![]()
![]()
So what's up with BD-Live these days? We've been hearing a lot about it but it's hard to say how much stuff is out there or who is using it. As we noted earlier, Zack Snyder is going to do a live community screening from Comic-Con tonight via BD-Live for Watchmen, and I figured I'd take a look at what else BD-Live had to offer for that disc. Fortunately there's a little more content than there's been for some other Blu-ray releases during their week of release (obviously they can keep adding more stuff, but this would be the time of highest visibility). In addition to the My Chemical Romance "Desolation Row" music video (also on the Blu-ray disc), there are some short videos available for download, four covering the special effects of Dr. Manhattan and two "viral videos" that are faux-vintage pieces about Dr. Manhattan and the Keene Act. The downloading instead of streaming is a little inconvenient, but one of the viral videos (41 MB, 3 minutes long) only took a minute or so to download (the 6.5-minute Lord of the Rings Blu-ray trailer was 187 MB in high definition and took considerably longer, enough to make me switch back to live TV to kill the time) and the WB Media Library makes it easy to delete anything you don't want to keep. There are options to create and upload your own video commentary (using your webcam and Warner's site) or view others' commentaries (there were two, by the same person, on Thursday, two days after release). You can also publish your BD-Live activities as updates to Facebook, like when I rated that LOTR trailer (I gave it only three stars--it looked goods, but it was only movie clips, with spoilers, and little Blu-ray information).
I then tried some other recent Warner BD-Live releases. It's nice that I don't have to sign in for each one (as has been my experience with Disney titles), though it's inconvenient that my WB Media Library is title-specific. For example, even though the LOTR trailer was a download option on other BD-Live titles, I couldn't watch it unless I put the Watchmen disc back in or unless I downloaded it again. All the discs offer the option to organize community screenings and view/record commentaries. Friday the 13th had a downloadable sneak peek of Trick or Treat but nobody had recorded a commentary yet. Gran Torino had no commentaries either, but it offered a streamable featurette of the Hmong experience in America or Jamie Cullum's "Gran Torino" music video. Streaming sounded more appealing to me, but both took so long I gave up, so maybe Watchmen's switch to downloading was good. Inkheart had no additional content, but there were four community commentaries. Two were labeled "test," but one was--surprise!--by director Iain Softley. So there's definitely some stuff going on with BD-Live, but the content is a little thin and it doesn't appear a lot of people are participating yet. I'm looking forward to seeing what will happen with it in the near future. --David
No comments:
Post a Comment