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While claims that the Xbox 360’s DVD format is too small are becoming, you rarely hear of a developer pushing the boundaries of Blu-ray. And yet Codemasters is doing exactly that. Apparently the publisher’s upcoming Fuel - an open-world racer redolent of Mad Max - would exhaust four Blu-ray discs if it were created using quot;traditionalquot; methods. That’s according to Executive Producer David Brickley, speaking to a href=”http://www.videogamer.com/news/25-09-2008-9464.html”Videogamer.com/a br /quot;In the context of that map, which is one small corner of it, when the guys showed us this technology, if you were to build it in a traditional manner it would fill about four Blu-rays,quot; he said. quot;A gargantuan amount of data, just enormous. The challenge for us was to say can we come up with a race experience generated according to an algorithmic rule set, procedural generation, which is of a standard that is indistinguishable from one that’s been done by hand?quot; br /To put the figure in context, Brickley likened the world of Fuel to that of Burnout Paradise. quot;I did a little Power Point internally to do it and it zoomed them in to each other,quot; he said. quot;It’s like a little postage stamp because I think it does like four kilometres or something.quot; Fuel is reported to be 5,000 miles in scope. br /The game is being developed by Asobo, and is due out on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC in Q2 2009. [PSU]

Speaking to Pocket-lint, electronics giant Samsung has claimed that the Sony-sponsored Blu-ray format will be dead in five years.
“I think it [Blu-ray] has five years left,” commented Andy Griffiths, director of consumer electronics at Samsung UK. “I certainly wouldn’t give it 10.” The reason? In five years time Samsung thinks downloadable distribution will reign supreme.
It wasn’t all doom and gloom though. Griffith said that 2008 would be Blu-ray’s golden year, citing cheaper Blu-ray players and the victory over Toshiba’s rival HD-DVD format as justification.
“It’s going to be huge,” he told Pocket-lint. “We are heavily back-ordered at the moment.”
The entertainment industry’s transition to downloadable distribution is widely considered inevitable, but just how will this affect Sony’s projected ten year PlayStation 3 life cycle? Will slowing Blu-ray sales have a knock-on effect on PS3 unit sales, as the console’s built-in Blu-ray player becomes less of a commercial asset? Or will PS3’s built-in storage space offset the growing obsolescence of its Blu-ray component? [PSU]

Sony’s Blu-ray technology “hasn’t made much difference” to the upcoming PS3 version of stupendously great 360 and PC FPS BioShock, the game’s associate producer has told VideoGamer.com.
BioShock, originally released for 360 and PC late in 2007, is scheduled for release on PS3 in Europe on October 24, and will come with a new survivor difficulty mode and exclusive downloadable content in the form of Challenge Rooms.
PS3 owners had hoped for some form of graphical upgrade, however, senior producer at publisher 2K Games Melissa Miller confirmed to us at the Leipzig Games Conference last week that the team was aiming towards graphical parity with the 360 version, and that the Blu-ray format hadn’t made much difference.
She said: “Graphical quality our goal was always to make sure everything looked just as good as on Xbox 360. So there was never anybody who could say, hey, why didn’t I get this on 360 originally, because I don’t feel like it’s up to the visual quality. We’re just trying to make sure that everybody is happy.”
When asked if the Blu-ray format had provided any advantages to the development team, Miller replied: “In terms of specific things, it hasn’t made much difference. The original game fit on a 360 disk so it wasn’t like we were in need of room. We’ve tried to do what we can to make sure that the PS3 looks just as great as the 360, but in terms of necessarily utilising something specific about Blu-ray, to my knowledge, Blu-ray hasn’t necessarily made a huge difference.” [Videogamer]

In a beneficial turn of events for the home entertainment industry, Blu-ray sales continue to rise drastically despite the staggering U.S. economy.
As DVD sales decline, Blu-ray has been filling in the gap, generating more than $200 million in the first half of 2008. This is in stark contrast to the same point last year, where Blu-ray earnings were less than 33% of current figures.
“We are trending 8% Blu-ray sales [per title], and at the end of the year, we will be between 10% and 12%,” stated Mike Dunn of 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment.
Lori MacPherson, general manager for Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment, North America contributed her thoughts.
“I think people are becoming pickier on what they spend their money on, but home entertainment always represents a good value. Thirty dollars for a Blu-ray movie that you can watch over and over again is still a great value,” she commented.
As Blu-ray production costs begin to drop, savings will be passed on to consumers and, in return, Blu-ray will take an even more prominent place in people’s homes. With HDTV penetration higher than ever, Blu-ray may very well overtake DVD prior to 2012, the previously accepted prediction. [PSU]

Buried under predictions that 2012 will bring dominance for Blu-ray over DVD and breaking news that the PS3 just may have had a hand in winning the format war the Entertainment Merchant’s Association 2008 Annual Report on the Home Entertainment Industry holds survey results  showing 87% of PS3 owners reported they watch Blu-ray movies on their console. That’s a stark contrast to last year’s NPD survey indicating 60% of owners didn’t even know it played them. We don’t know what’s behind the jump, be it better marketing/consumer education, or something wrong with how one the surveys were conducted. You can mull that one over during the fast money round while also peeping results that say 22% of HDTV owners think they’re watching HD programming, but in fact are not — not like we haven’t heard that before. [PS3 Fanboy]

K-Mart stores have discounted Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox 360 HD DVD Player to $5.00 as the retailer moves remaining units of the defunct high-definition peripheral.
A buyer on the discount website Slickdeals.net purchased an Xbox 360 HD DVD Player for $5.00 in Greensboro, NC.
The device, which allows Xbox 360 owners to play Toshiba Corp.’s HD DVD format titles, launched in Nov. 2006 for $199.99.
It was later discounted to $179.99 in a price war against Sony Corp.’s Blu-ray disc format.
Toshiba in Feb. exited the HD DVD format business after companies including Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, Best Buy Co. Inc., and Netflix Inc. defected to Blu-ray.
Retailers including Best Buy and Circuit City Co. Inc. have cleared all in-store HD DVD inventory.
Amazon.com has discounted a wave of HD DVD titles by up to 60 percent to clear inventory. [PunchJump]

We have no confirmation or sourcing of our own on this, so, we don’t vouch for its accuracy. But we will be watching the clock at 10 am Crecente time tomorrow, as CrunchGear is rumormongering that Microsoft will announce Blu-Ray Xboxes will be shipping by Christmas, at that time. Rumor has it they’ll cost less than an Elite.
The announcement would apparently be timed to upstage Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference which kicks off an hour later in San Francisco. Here’s the full rumor from CrunchGear’s tipster:

I’m told MS will upstage Apple with a Monday 9am PDT announcement (1 hour before WWDC) via press release that the Xbox 360 will get Blu-Ray before Christmas. Price was “under the current Elite,” but i could get any more details. [Kotaku.com]

Now this is what we were expecting from the next generation of home video entertainment. French site play3-live recently conducted an interview with Manuel R. Gutierrez Novelo, CEO & President of TDVision Systems, in which the three dimensional Blu-ray experience is discussed.
“We’re in the process to enable the PlayStation 3 to playback 3D movies using our TDVCodec and Blu-ray discs at our R&D labs since the PS3 is enabled with the BD2.0 version,” commented Novelo. “Currently we have it working on a PC in 3D and after some changes on the firmware and installing some software for the PS3 we’ll be playing 3D directly from the PS3.” [PSU]

“The objective (and what we are talking to major studios) is to encode their existing and new 3D stereoscopic content with our TDVCodec and have the movies available in every-shop everywhere in the world since one single Blu-ray disc encoded with our format has the 2D and the 3D version and can be played back in 2D over existing 2D platforms and in 3D where the platform is available (PC or PS3 with our firmware update and a Samsung / Mitsibishi / Kerner / TDVisor / Hundai monitor is connected),” he continued.
Obviously, 3D content won’t be visible on every television. Novelo elaborated, “You can use the 3D TV from Samsung (both RPTV DLP or the their newer Plasma), Mitsubishi, Kerner electronics, IZ3D Monitor and Hundai. The DLP based TVs work under shutter glasses (by blocking the left and right eye alternatively) Kerner, IZ3D and Hundai use polarization glasses.”
Here’s the big question though — when can the Blu-ray community expect to view this content provided they have a TDVReady HDTV? The answer — not all that long. Apparently, this technology is set to hit “soon in 2008.”
It’s exciting stuff for sure. If you’d like to read the full interview, check out the translated version right here.

“Two years ago PlayStation was on life support,” Stringer said during The Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital Conference on Wednesday.
Lofty development costs for the console were nearly “catostrophic” for his company, he said.
But he says everything is fine and dandy now with PS3, following improved sales and a win in the HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray format war.
He said he’s “very pleased” with the console’s performance, and is optimistic that games will begin to take more advantage of the PS3’s processing power.
Stringer said as early as January this year that PS3 was “out of the woods” after a rough launch, hindered by a high retail price tag, stiff competition from Xbox 360, and a slim games lineup.
As for the movie format war, Stringer said that if HD-DVD would’ve won, a reference to “Betamax 2″ would’ve been engraved on his tombstone.
He also denied that Blu-ray won because Sony paid movie studios the most money. “We were not in the check-writing competition,” he said.
The future of Blu-ray is promising, even in the face of digital downloads, according to Stringer, who said that consumers will take a long time to move away from physical media to purely digital. [CVG]

Although the so-called console war rages on, the format war has been over for several months. Blu-ray shoved HD DVD out of the marketplace and into the closet at the perfect time apparently, as DVD sales continue have continued to decrease since their plateau approximately three years ago.
“Blu-ray had its second-best week ever in the seven days ending March 23,” commented Steve Beeks, president and co-COO of Lionsgate. “We anticipate Blu-ray sales of $800 million to $1billion-plus for all of 2008, up dramatically from approximately $300 million last year.”
This dramatic 351% increase in Blu-ray sales will help alleviate the somewhat sluggish DVD sales that movie studios are now faced with. Blu-ray will only continue to climb as more people opt for high definition content over the standard DVD fare. This begs the question, how long will Blu-ray last in the face of the ever-growing digital market? We’re not sure, but we do know it’s a great time to own one of the best Blu-ray players available, the PlayStation 3. [PSU]