The base offer is

1 x Sony BDP S350 Blu Ray Player.

3 x Movies (Wall-E, Mamma Mia and the single Disc Edition of Hancock). These are in the box.

2 x Movies by Postal Redemption (Batman Returns and Casino Royale).

The terms of the Postal Redemption are here (http://xs.sonyvfactory.com/BDPROMOTERMS/) Expires 31/01/09.

The basket price for this is £200+ but when the offer kicks in at order processing stage the price drops to £155 when you choose free Free Delivery.

In addition to there is a co promotion running from Sony that if you buy one of these players they offer you a list of additional Sony Blu ray movie titles titles on a buy 3 get £15 off.  So depending on your choice of titles its possible to get the Player and 8 titles for £165. (Note: You must ensure all items are in your basket and purchased in one transaction to qualify for this promotion.)

Before you get too excited remember you Need an HD Television i.e. one that has an HDMI connection.

Tip: Don’t forget to order an HDMI cable if you need one.

Link: Amazon Sony BDPS350

Below I have drawn boxes around the links to the other offers.

At the launch of the new Apple Notebooks yesterday Steve Jobs called Blu Ray a bag of hurt.

His actual quote goes

“Blu-ray is just a bag of hurt. It’s great to watch the movies, but the licensing of the tech is so complex, we’re waiting till things settle down and Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace.”

The licensing hasn’t stopped HP, Dell and Sony amongst others for including Blu Ray drives in their laptops.

Blu Ray’s market share is still very low at about 5% of the home video market so Steve has one point about market penetration.

However this is really about protecting his digital distribution business aka The iTunes Music Store that also sells HD TV shows and movies for download.

The truth of the matter is if you compare iTunes HD content with Blu Ray content there is a very significant quality gap in Blu Ray’s favour.

Apple should have got on the HD bandwagon and let the consumer decide.

Picture: Some of the Free HD TV content you can download from the US iTunes Music Store.

Lets delve deeper into this whole Apple HD TV content thing.

File Size: If you purchase any HD TV content from the US iTunes store you will also receive the iPod friendly version of the content. In the example below that would consist of a 1.64gb file and a separate 640mb file. A total of 2.2gb per episode. If your chosen show had 24 episodes a season that’s a 54.72gb download in total.

This presents two problems 1) You need to download that. Think bandwidth caps and putting up with slow Internet while it does it. 2) You need to store the content for in theory as long as you want to keep it.

Technical Details:

Video Codec: H.264
Resolution: 1280×720
Total Bitrate: 4439kbps

Video Quality: The 720 HD content looks a whole lot better than the 480 equivalent for sure but is it stunning? No, Don’t get me wrong it’s good, especially on a laptop or PC monitor in a window, but on a large 1080p TV the imperfections of compressed video are evident.

I can be very critical when it comes to video quality. I am sure half the time I am watching blu ray movies I am just looking for flaws in the transfer. So to recap it’s good but not perfect.

Tip: If you have a 1080p display and are distracted by image tear on the top section of the screen, try dropping down your resolution to something closer to the resolution of the video clip.

Audio: Some of the HD content comes with two audio streams  plain old stereo and the other a surround sound version.

Cost: $2.99 is the initial cost per episode but factor in the cost of storing the content and bumping up against any download caps on your Internet connection.

Tip: Download at night its the only way particularly with when you get into the 20 to 50 gig sessions.

Summary

It’s great having essentially an on demand HD content distribution system. The only competition is from from your Satellite or Cable company.

An Argument could be made that future generations will just cherry pick their content instead of buying 400 channels of content they have very little interest in.

So this business model is here to stay. In 5-10 years time it will be funny to re-read this post watching me complaining about file size, download speed and caps.

Yesterdays product announcement went pretty much as expected on the iPod Nano front.

These are sort of cool but I’m much more of an iPod Touch kind of guy. Video on a small screen just becomes annoying after a while.

The updated iPod Touch isn’t enough of an improvement to make me contemplate an upgrade. The additions of a volume control and speaker are nice but it doesn’t really make much odds to me.

The iPod touch is still a marvel to me. Here is what I do with mine:-

Listen to Music
Watch Video
Stream TV from BBC iPlayer
Stream Audio from AOL Radio
Read Twitter and my Gmail Email
Play Games and Apps
Read the New York Times

As well as all the standard things like Maps, Web sites and Pictures. The iPod Touch is more a computer than a Video playing mp3 player. It’s expensive but ultimately worth it.

The good news from yesterday is the Addition of HD TV content in their main store. Prior to this the only HD content available from Apple was locked to the Apple TV infrastructure, and that was movies and not TV.

Now you have the choice to download some TV Shows in 480p ($1.99) or 720p ($2.99).

Much like a drug dealer offering the first hit for free Apple are now offering free downloads of 10  episodes in HD from the likes of Heroes, Battlestar Galactica, The Office, Monk and more to showcase the HD content in the iTunes music store.

When you buy an HD episode you get both the HD and SD versions (one for your TV one for your iPod).

It’s nice to have the choice of quality and price points. But as I have said before paying extra for HD just feels like a tax.

Sadly if you are a UK resident don’t get too excited as none of this HD goodness seems to have filtered through to us.

This an entry level dual format HD reader it can read Blu-Ray and HD-DVD disks.

It ships with an OEM version of PowerDVD 7.3 capable of playing back both formats (if your PC meets the other spec requirements).

It requires a SATA connection and comes supplied with a SATA cable.

The drive is about 1″ longer at the back than other drives I have seen.

The drive was relatively quiet on playback.

This drive is a DVD burner but it can’t burn Blu Ray or HD-DVD so this is a reader only for those formats.

The cost is circa £70.

Summary

Having access to 3 digital formats DVD/HD-DVD and Blu Ray from a single drive makes this a great addition to an existing HTPC or Entertainment PC.

The cost of PowerDVD alone is about £25 so the bundle makes this really good value for money.

On a side note Cyberlink have removed HD-DVD support in PowerDVD 8.0 so this is your last chance to get  HD-DVD playback software.

Specs

Blu-ray Disc and HD Dvd-rom drive

From time to time new standards are introduced but rarely is it explained to consumers what they actually are.

The purpose of this post is to point you in the right direction about HDMI a semi new type of connection (pictured above).

You use HDMI to connect devices together typically for Hi-Definition Audio and Video.

So it might be a PC to a Display or even a Blu Ray player to a TV.

For the first time in PC technology we have a cable that can carry both Audio and Video on  a single cable.

From the PC End HDMI is the latest in a very long line of Display technology that started with EGA, CGA, VGA then DVI.

You can get converters from DVI to HDMI (pictured below).

HDMI does come with a steep learning curve in terms of specification and compatibility from HDMI 1.0 to 1.1, 1.2, 1.2a, 1.3. 1.3a, 1.3b and 1.3b1 (insanity I know).

Each adding something or fixing something in the HDMI specification.

Find below some good links all about HDMI for further reading.

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI

Link: http://www.enduserblog.com/2008/07/how-i-learned-t.html

Link: http://tech.yahoo.com/blog/patterson/2708

I’m all for PC’s taking different form factors and these look nice (I think) not sure about the wood effect one.

PC Mag has one in for review and give it 3.5 out of 5.

As their review points out this is in direct competition with Apple’s Mac Mini.

The Dell Studio Hybrid can however be configured with a blu ray drive and output HD over HDMI so this becomes interesting for those wanting a tidy/small PC based HD experience.

Link: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2326614,00.asp

Toshiba do have a problem on their hands. HD video is sexy (especially on high resolution laptops)However their implementation of it (HD-DVD) failed to be accepted in the marketplace.

HD-DVD as a format has now been relegated to the bargain bin.

As a dual format guy, I have benefited from all this cheap 1080p goodness, so I am far from complaining.

It does seem like Toshiba are compensating in their updated range of laptops.

Take the 18.4″ Qosmio G55 with its Quad Core CPU.

However a media machine like this with no Hi-Def optical drive is a pretty big problem.

There is next to no downloadable HD content. Apple iTunes doesn’t count because their HD content requires an AppleTV.

I doubt Toshiba can afford to wait the next 3 to 5 years before HD downloads become a reality.

Link: http://explore.toshiba.com/

Today Apple launched Movies into their iTunes music store in the UK. You can:

Purchase Movies from between £6.99-£10.99 or Rent from £2.49-£3.49

They also offer 720p Hi-Def Movies but these require you to have and AppleTV.

Their implementation of Hi-Def is flawed. You need their hardware and the content is 720p/1080i only as I understand it.

This is semi-understandable as 1080p content is just too fat to fit down the Internet pipes we have today.

The non HD content is more geared up for the iPod generation who want to watch content on their video enabled iPods/iPhones.

The UK is now no longer the poor digital relative.

I work really hard and on the odd occasion I have the time to sit down and watch a movie I want it to be in the best possible quality. I also like to control my media so I use a HTPC (home theatre PC).

I fell in love with HD-DVD (sigh) until some big wigs decided having region free movies was far too convenient to the consumer.

The HD-DVD format is dying a lot quicker that people expected with planned upcoming titles being cancelled.

The formats demise does have some fringe benefits, you can pick up a Toshiba HD-DVD player for £50 with 2 free movies. Tip: these also make excellent up scaling DVD players if you have a 720p display or above. Also lots of people are selling off their movie collections cheap and retailers have dropped the price of some HD-DVD titles to circa £6.

But what now? Should I stop watching HD?. I only have one choice Blu Ray.

The benefit of having a HTPC instead of a dedicated player is I can just pop in an inexpensive OEM BD ROM Drive and pick up where HD-DVD left off.

I chose the entry level Pioneer BDC-202BK. This connects into a SATA connection and installs without the aid of any drivers, just like any other optical drive.

This is a combo BD-Rom and DVD writer.

The operational noise of the drive while reading a Blu Ray disk is slightly louder that I would have liked but is acceptable.

So I am now begrudgingly dual format.

I see that some retailers of consumer  Blu Ray players have increased the costs of the devices as there is now no effective competition.

So in this example I have managed to survive the curse of the early adopter relatively un scathed. I’m not interested in formats, I’m interested in movies.

So how does Blu Ray compare to HD-DVD?, well the movies are more or less in the same codec(s) VC-1 for example so really the viewing experience is very similar.

Blu Ray titles tend to be less swishy with their extra features like picture in picture to maintain compatibility with the different Blu Ray profiles.

Blu Ray titles have regional encoding Like DVD did.

So I now have to live with Blu Ray and all its many “issues” as there is simply no commercial alternative available for 1080p content today.

I am literally being dragged kicking and screaming on to this format.

DRM free, Legal, 1080p downloadable content cant come quick enough, That may sound naive but music is moving fast to DRM free so why not movies down the road?