Who Done It?

[geek]

Sony may have taken the cake (get it? if not, look at the first picture) with this stunt, but then again, this may be a journalist out to make a buck. I’m betting on the latter.

For those of you who don’t know, Sony may have just given Blu-ray an irrevocable death sentence. Basically, some guy is accusing Sony of totally faking a Blu-ray demo at a recent PR event. He opened up one of the laptops demoing a movie on Blu-ray media, to find that the thing was on a standard, hand-made DVD-R. First impression states that Sony was faking the demo because they either did not have the content or did not have the capability to play it.

However, upon the addition of a grain of salt, one will realize that there’s more to this than the journalist would have you see. There were, in fact, two laptops present, side by side. One was displayed the Blu-ray version, the other was standard DVD content. The journalist has provided no proof that the laptop was not the latter. Secondly, many people currently working with Blu-ray hardware have stated that they often use DVDs to hold the content – the drives can read it, they just can’t hold as much. It is certainly possible that this demo could fit onto a single DVD, especially with no special features or other junk, which is why it was bootlegged. In case you were wondering, the DVD isn’t actually bootlegged – Sony’s film studios own the movie.

Even still, it’s apparantly quite common to fake demos, especially with newer technology. This was not a high-profile event – only a handful of Sony employees were running this. There was no fanfare and no executive handshaking here. I call bull.

Besides, we all know what happens when we don’t fake demos.

This probably runs in the same line as GTHD running on a PC. Plausible, but unlikely.

[/geek]