Monthly Archives: April 2009

Back up, and thanks!

I’m back. An excellent Telsta/Bigpond tech guy came around first thing this morning and got me going. Something was definitely wrong at the other end. He provided a new Bigpond two wire gateway for my ADSL connection. My old Alcatel … Continue reading

Posted in Admin, Computer, General Tech | Leave a comment

Speed demon

One word describes why I felt I needed a new computer: Blu-ray. My old computer would not play Blu-ray discs in any watchable way. Not that I watch them on a computer, but when checking things out, half the time … Continue reading

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

Apple iTunes, a masterpiece of obfuscation

Goodness knows when you will see this. Internet for me, at the moment, is thoroughly dead. New computer. Spent Thursday night loading stuff. Likewise Friday morning. During one of its reboots, its graphics card failed. The shop people actually came … Continue reading

Posted in Audio, Portable, Rant | Leave a comment

Day and Date everything

Warner Bros says that it is proposing to release ‘day and date’ (where this term comes from I don’t know, but it means ‘on the same day’) The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in just about all possible formats on … Continue reading

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New Blu-ray disc notes

Icon Film Distribution will soon (1 May, I think) be releasing Slumdog Millionaire on Blu-ray. My Blu-ray vs DVD comparison for this title is here. A sample: That company will also be releasing Transporter 3 on Blu-ray on 10 June … Continue reading

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‘600hz sub fielding’

A member the public has written to one of my editors asking, in short, what is ‘600Hz sub fielding’? The editor passed it on to me, and my initial thought was: ‘I have no idea’. Fortunately our correspondent quoted some … Continue reading

Posted in Equipment, How Things Work, Video | Leave a comment

Super-dedicated WALL-E

I was scanning the Blu-ray version of WALL-E with BDInfo and discovered that it is organised very differently to the US one. That one apparently has the movie, with a run length of 1:37:25 in a single file (20000.M2TS). The … Continue reading

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Eight bits of noise?

In the previous post I asked at the end: ‘Is 24 bits it worth it?’ I want to do an extensive post on this in due course, but let me first make my point briefly. In that previous post I … Continue reading

Posted in Audio, Blu-ray, Compression | Leave a comment

24 bit sound vs 16 bit sound and DTS-HD Master Audio

I’ve run BDInfo on the forthcoming Australian release of Slumdog Millionaire on Blu-ray from Icon Film Distribution. This turns out to be a very different encode to the US version. The main title details of the US version are here. … Continue reading

Posted in Audio, Blu-ray, Disc details | 5 Comments

That’s a lot of bits

I’ve just been analysing the new Blu-ray release of the 1958 musical Gigi. This gets Dolby TrueHD 5.1 channel sound for the English track, backed up with Dolby Digital 5.1 at 640kbps. Foreign language audio is provided in French, German, … Continue reading

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