Monthly Archives: July 2008

Cuil pride

Posted on July 31, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

A month or so ago I sent an email to prominent conservative newspaper blogger Andrew Bolt, expressing my pride in my son, who had recently graduated as an Officer in the Australia Army from the Royal Military College, Duntroon, Canberra. … Continue reading →

Posted in General Tech, How Things Work | Leave a comment

Packaging errors on Blu-ray discs

Posted on July 29, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

I use AnyDVD HD to help me analyse DVDs, Blu-ray discs and HD DVDs. However it hasn’t been of as much help with determining the region codes of Blu-ray discs as it has been with DVDs. I raised this on … Continue reading →

Posted in Blu-ray, Disc details, DVD, HD DVD | Leave a comment

Warner Blu-ray releases

Posted on July 28, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

For some reason I fell out of contact with Warner Bros for a while, but have now reestablished contact. This evening they sent me a few press releases. First, they’ve got a two-for-$50 promotion on Blu-ray going from Wednesday until … Continue reading →

Posted in Blu-ray, Disc details | Leave a comment

HELP! Taking screen shots of Blu-ray

Posted on July 25, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

Does anyone know of a tool which allows you to take full frame grabs from Blu-ray and HD DVD on a Windows platform? You can’t do it with PowerDVD (although this does provide it for DVDs). I would love to … Continue reading →

Posted in Admin, Blu-ray, DVD, HD DVD, Video | Leave a comment

Program content or broken equipment?

Posted on July 22, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

I’m testing a whole batch of TVs at the moment, and have just reached the last of the six of them. One of the first things I do these days with a display is plug a Beyonwiz HDTV receiver into … Continue reading →

Posted in DTV, Equipment, Testing, Video | Leave a comment

9.7

Posted on July 20, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

I place quite a bit of weight on the ‘User Rating’ figure on IMDB. For as long as I can remember, the top three places have been occupied by The Shawshank Redemption, The Godfather, and The Godfather: Part II, with … Continue reading →

Posted in Cinema | Leave a comment

Site News

Posted on July 19, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

For a while I’ve been writing review of Blu-ray discs for Sound and Image magazine. I’ve started loading them onto this site at ‘Blu-ray Reviews‘. I expect to have quite a few up over the next couple of weeks. Some … Continue reading →

Posted in Audio, Blu-ray, How Things Work, Video | Leave a comment

Wasting Digital Real-estate

Posted on July 15, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

The excellent Blu-ray section of High-Def Digest is a frequent stopping point for me, especially its reviews. The reviews are usually pretty well done, but they do contain the odd error, often due to the difficulty of obtaining valid information … Continue reading →

Posted in Blu-ray, DVD, HD DVD, Rant | Leave a comment

Foxtel picture quality

Posted on July 10, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

I don’t have pay TV. This has been a problem at times because I haven’t been able to explore its capabilities very well. But the cost to benefit ratio is, to me, too high. Over the years I have heard … Continue reading →

Posted in DTV, Video | Leave a comment

Disc Database

Posted on July 8, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

One of the things I’ve been doing since not long after the introduction of the DVD has been building a database in Microsoft Access of details relating to discs. I’ve added additional fields over the years to allow for bits … Continue reading →

Posted in Admin, Blu-ray, Disc details, DVD, HD DVD | Leave a comment