20th Century Fox announces Blu-ray releases [Update 1]

by Nick Doerr { Sep 5th 2006 at 10:30AM }

Listed below are the first Blu-ray movies you'll probably watch (and some "play") on your PS3 from 20th Century Fox.

Behind Enemy Lines
Fantastic Four
Kingdom of Heaven (Director's Cut)
Kiss of the Dragon
The League of Extraordinary Gentleman
The Omen (666)
Speed
The Transporter

Some of the titles have interesting quirks, taking advantage of the PS3 and Blu-ray. For example, Kingdom of Heaven is the first title to use a dual-layer Blu-ray disc. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen boasts numerous such quirks -- a search engine to find scenes by actor, location, character, and other subjects. It also includes a first-person shooter. The search engine can also be found on Speed, along with a Java game. Overall, they're taking advantage of the power of Blu-ray, but it's tough to get it right straight away, so this is a small example of what's to come. The movies will be compressed in MPEG-4 format, which you all have pointed out is an improvement over prior codecs. Even so, adding in games with the DVD may begin to quell the majority of shoddy movie-to-game translations and just package them together at a slightly higher price. Just hope they also have a standard movie-only edition.

[update: reading old articles too quickly caused a case of brain farting. Fixed the MPEG-4 sentence. Thanks for keeping me on my toes!]

Tags: Blu-ray, Playstation 3, Playstation3, PS3

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

boots @ Sep 5th 2006 10:53AM

"Regrettably (to those with keen eyes), the movies will be compressed in MPEG-4 format"

Did you know that MPEG-4 (probably H.264) is even better than VC-1, let alone MPEG-2? So I don't understand what is regretable there.

Richard Lawler @ Sep 5th 2006 11:06AM

MPEG-4 compression is a good thing. You can get get better quality at lower bitrates, important because they are only using 25GB discs for all the movies except kingdom of heaven.

SuicideNinja @ Sep 5th 2006 12:42PM

MPEG-2 is what they have been using, so this is either a mistake or a misunderstanding. MPEG-4 would be good, MPEG-2 is bad. See engadget or hdbeat on the subject:

http://www.engadget.com/2005/11/29/sony-pictures-to-use-mpeg-2-on-blu-ray/

So...where's Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, Alien: Resurrection, and Alien vs Predator? Screw all those other movies. I guess Predator 1 and 2 while they're at it.

tom @ Sep 5th 2006 11:31AM

It's regrettable that the editors of this website are often the least informed type of fanboys. that makes many of thier posts hard to read, as an educated fanboy. These guys didn't know who From Software is (isn't loving Armored Core a requirement to be a Sony fanboy?)