You'll think I'm crazy, but I'm watching blu-ray on a 27" monitor

It's an internal SATA drive, I'm sitting pretty close so I'm seeing the detail.

The problem of it only working on my system and not everywhere is always an early adopter's problem. I think that in a few years they will be usable everywhere, cars will be sold with a Blu-Ray player and little screens build into the front headrests to entertain the kids. It's a gamble, but I think the odds are good.

Blu-Ray does does have some new things. BD Live (internet features, lets them add things like games with online high scores), that's new. It's also crap from what (little) I've seen. Bad example. The menus are better and more responsive, every DVD and player annoyed me with slow menus. They can also do cleverer stuff with the extras, for example Band of Brothers has a special mode so you watch the episode with a timeline at the bottom and special information bubbles are available every minute or so. You can either jump from bubble to bubble or play the episode in full and have it display the bubbles at the right time. For example, the first time a military phrase is used, it will pop up an explanation. Some of it's pretty stupid (does *anyone* watching a WW2 TV series need Kraut explained?), but there's some interesting stuff like photos from the actual events when they happened, or news footage about the events, quick biographies about characters, near the end it actually has a correction about a soldier who they say in the program died (Pvt. Blaithe, episode 3) actually survived and served in Korea.

This isn't a selling point of course, no one will pay £200 for good menus. It is a very nice bonus, at least for me, so I guess I just wanted to give it due props.


BTW, around here a lot more people know what Blu-Ray is than would ever think of a internet movie service. That may be because we don't really have one.

EDIT: Oh yes...

Nobody ever said VHS quality is all you'll ever need.

My father did. Interestingly enough he likes the improvement Blu-Ray gives, I honestly think having geek children made him understand these things. He'd tell you it's over priced TBH, and that's not an unreasonable opinion.

This comment was edited on Feb 13, 2009, 17:39.