First Blu-ray Titles In Store, May 23rd 2006! blu ray has arrived

First Blu-Ray Titles in store, May 23rd 2006!!!

Sony Pictures has announced the first titles for the Blu-ray format will be available in stores May 23, 2006. These titles include: 50 First Dates, The Fifth Element, Hitch, House of Flying Daggers, A Knightâs Tale, The Last Waltz, Resident Evil Apocalypse and XXX. The second offering titles will be available on June 13, 2006 and will include Kung Fu Hustle, Legends of the Fall, Robocop, Stealth, Species, SWAT and Terminator. Other titles to be released include Blackhawk Down, Bridge on the River Kwai and possibly others in the near future.
Samsung will be first to market with a Blu-ray player. Prices for this player and any pending Sony players are not yet available. HD-DVD players are slated for release on March 15, 2006 priced at $500 and $799 from Toshiba. It is safe to assume the very first generation Blu-ray players will be priced in the same ball park. Oddly, Sony isnât first to market with Blu-ray players.

Consumers have feared the looming format war that is shaping up for its first real battle. With four titles being released for HD-DVDâs launch and 20 titles being slated for Blu-rayâs launch â one could argue that both sides forgot to bring enough ammunition to catch the general publicâs attention. Sony Pictures has over 3,000 feature films waiting in HDTV along with 2000 more titles from its television archives. Consumers and retailers alike would have liked to have seen an initial launch of 100 to 200 titles to kick off the Blu-ray party but Sony is playing conservatively. They cite how quickly they have gotten over 400 UMD(for the Sony PSP) movie titles out in less than one year. When Playstation 3 hits the market later in 2006 â there will be strong motivations to have more than a few handful of discs on the market. For now, Sony is playing their cards close to their vest. But make no mistake⌠it is game on for Blu-ray and the HD disc format war.

funny how there are such titles but the problem is that does the market really need Blu-Ray DVDs?HALO2 uses only 3 - 5 GB out of 9 GB. Halo 2 has better graphics and programming than most PS2 games, so is it REALLY needed?xboxrulz

Going against your speech there xboxrulz: Let's give an example such as..say...Naruto. Like all other Anime it certainly does have alot of episodes that exceed hundreds. Each high-quality episode would cost maybe 150-200mb if compressed right. At the moment, the Naruto anime series has 175 episodes. Take the average of 150 and 200 = 170. So now we multiply the episodes and the amount of space each episode takes and we get 29715mb, also equaling to approximately 30 gigabytes. As you said, each blue-ray DVD has 9gb of space? Isn't that much better than storing them in normal DVDs?

each blue-ray DVD has 9gb of space

9GB?? Lame.. All those talks about 40GB Blu-Ray disks and now this! Give me a break.. You can have an 18GB (normal) DVD if you want to. Dual Layer plus two sides and voila. Even without those two sides you have 9GB with Dual Layer, and most DVD players support this.

Where did everyone get the 9gig number from? Everywhere I've looked still says 25gig for single layer, 50 for dual (and assuming you do your double sided thing... 50 and 100 gig)
http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/
http://www.blu-ray.com/media/

They're showing the media being sold as 25/50gig as well. SO this 9gig number is a random mistake on someones part.

And xboxrules, so halo2 can fit in under 9 gigs... that was a last gen game. Blu-ray is intended for next gen. If you compare the size of a ps1 or n64 game to the 3-5gig halo that came out the next generation, thats a pretty big jump in file size. Wouldn't be surprised to see a similar jump this generation. Most games before dvd were less then 700mb (excluding big rpg's with a couple disks worth of movie files ).

Larger media might not be a necessity, but it'll make things easier if they can not worry about storage medium size. They can put extras on disks if they want without worrying about if it'll fit, they can have higher quality audio/video without worrying about compressing it. Blu-ray sized disks might not be needed NOW, or for other mediums, but for next-gen gaming it'll be a help. I mean if games even half filled a dvd last gen, next gen would benefit from a larger medium.

Well, I've heard before that the Blu-ray disks would have those capacities, but somebody hear said that these were 9GB. Now, if we're talking about those capacities, it's completly different. You buy a few of those and you never have to buy a bigger hard drive again! Just burn your files to a blu-ray disk when you get to 25GB

now, when did I say 9GB Blu-Ray discs? I know the capacity is 25-40GB right now. I was talking about DVDs.ok, I give you kudos for saying a series of movies, but right now I'm talking about gaming as the original poster posted up something about the PS3. There IS NO need to use the Blu-Ray. It is absolutely useless in the gaming industry at the moment. I don't say it will never, but it will never in this decade since who really needs 40GB for ONE single game.On the other hand, M$ is releasing a HD-DVD external drive for the 360, now that's smart because it doesn't force you to spend more money on games since manufacturing Blu-Ray discs are highly expensive due to it's new technology. HD-DVD on the other hand is less expensive, got similar storage capacity and the player is compatible with normal DVDs versus the Blu-Ray. Blu-Ray player manufacturers don't have to make the Blu-Ray players compatible with normal DVDs, so you may need two different players. One to read DVD and one to read Blu-Ray. Especially when it comes to your computer, it's a hassle.So, think it over.I support the HD-DVD over the Blu-Ray mainly on the compatibility issue that the Blu-Ray has.@Jeigh: ok, this generation is the 360/PS3 generation, let's compare, the 360's Call of Duty 2 game only takes up about 5 -8 GB disc space (rough estimate), still will not exceed the 9GB dual layer disc it uses. This is "next-generation" already on the console market.xboxrulz

True, however it is first gen 360 and it is a pc game ported to the 360 basically. Both the 360 and pc are currently limited to the original DVD media so why wouldn't they make it fit? I assume they want to avoid what used to happen with games before dvd's where its a handful of cd's to install it, especially on consoles. Also, even if they CAN keep them at a smaller size, as I metnioned, why would they want to? If they can simply move onto a newer medium and have better results, go ahead. Once the media becomes more mainstream the pricess will crash just like dvd's and cd's before it.

well, I don't know if this is a good thing, but M$ declared many times that they'll not use HD-DVD for games. It's simply for movies and any of your media uses.They'll use the traditional 9GB DVD for storage, but still, I think it's enough.xboxrulz

M$ is only using HD-DVD just for movies and whatnot because they realized it'll screw people over releasing it as optional... if they used it for games, then games WOULD become larger (prob) then the size of the old dvd's and require multiple disks for people without the hd-dvd drive. Also it would require more money to produce two versions of the same game.

Plus there are more advantages then simply having bigger storage, games could make greater use of streaming data since the read speeds of a 2x bluray are like 50% greater then a 16x dvd, and they plan to release much greater speeds obv.

http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ gives a comparison of various tech specs between a dvd and the bluray disks. Alot of which don't impact anything currently but who knows what the next 4-5 years hold (or however long the ps3 sticks around).

I don't know, personally I think going with a new gen media is the right choice. I understand that they "can", without THAT much effort, stay within the confines of the dvd medium and be fine. However why kill that potential? If they are trying to make these system excel in every way, sticking with dvd seems like they are just cutting off options.

I personally will wait it out. I don't intend on buying this generation's Betamax. Sony, in business principle, seems to be doing the right thing: i.e. address piracy more seriously. But as we all know... nothing will be uncrackable for too long. I figure, when the time is right (and the price is low), I'll jump into the mix. Besides, who wants to buy any of the movies listed??? Nothing against these movies, but did anyone miss that none of them were filmed in High-Def? Until that happens, there is no substantial reasons to move to a new media... I don't really care if they add even more 'dvd features' like more mindless commentary to fill all that extra space. I care more about the quality of the movie.

I don't think it will take to much longer in the game industry to start filling up the bluray discs. Figure PS3 has already announce they are going to be using them, which means they must be starting to think big already. You know XBox and PS3 love the competition. Once bluray comes to gaming who knows what will happen. There was a forum posted somewhere else about the future of gaming, well here it is. They will start by making bigger and better games now that this is here.

2 hours of video from our big broadcast cameras can take up 30GB of data in raw format. On some of our documentry projects at work is nothing for it to take upwards of 80 - 100GB worth of footage until it is edited down. This is why we have over 11TB of storage space. We've spent well over $350k in the last three years buying storage to store our video project. If we could cut that down and store on 1 - 3 dics...that is going to save us a hell of a lot of money in the long run. We could store our entire SAN in a small shipping box. Not only that, but we don't have to carry expensive maintaince contracts and would save a few thousand dollars a year on utilities. Any idea how much it costs to cool a 3500 Square foot room full of servers? It ain't cheap. So while you talk about games not needing them now, this technology is NOT aimed at the gaming industry. The gaming industry just happens to be able to use the same format as we in the video production business. This technology is mainly aimed at us. While you don't see Beta in the homes, you still saw beta machines in every major video production companies and television studio in the country. Most of those older big shoulder cams...yeah, they all shot in BETA. Even if we buy burners at $1500 for each format, considering our average project costs $130,000 now, that's small change. So we'll burn in DVD, HD-DVD, or Blu-ray when the tech becomes available. So you can complain about cames not needing that much all you want, that's fine. But remember that even Gates once said "Computers will never need more than 640k of ram"