Entertainment to Your door | DVD, blu-ray, movie reviews

Every Start Track fan knows that blu-ray 1080p HD release came to the light this year, in 2009.

You can read the complete review here

As for the best place to buy it… I did a little research and compared many well-known online stores…

Amazon sells it at $69, but this store offers it at $54 so it was a nice place to buy my favorite movie on blu-ray.

Smartz is now my best source to buy blu-ray and anything related to Start Trek!

Buy cheap: Star Trek on Blu-ray – Original Motion Picture Collection

The Movie I love: State of Play

Director Kevin Macdonald successfully revives the 1970s-style paranoid thriller with State of Play, a taut and assured reworking of the 2003 BBC series of the same name. Paring down the original six-hour series to a lean 127 minutes, Macdonald and screenwriters Matthew Michael Carnahan, Tony Gilroy, and Billy Ray barely give the audience a moment to breathe as a veteran reporter and a doe-eyed blogger race through the streets of Washington, D.C., to uncover an ominous political conspiracy.

Now it’s available on blu-ray… The best price I saw on the Internet was again in my so loved Smartz. You can buy State of Play on blu-ray with free domestic shipping.

The story gets under way with two seemingly unrelated incidents: the morning after a low-level drug dealer and a pizza deliveryman are gunned down in a dark alley, a congressman’s aide is pushed in front of a moving subway train. When the latter is reported as a suicide by the media, speculations of foul play begin to emerge after the aide’s boss, rising U.S. congressman Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck), tearfully announces her death on live television. Collins’ old college roommate is Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe), a reporter for the Washington Globe, who openly resents the preferential treatment given to inexperienced underlings like Washington Globe Capitol Hill blogger Della Frye (Rachel McAdams). As the chairman of a committee overseeing defense spending, Congressman Collins is currently on a campaign against rogue government contractors profiting from the “Muslim terror gold rush” abroad. Beholden to no one, these contractors seem increasingly poised to make their presence known in the U.S., where they are gradually gaining a foothold. When McAffrey discovers that the deceased aide was in fact Congressman Collins’ primary researcher in the case against the government contractors, suspicions of conspiracy lead him on a treacherous investigation pointing to corruption at the highest levels of government.

State of Play is the kind of thriller that starts with a bang and throws in enough twists to tie your brain in knots as the layers of deception are stripped away to pose some genuinely frightening questions: Are we already at the point where independent defense contractors can gun down American citizens within the U.S. without fear of repercussion? If so, how could this have happened while U.S. citizens remain fatally unaware? And what could entice soldiers who once defended their country abroad to now set their crosshairs on innocent Americans? Is it really all about the money?

Unfortunately for McAffrey and Frye, the answers to these questions may come at the cost of their own lives; the stakes are high from the very first scene, and while Carnahan, Gilroy, and Ray smartly inject some tension-breaking humor into the mix, the primary focus of the screenplay is to keep viewers constantly guessing as they chew their cuticles raw. Thanks to some stylish directing by Macdonald, clever cutting by editor Justine Wright, an occasionally dissonant score by composer Alex Heffes, and a stellar cast, the end product is a tightly coiled thriller that recalls such landmark films as Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View and All the President’s Men. And by cleverly raising questions about print versus online media, the screenwriters manage to instill the tried-and-true political thriller with a satisfying contemporary twist. While the primary players are all in top form, it’s supporting performances by Helen Mirren, Robin Wright Penn, and Jason Bateman that make State of Play compulsively watchable. Bateman in particular injects the film with a healthy dose of humor and energy in the third act, when he appears in the role of a pill-head PR agent who could hold the key to blowing the entire investigation wide open. A rare treat for cinema lovers starved for the days when scruffy newspaper reporters fearlessly sniffed out corruption, State of Play delivers the kind of conspiratorial thrills that would have made Pakula proud.

Inaugural HDTV

HDTV technology was introduced in the United States in the 1990s by the Digital HDTV Grand Alliance, a group of television companies and MIT. Field testing of HDTV at 199 sites in the United States was completed August 14, 1994. The first public HDTV broadcast in the United States occurred on July 23, 1996 when the Raleigh, North Carolina television station WRAL-HD began broadcasting from the existing tower of WRAL-TV south-east of Raleigh, winning a race to be first with the HD Model Station in Washington, D.C., which began broadcasting July 31, 1996. The American Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) HDTV system had its public launch on October 29, 1998, during the live coverage of astronaut John Glenn’s return mission to space on board the Space Shuttle Discovery. The signal was transmitted coast-to-coast, and was seen by the public in science centers, and other public theaters specially equipped to receive and display the broadcast. The broadcast was made possible by the Harris Corporation, which sponsored the equipment necessary for transmitting and receiving the broadcast.

First regular European HDTV broadcasts

Although HDTV broadcasts had been demonstrated in Europe since the early 1990s, the first regular broadcasts started on January 1, 2004 when Euro1080 launched the HD1 channel with the traditional New Year concert from Vienna. Test transmissions had been active since the IBC exhibition in September 2003, but the New Year’s Day broadcast marked the official start of the HD1 channel, and the start of HDTV in Europe.

Euro1080, a division of the Belgian TV services company Alfacam, broadcast HDTV channels to break the pan-European stalemate of “no HD broadcasts mean no HD TVs bought means no HD broadcasts…” and kick-start HDTV interest in Europe.

The HD1 channel was initially free-to-air and mainly comprised sporting, dramatic, musical and other cultural events broadcast with a multi-lingual soundtrack on a rolling schedule of 4 or 5 hours per day.

These first European HDTV broadcasts used the 1080i format with MPEG-2 compression on a DVB-S signal from SES Astra’s 1H satellite at Europe’s main DTH Astra 19.2°E position. Euro1080 transmissions later changed to MPEG-4/AVC compression on a DVB-S2 signal in line with subsequent broadcast channels in Europe.

HDTV sources

The rise in popularity of large screens and projectors has made the limitations of conventional Standard Definition TV (SDTV) increasingly evident. An HDTV compatible television set will not improve the quality of SDTV channels. To display a superior picture, high definition televisions require a High Definition (HD) signal. Typical sources of HD signals are as follows:

- Over the air with an antenna. Most cities in the US with major network affiliates broadcast over the air in HD. To receive this signal a HD tuner is required. Most newer high definition televisions have a HD tuner built in. For HDTV televisions without a built in HD tuner, a separate set-top HD tuner box can be rented from a cable or satellite company or purchased.
- Cable television companies often offer HDTV broadcasts as part of their digital broadcast service. This is usually done with a set-top box or CableCARD issued by the cable company. Alternatively one can usually get the network HDTV channels for free with basic cable by using a QAM tuner built into their HDTV or set-top box. Some cable carriers also offer HDTV on-demand playback of movies and commonly viewed shows.
- Satellite-based TV companies, such as DirecTV and Dish Network (both in North America), Premiere (in germany), Sky Digital and freesat (in the UK and Ireland), Bell TV and Star Choice (both in Canada), Canal Digitaal (in the Netherlands), NTV Plus (in Russia) and Digit-Alb (in Albania), offer HDTV to customers as an upgrade. New satellite receiver boxes are usually required to receive HD content.
- Video game systems, such as the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, and digital set-top boxes that rely on an Internet connection, such as the Apple TV, can output an HD signal. The Xbox Live Marketplace, iTunes Music Store, and PlayStation Network services offer HD movies, TV shows, movie trailers, and clips for download, but generally at lower bitrates than a Blu-ray Disc.
- Most newer computer graphics cards have either HDMI or DVI interfaces, which can be used to output images or video to an HDTV.
- Almost all computer graphics cards have standard SVGA jacks which can be used to output images or video to an HDTV’s “PC Input” jack.
- The optical disc standard Blu-ray Disc (25GB-50GB) can provide enough digital storage to store up to 10 hours of HD video content, depending on encoder settings.
- A DVD-R disc (~4.7GB-~8.5GB) can also provide storage for up to 3 hours of HD video content, readable by Blu-ray player, PlayStation 3 video game console or Blu-ray drive installed in a PC, depending on encoder settings.

On January 4, 2008, a day before CES 2008, Warner Bros., the only major studio still releasing movies in both HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc format, announced it would release only in Blu-ray Disc after May 2008. This effectively included other studios which came under the Warner umbrella, such as New Line Cinema and HBO, though in Europe HBO distribution partner the BBC announced it would, while keeping an eye on market forces, continue to release product on both formats. This led to a chain reaction in the industry, including major U.S. retailers such as Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and Circuit City, and Canadian chains such as Future Shop, dropping HD DVD in their stores. A major European retailer, Woolworths, dropped HD DVD from its inventory. Netflix and Blockbuster – major DVD rental companies – said they would no longer carry HD DVDs. Following these new developments, on February 19, 2008, Toshiba announced it would end production of HD DVD devices, allowing Blu-ray Disc to become the industry standard for high-density optical disks. Universal Studios, the sole major movie studio to back HD DVD since inception, shortly after Toshiba’s announcement, said “while Universal values the close partnership we have shared with Toshiba, it is time to turn our focus to releasing new and catalog titles on Blu-ray Disc.” Paramount Studios, which started releasing movies only in HD DVD format during late 2007, also said it would start releasing in Blu-ray Disc. Both studios announced initial Blu-ray lineups in May 2008. With this, all major Hollywood studios now support Blu-ray.

According to Adams Media Research, high-definition software sales were slower in the first two years than DVD software sales. 16.3 million DVD software units were sold in the first two years (1997-1998) compared to 8.3 million high-definition software units (2006-2007). One reason given for this difference was the smaller marketplace (26.5 million HDTVs in 2007 compared to 100 million SDTVs in 1998). Former HD DVD supporter Microsoft has stated that they are not planning to make a Blu-ray Disc drive for the Xbox 360.

Blu-ray Disc began making serious strides as soon as the format war ended. Nielsen VideoScan sales numbers showed that with some titles, such as 20th Century Fox’s Hitman, up to 14% of total disc sales were from Blu-ray, although the average for the first half of the year was around 5%. Shortly after the format war ended, a study by The NPD Group found that awareness of Blu-ray Disc had reached 60% of U.S. households. In December 2008 The Dark Knight Blu-ray Disc sold 600,000 copies on the first day of its launch in the United States, Canada, and United Kingdom. A week after launch the The Dark Knight Blu-ray Disc had sold over 1.7 million copies worldwide making it the first Blu-ray Disc title to sell over a million copies in the first week of release.

According to Singulus Technologies AG, Blu-ray is being adopted faster than the DVD format was at the same period of its development. This conclusion was based on the fact that Singulus Technologies has received orders for 21 Blu-ray dual-layer machines during the first quarter of 2008, while 17 DVD machines of this type were made in the same period in 1997. According to GfK Retail and Technology in the first week of November 2008 sales of Blu-ray recorders surpassed DVD recorders in Japan. According to the Digital Entertainment Group the total number of Blu-ray Disc playback devices (both set-top box and game console) had reached 9.6 million by the end of 2008. According to Swicker & Associates Blu-ray Disc software sales in the United States and Canada were 1.2 million in 2006, 19.2 million in 2007, and 82.4 million in 2008.