Why does it need action scenes to justify it? Look at some of the amazing stills from The Kite Runner (on dvdbeaver) or A Passage to India to see how Slumdog could excel in HD. The most impressive HD shots to me so far are not explodey crap but the sheer depth and detail revealed in more sedate scenes.

The licence fees on a BD-R or BD-RE are miniscule compared to the retail price. A more likely reason for their expense would be the comparative rarity of BD burners vs DVD, the immaturity of the market meaning its front-loaded with people who *need* the storage and the willingness of such people to pay inflated sums for these disks. Anyway, you can buy BD-Rs for ~ $4 each in bulk which per Gb isn't far removed from what you'd pay for any other kind of recordable media. The price is bound to sink further over time as more and more computers are equipped with BD recorders. BD player / burners are creeping into the product lines the same way they did with DVD.

DS upgrades are akin to Malibu Stacy and her new hat. People will be queuing up around the block to get the new model with its low res camera and mic functionality.

I don't get the headline either - "blu ray player sales" makes more sense. PS3 sales are a little down because the 360 dropped its price and the PS3 didn't. Sony is long overdue a price drop.

Broken headline aside this is a mightily impressive achievement for WB. First week sales even exceeded those of The Matrix on DVD back in 1999. That release is generally regarded as the breakthrough title for the DVD format.

Exactly mkv support means nothing by itself. People think that mkv support means their random bootleg anime movies are suddenly going to play on a divx7 certified device. If divx7 says specifies avc and aac audio through mkv then that is all you can ever hope your device will support. Some devices like the ps3 or 360 might also toss in support for other codecs (e.g. vc1, ac3) but if its outside of the divx7 spec you are entirely at the whims of the individual vendor whether they bother or not.

I think the ps3 will get divx7 eventually. It already supports virtually all of the component parts, it just needs to be able to read them from a mkv stream and get itself certified.

Sony is getting clobbered by the exchange rate. I read that something like 80% of their products head overseas so they are probably very conscious of the overbearing cost of Japanese facilities at the moment.

AVCHD is hit and miss. Better to encode or remux into .mp4 for the time being for best cross-device support. If/when divx7 takes off you can then mux into .mkv. Oh for a single cross-platform standard for all this stuff...

tru2way is probably open in the same way as mobile phones are open. The phone is implemented to a standard and all phone providers use the same standard. However the provider may subsidize the phone and therefore lock it down to restrict functionality or customize the user experience to point to their services and sites. tru2way probably works the same. It might be possible to buy a subsidized box from a provider, or a unlocked box on your own dime. If you choose the former over the latter you may be subject to restrictions of the service. Maybe you can get an unlock code after a 24 month contract or something. Tru2way might also mean convergence of devices since it runs Java so there is huge potential for the kinds of apps it will run.

You can buy BD drives for less than $150 for PCs right now. Most ship with playback and burning software too.