The James Kilgour BlogA Life Blog.

Blu-Ray; the latest development in Video-Disc technology. Offering 50gb of storage; enough for full HD Video films and TV-Shows.

The technology is principally backed by Sony, being offered in the PS3. This multi-national company promises the next generation of Film Quality; you can actually feel like your there. The price difference? Well, for a good Blu-Ray player, the price is around £180-£250, and each Blu-Ray disk is around £5 more than their DVD counterpart. (Usually around £20)

But I don’t think it’s worth it. I recently visited Sharp Laboratories of Europe, who are often regarded as one of the best makers of LCD screens, (they make screens for iPods). They showed me two identical HD TVs, one plugged into a standard DVD player, and the other into a Blu-Ray player with a Blu-Ray disk. While the latter picture was slightly sharper, the difference was nominal! It was only something you would notice if you looked carefully, and I can get a sharp picture like that from my Up-scaling-DVD player anyway!

The thing is, not only would I need to spend extra on buying a player, but also the disks are much more expensive. And, I would need a Blu-Ray player connected to every TV in the house if I wanted to play them around the house; not to mention that 1 of the TVs isn’t HD, and 2 of the HD ones are only 17/19 inches, (the difference would be impossible to see on these). Now that I think about it, I also have my laptop and desktop PCs; these don’t have Blu-Ray drives in them.

To me, Blu-Ray does seem like just a way of Sony and it’s huge consortium getting people to replace all of their old DVD players, disks and old TVs, just to fill their greed for profit, Well, I’m not playing. Not until the price of these players and disks are at an affordable rate for this economic period.

JK

So YouTube have widened their videos, with the introduction of HD. People have been complaining about it like nobody’s business. It’s change! Let’s deal with it.

JK

YouTube, the amateur video service is rumoured to be on the verge of streaming full length movies from the likes of MGM. Soon, we could be enjoying James Bond, Legally Blonde and more, for free!

It’s all a bid to earn more in advertising revenue; something the service desperately needs to keep afloat, with such high bandwidth and storage costs.

But will the service be of any value? YouTube is characteristically slow, with small and bad quality streams. How much fun will the videos be in YouTube style?

JK

So I rented the much hyped ‘I am Legend’ Will Smith film from iTunes last weekend. It started off pretty well, with some cool cgi imagery of New York desolate. Then it came to the end. And that was it. He was blown up by a grenade while killing all the mutants and saving that foreign woman and her son. It was a terrible ending in my book; he was the hero! Generally there the ones who survive and live happily ever after. I didn’t think much else about the film, (except what a waste of £3.49 it was), until I saw this video on youtube. It’s the alternate ending featured on the dvd, and in my opinion, much better. See what you think:

Original Ending here.

JK