The Dark Knight Blu-ray to kick off social BD-Live features for Warner?
By Richard Lawler 
posted Aug 6th 2008 6:41PM
posted Aug 6th 2008 6:41PM
[Via MovieWeb]
posted Aug 6th 2008 6:41PM
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Oh yeah....whoohooo, I'm excited beyond all imagination....hey Warner, how about releasing a version without this BD-Live crap a little earlier and a little cheaper? Eh?
How about they release a Blu-ray release that makes use of the available technology, rather than pandering to the "All I want is to watch the movie and I'm convinced that somehow I lose out if I'm given options on top of the ability to watch the movie" crowd.
You want The Dark Knight to be released early? Huh? And you're going to get around the numerous legal and promotional issues with that how exactly? Or do you think that the six-twelve month delay between cinematic and DVD releases has to do with the studios adding BD Live features to their plain 'ol DVDs?
I'm not a fan of Blu-ray for reasons I've given before. Nonetheless, the insistence by its supporters that Blu-ray shouldn't be any better than DVD, save for video quality, is something I'm finding hard to understand. There's nothing compelling about the format right now. It's Laserdisc to DVD's VHS, being better quality but suffering from being more expensive and with serious disadvantages over its lower resolution rival.
If you want BD to succeed, encourage the studios and manufacturers to actually show it at its best. Hold manufacturers to account for building obsolete players. Tell the studios to make use of the available features. Tell everyone to get rid of BD+ before that disaster causes untold damage.
Don't whine when studios actually try to make superior discs, even if the features they're adding are of no interest to you.
i can only imagine how fun the chats will be based on "discussions" here at engadget and AVS forum
If they really are thinking of adding the whole sync'd watching and commentating then it'd better not delay the release date or bump some other useful feature (or xtra scene etc).
Basically I feel this is a worthless addition for BD... just like it was worthless for HD-DVD (this was on some of the Harry Potter flics if I remember correctly).
Well, the movie companies are kind of in a bind right now on exactly what to offer to spice up BDs. If you to a less-technical forum, such as those on Amazon, you constantly read that most average consumers don't see a high enough cost-benefit ratio to move from standard discs. If they aren't going to make players (and movies) cheaper, faster - then what else are they going to promote if PQ isn't wowing 'em? I think we are all in agreement - it ain't this crap.
I had a co-worker send pretty much two days bitching about The Dark Knight. I wanted to throw him out the window, for that reason alone, I would never use a feature like this.
Plus, I want to watch a movie, not listen to people talking.
"Synchronized watching" has got to be the lamest BD-Live feature I've seen. Scratch that, selling ring tones and other crap is #1, followed closely by synchronized watching.
You know, I was excited when Sony added BD-Live to the PS3 firmware, but now I'm starting to wonder if I'll ever actually want to use that feature.
Warner will probably just spend all its effort on doing the BD-Live and only offer a standard DD 5.1 448 kbps audio track. :-P
I've got to wonder:
Do movie studio executives ever read boards like this? Is there some other comment post somewhere where people have been saying "I'd buy way more movies if I could talk to strangers while I watched"?
Why are they pushing this like it's a feature? Who thinks this kind of thing is worth extra money?
Just make the movie look and sound as good as possible, give me some deleted/extended scenes, and be done with it. If you really want to go overboard, throw in some documentaries, interviews, or commentaries...those aren't a big seller for many of us either, but they're cheap to add. And that sort of thing is a much better idea than adding this "social" crap to everything.
Cough...social Zune...cough...learn a lesson.
All these lame features just confirm that the studios really do not have a clue what to do with BD-Live. Internet access was lame on HD DVD and now its lame on blu ray. Yet we still people moaning that all players should be 2.0 enabled!
I could join hundreds of chat rooms, forums, twitter like services and chat about a movie right now. Any movie. They have to start providing proper bonus download content instead of this junk. WB own rights to thousands of TV shows, movies, songs, music videos and even online / print publications. They should be sticking some of that up on their "live" service and rewarding people for buying their disks, not adding some stupid chat service. Why not offer users the chance to download and watch one of the 90's Batman movies, or the cartoon series as a reward for registering online? That would be smart. That would be compelling. A stupid chat feature is not compelling.
How bout kicking off some lower prices. BD isn't going anywhere till the consumer gets some affordable prices in the $100-$120 range for a 2.0 player.
Leave all this crap out and give me the higher quality audio and video.
Yes, because it's some kind of trade-off. I mean, a few megabytes of meta information describing an Internet connection is going to mean they have to store the entire movie as 480p with a 384kbps DD5.1 track, because how else are they going to fit everything on a 50Gb Blu-ray disc?
I really cannot fathom the whole "Don't add anything to the disc, do something logically impossible instead" mentality. This is not going to cause any reduction in quality. It's not going to bring forward the release date. It's not going to impact anyone who doesn't want it.
What the hell's the problem?
dude, dun pretend to be a technology expert.
You dun know about the BD Live technology and you were out of you mind to think the BD Live thing would take more than 50 MB of your 50GB Blu-ray volume.
Let me tell ya, it's gonna be less than 50 MB, to be exact, less than 30 MB in total.