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How jacked up is this? We are buying HD televisions and Media Center PC’s here in the US, yet we don’t have any DVD based HD movies. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are in the works, but WMV HD has been around for a while now and we only have T2 and a bunch of IMAX movies (see WMV HD movie list) to show for it. It’s great to see our friends in Germany getting a bunch of movies in WMV HD, but come on, why no love here in the US? Who’s to blame? Microsoft for not inking deals with Studios or the Movie Studios for being slow to adopt new technologies? Either way, if you are looking for some blockbuster High-Def movies check out the ones from Concorde Home Entertainment. They just released Underworld, Timeline, The Italian Job, We Were Solders, and Tomb Raider all in Windows Media HD! Most of them are available from Amazon.de for about $24 EUR (US $32, shipped $48.16), which isn’t to bad, since LaserDiscs cost me more than that years ago.
Trailergod posted these points over at the AVS Forum about UNDERWORLD:
Video :1280 x 544 Pixels
8.94 Mbps 7.82GB in size
1. English, Windows Media Audio 9 Professional 5.1 (440 kbps)
2. Deutsch, Windows Media Audio 9 Professional 5.1 (440 kbps)
1. The dvd-rom has an autorun function that loads its own player with movie specific menu. With this you can change audio tracks, search chapters.
2. its OFFLINE DRM !!!! , the .wmv file is encrypted but no need for internet connection. This simply means that this file can’t be re-encoded to other formats.
3. Playback using Media player 10 is possible. Simply open the .wmv file and Windows Media player 10 starts playing it, you can also change the audio tracks directly within media player 10.
Video quality for Underworld looks good. Detail is much better than the NTSC DVD version.
– Screen shots over at the AVS Forums, “WMV-HD titles (Underworld, Timeline, Italian Job, We were soldiers etc)” thread.
– Concorde Home Entertainment