, has made the decision to support Blu-ray.
Netflix, Citing a Clear Signal From the Industry, Will Carry High-Def DVDs Only in Blu-ray Format [Netflix Press Release]
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Movies are New Again with Fan-made Commentaries
by Smithee on May 22, 2009
in Frugality
When DVDs (and before them, Laserdiscs) were new, I really used to enjoy listening to the commentary tracks. Granted, some were better than others, but I couldn’t seem to get enough of the “behind the scenes” talk, and to hear the cast and crew telling funny stories about each other.
Those don’t interest me as much as they used to, and in fact these days I’m more likely to rent a DVD than buy it, but there is a kind of commentary track that I still enjoy: the kind made by people who weren’t at all involved in making the movie.
The gold standard for these is Rifftrax, from three of the people who made Mystery Science Theater 3000. When it comes to making fun of movies, few people have had anywhere near as much practice. It’s a pretty ingenious system that manages to avoid conflicts with copyright law. Here’s how it works:
Here’s an example from the first “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie:
This is a great way to spend a few dollars and make new again some of the movies you probably already have on your shelf. Some of my favorites from Rifftrax go with movies that honestly, nobody should own (Troll 2 comes immediately to mind), but among those you’re likely to have lying around, these are good, too:
Do you know of any other good “alternate commentary” sources? Tell us in the comments!
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