thebluview

Late in the making but click the link for our Avatar review

Bookmark this article

Released tomorrow in the UK, follow the link for a review of Law Abiding Citizel on Blu-ray

Bookmark this article

Released today in the UK, follow the link for a review of Zombieland on Blu-ray

Bookmark this article

I’m not sure why I missed UP when it hit the cinema usually the kids drag me to Disney/Pixar movies. So it was with some excitement and a little trepidation that we sat down to watch UP. Well I’m not sure where the uncertainty came from but it was totally unjustified. UP is easily the best Disney/Pixar movie for a while. The story a little farfetched and with a few holes (with the age of the main character just how old is the baddie) is enjoyable. Being an older viewer the start of the movie can defiantly pull on the heart strings

The video on this Blu-ray is exceptional with nice bright colours and no hint of edge enhancement or artefacts. The sound design in DTS HD Master Audio is equally as good with good articulation and some nice steering effects, defiantly demo material in the way the original Toy Story was used in many stores to demo the first flat screen TV’s.

Extras are also good with some nice shorts and documentaries. If you can go for the deluxe four, yes four disk editions. With this you get the Blu-ray main disk, a Blu-ray extras disk a DVD for the kids to watch over and over again and a digital copy that works in Windows Media Player and iTunes.

Up is by far the best Disney/Pixar has produced in a while and if you where in two minds whether to invest in it, don’t hesitate. Get your copy straight away.

Bookmark this article

From the title you might think that this is not going to be a very good review. Well far from it I really enjoyed the first Crank movie with its non-stop adrenalin pumping pace and sense of humour. Well Crank 2 is more of the same only with the dial set to eleven. The movie starts where the previous movie ends with our hero (?) dropping to the ground from a helicopter and surviving only to have his heart stolen and replaced by an artificial version which he must keep charged and that’s all I’m going to reveal about the plot.
As far as picture quality at times it’s outstanding and always looks good. At low of the action takes place outside or in well lit interiors which contribute to the quality. However once you realise while viewing the extras that the whole film was made on hand held consumer 1080p cameras you’ll understand a good job they have gone with the picture and some of the effects. The 7.1 channel DTS HD Master Audio mix is also very good bullets and the effects constantly fly around the sound stage.
The extras are also reasonably good with some insight into why and how the movie was made but as with the movie don’t expect anything too deep and meaningful.  However marks are taken off as the US version comes with a digital copy which is missing from the UK release.
Now the Cranky bit. There is a major issue with this disk in the UK. It’s quite obvious that the disk was not thoroughly tested before it was sent to be mastered and there are a lot of posts on the internet from people having issues getting this title to run and I experienced it myself. After inserting the disk and waiting quite a while you get a small square in the middle of the screen and you only get video here and no menus. I experienced this on both a PS3 (I never download updates the first time I load a movie) and also on a Sony BDP-S350, both very popular players. On the PS3 I was able to stop the disk and start it again and said yes when it prompted me to down load an update, after this all was good. For the S350 it was a little more complex as the machine is not within easy reach of an internet connection and I had to add a USB memory stick to allow it to update, again once the update was complete all was good. But a word of warning if you have a profile 1.0 player or your player it not connected to the internet, it’s not your player it’s the disk.
Overall a good fun movie but Lionsgate really need to sort their testing out for future releases.

Bookmark this article

First of all I have to admit I’m a little bit of a Clint Eastwood fan especially his more recent work and directing. I won’t reveal the plot suffice to say that Clint’s portrayal of Korean War veteran, ex auto worker and racist is exemplary and very believable you really feel for him and can sympathise with his old world point of view. The supporting cast most of which are played by real Hmong people add emotion and weight to the movie. Picture quality is good with some of the outdoor scenes showing outstanding contrast. The audio quality is good, it’s not going to shake the room, and it’s not that type of movie but generally backs up the believability. Extras are OK, there a nice feature on the making of the movie and the insistence of Clint Eastwood that they use the Hmong people with profiles and audition footage. Grand Torino: More than a Car explains men’s preoccupation with classic cars. One thing I will criticize is the digital copy. Most recent digital copies have been useable on portable players but this type is only useable on a PC and wrapped in DRM copy protection. It may be that Warner Bros don’t want to pay Apple to allow people to download via iTunes(as a lot of recent releases have) but this is one movie I would put on my iPhone but I’m not paying for it twice.
Well worth the investment for this BluRay shame about the digital copy.

Bookmark this article

Yesterday saw the UK release of Disney’s Bolt. I previously wrote about my families trip to the cinema to see this movie in its native 3D so now does it translate to hi definition 2D. Well the answer is well, the movie whips along at a pace and the story infolds nicely with a good mix or action and humour. The picture quality on this disk is excellent as you would expect from a Disney Animation release that was produced digitally some parts actually have a 3D feel. Colours are bright and edges well defined with no hint of enhancement. One thing to note is that the box and disk flag the audio as DTS-HD Master audio with 5.1 channels; however my PS3 picked it up as a 6.1 channel mix. The mix is dynamic and punchy with some deep base in the action sequences I did feel that the surrounds where perhaps not used as much as they could have been.
On the extras front the ‘Super Rhino Short’ is good and had the kids rolling around on the sofa. The rest is a mix of music video and documentaries. There’s also a mini game which might keep the kids entertained for a short while. The deleted scenes are not really deleted scenes as you would expect but pre-visualisation sketches that were omitted as the story changed (for the better). The other great bonus is that this is one of the few BluRay releases that also include a DVD in the box with the full movie playable on standard DVD players. So if you have not yet gone HD get the BluRay, watch the DVD and when you get around to upgrading you have a good BluRay to test you system. Also if your kids don’t have BluRay yet this is a movie that they can watch on their own DVD players, PS2’s and XBOX’s as it’s a movie I’m sure kids will want to watch again and again.

Bookmark this article

OK I’ve spoken about this issue several times, you have a device with a network connection but no way of running a cable to it or it’s far away from your router in your AV stack. This is typically a BluRay player that supports Profile 2.0 or other device such as a SlingBox.

Well Buffalo Technology has the device for you, seriously. The Wireless-N Nfinity Dual Band Ethernet Converter to give it its catchy title. This little box has four 10/100 Ethernet connections and wireless 802.11n connectivity. Yes that was four Ethernet connections. So you can connect everything in your AV stack wirelessly to the internet including BluRay player, SlingBox, Internet Radio enabled receiver and XBOX360. All connected through one box.
There are a few issues. First of all you must connect it to a PC or laptop to configure it and secondly the ports are only 10/100 speeds so if the device your connecting has Gigabit ports you’re not going to get the full bandwidth, however with most internet connections being less than 10mb its not going to affect performance plus if you have a few devices connected then they will be sharing the ‘up to 300mbps’ bandwidth of 802.11n anyway. The Converter also works with 802.11g and b. 802.11g would be fine but if you are still on ‘b’ then its time to upgrade.

As far as setup goes this could not be easier. Connect the Ethernet Converter to your PC with the supplied cable, insert CD, and install the software. One of the nice things about the software is that it allows you to select which network adapter the Ethernet converter is connected to. I’ve used a few of these converters and all have not worked unless you disable your laptops wireless connection first, with the Buffalo software you select which network adapter it’s connected to and then it searches for the Converter. Once it’s found it you then hit the scan button and select your wireless network and enter its password (you have set a password haven’t you!). One word of caution the default setting of the device is to use a manual IP address, as most users use DHCP, this should really be the default, you will need to go into the ‘web address’ section of the software and change the IP address setting to automatic.

So once you have it up and running, how does it perform? Well I have to say – great. I have my PC, SlingBox and 360 connected through it and the performance is fine I hit my 10mb performance of my internet connection through it and can stream through the SlingBox with no issues. In terms of speed with a fish tank and two brick walls i’m seeing around 60% signal strength and about 144mbps speed, which is about the same as I get with by PC’s dedicated card with external antena. I’ve connected my son’s Sony BDP-S350 BluRay player through it to update it to the latest firmware and try his player on profile 2.0 and it worked flawlessly. For anyone with a few devices that have Ethernet LAN connections that do not want to run cables to then this is the ideal solution.
Pricing is around $90-100 or £60-70 in the UK

Bookmark this article

Well I finally decided to upgrade my main PC to play back Blu Ray movies. I settled on the LG Super Multi Blu drive. My machine runs Windows Vista Home Premium so I was hoping to integrate the playback into Media Centre. First of all there are a few things you will need

A  Display that supports HDCP,  Video card that supports HDCP,  Blu Ray drive,  Blu Ray decoding software,  A fairly powerful CPU to do the Blu Ray video and audio decoding

Installing the drive which has a SATA interface was as painful as installing any CD or DVD drive and took just a few minutes. Next install the CD that comes with the drive which includes CyberLink Power DVD. This was the first issue, after installing all this and rebooting I was informed I needed an update. This update turned out to be a complete 102MB new version of Power DVD – time to go make a coffee. Once this is down and you’ve rebooted again you should be able to play Blu Ray movies. However I noticed the volume was quite a bit lower than the rest of my system and usual Blu Ray device, a PS3, this I can live with by setting the default volumes on my Onkyo receiver. Now Blu Ray movies played fine under Power DVD but Media Centre does not have any Blu Ray play back.

To get Media Centre to play ball you need a plug-in. I used a plug-in written by Armyb77 which you can down load form here. This enables Media Centre to run Power DVD when you wish to watch a Blu Ray, it’s not as pretty as getting Media Centre to display it directly but it works. When you quit Power DVD, Media Centre comes back up.

The only weak spot with this solution would be the sound card, while it sounded fine I’m sure I was getting down mix of Dolby Digital as there was no difference which ever audio track I was playing and limited activity from the surrounds. If you are looking at this solution for your main Blu Ray playback device (with the bonus of gaming and web surfing on a large display) then you should look at a solution such as those from Auzentech which offer cards with HDMI pass through.

To give you an idea this is my setup. Processor Intel Core2 Q9450 CPU overclocked to 3.2GHz, 4GB PC 8500 RAM, ASUS Maximus Formula motherboard, PNY Nvidia 9800 GTX+ 512MB with the latest WHQL drivers and finally a Creative X-Fi Extreme Gamer sound card with the 7.1 analogue cable plugged into an Onkyo TX-SR806 receiver (review coming soon). For the display as this machine is in my main room it’s running through a Sharp LC52X1CE 52” LCD TV.

Altogether this solution worked well, picture quality was good is not quite up to the PS3 which is a little disappointing as I was running a high end view card with Nvidia PureVideo decoding enabled but this is no fault of the LG drive which performed flawlessly. It also includes software to back up your PC (rather expensive with the price of BluRay blanks) and video editing software. The drive also supports HD-DVD and it might be a solution if you already have some of these disks but enough said about that, this is The BluView

When I can get hold of a Blu Ray writer I’ll post a article of that, I’ve a Sanyo Xacti HD1000 HD Camcorder and can’t wait to create some Blu Ray disks….

Bookmark this article

I have to say I was looking forward to this movie, lots of ‘a’ list stars and an interesting premise. However the story turned into a poor rip off of an old Rambo movie, perhaps intentionally as a parody but others have done it better. A test of a good movie is how long my kids (Ben Stiller fans) stay to watch, this looked like our typical family viewing. In this case of the three (I have four but the eldest was out) one left within ten minutes and another in fifteen, not a good sign. A giggle was heard a few times but there was a severe lack of anything stirring in the belly region. Most of the time we could not understand Robert Downy Juniors poor black voice imitation and the less I say of Jack black the better. Everyone is raving about Tom Cruise’s appearance and he really stole the show. However, player – this movie is not

Picture quality was mixed. The jungle setting had great promise but a lot of the time was dark and lacking in detail, the opening scenes did look good but like most of the movie it was downhill from there.  The audio fared better good explosions and good base extension but not quite demo material and I’ve already mentioned the dialogue. I doubt many will use this to show off their systems as your customers or guests will think you need a center channel upgrade.

Extras are the usual however I’ve not been through all of them yet and to be honest I’ve no interest to do so after the movie. One thing that impressed was the digital copy. I have a few disks that have promised this, some you down load from the web and the sites don’t work (if they do work they only work with Internet Explorer) and most others are playable via a PC only which I guess is OK for laptop users and travelers. The good news with this release is at last we have a digital copy that works with iTunes so you can load it onto your iPod or iPhone. It’s a little strange that they give you the movie on a DVD and then you have to download it from the iTunes store – sounds like Apple getting their pound of flesh to allow this functionality, anyway it is a welcome feature. If you’ve sat through he movie I doubt you will want to watch if again on a portable device.

Perhaps one to rent..

Bookmark this article