Good find :).

Simon | January 07, 02:06 CET

Not being hi-def in either format, all of this is personally irrelevant, but also note that the HD DVD Promotion Group has cancelled its press conference at the upcoming CES, in the wake of Warner Brothers announcing its support for Blu-Ray.

The One True b!X | January 07, 02:06 CET

The ASIN number shows up on a few websites. Even Target.

Simon | January 07, 02:14 CET

Blu-ray Disc, not DVD.

Second of all, I'm very glad I'm buying a Blu-ray player next week.

The Dark Shape | January 07, 02:17 CET

I haven't bought a hi-def player yet, but Firefly on Blu-ray might be what finally pushes me over the edge. I really hope that this gets released.

Apollo Gilgamesh | January 07, 02:27 CET

Even Target.

Well, technically Target operates via Amazon, so that's not surprising.

The One True b!X | January 07, 02:33 CET

I'm even more glad I haven't gone the HD or Blu-ray yet. If I ever get a flat screen, maybe I will. It's still interesting "Firefly" is in Blu-Ray and "Serenity" is in HD-DVD format. That makes the perfect case for an HD DVD player that accepts both formats.

impalergeneral | January 07, 02:41 CET

This would be quite literally shiny. I hope it pans out. And as a PS3 owner, I hope the format war continues to shake out so we can get Serenity on Blu-ray.

jam2 | January 07, 02:42 CET

There are a few other places listing the same info (some have a different product for the same ASIN number!)(oh Simon has said about the ASIN number) - I guess maybe some companies might just take their lead from Amazon. No idea on what sort of time frame we are looking at and I wouldn't like to make a guess.

[ edited by Zol. on 2008-01-06 23:47 ]

Zol. | January 07, 02:42 CET

:(

HD DVD is the superior format. And I can't stand how Sony does business. Unfortunately as we all know the good guys don't always win.

Okkay | January 07, 03:15 CET

Or simply wait for a Blu-ray Serenity disk to come out, which I imagine will happen in time. With both Warner Brothers and New Line supporting just Blu-ray as of this summer, I imagine the high-def format war will be over by the end of 2008.

Matt_Fabb | January 07, 03:16 CET

Okkay, take a look at the format specs, I think you have labelled the superior format the wrong way around, Bluray has greater range - take at look at the Wiki pages for quick reference on the spec.

Zol. | January 07, 03:19 CET

I've been waiting for this. With the rumblings that Universal is looking into going neutral, we should be getting Serenity on BD at some point this year or next as well, hopefully it's the collector's edition.

LOUiE | January 07, 03:21 CET

I supported HD-DVD but it looks like the battle is just about over so eventually I'll probably get a PS3. I bought an HD-DVD player and it does upscale regular dvds really well so I don't feel like it was a total waste. Of course Firefly coming out on Blu-ray will probably cause me to go out and get a PS3 even sooner. I don't like Sony but I believe the PS3 is still the best deal when it comes to Blu-ray players. And yeah, if (or should I say "when")Blu-ray wins I'm sure Universal will release Blu-ray versions of all the movies they released on HD-DVD. Serenity has consistently been a top seller in Hd-dvd and it was one of the first ones they released. My guess is it would be one of their first Blu-ray releases as well.

Firefly Flanatic | January 07, 04:34 CET

Yep, this might push me over the edge for purchasing Blu-Ray over hi def too. I've been holding off buying a new player until a winner is more clearly decided [parents owned an incredible Betamax player for years, but those VHS tapes never would work ;-)], but Firefly could be a huge deciding factor. BTW, if you have an Amazon account, you can "sign up" to be notified when the Blu-Ray disc will be available.

KyKaylee | January 07, 04:50 CET

I'm really surprised Blue-Ray is winning this battle. I don't think much of Sony, I was sure HD-DVD was going to win. Guess I'm glad I haven't purchased anything yet.

Succatash | January 07, 06:05 CET

neither format is worth the amount of money needed to properly view them. After a proper TV, Player, sound system and cables you could easily drop 2-5k in order to get equipment good enough to actually see a difference in quality. That's stupid. DvD is great, while i actually have an HD-DVD player, and have seen lots of films in both formats, im not getting anymore of either.

as for suprise on who is winning, im not suprised blu-ray is winning, since the ps3 was released its skyrocketed in sales due to there not being any games on ps3 worth buying. so naturally people have to justify spending 600 bucks some way.

pongluver | January 07, 06:29 CET

If you have an HDTV of decent size -- and by that, I mean maybe 24" inches at most -- you're going to see a difference. A big one. If you don't, pongluver, your system's not calibrated correctly.

The Dark Shape | January 07, 06:43 CET

Excellent...lets have Fox milk me for another $100...

lax01 | January 07, 07:31 CET

pongluver - please use proper punctuation and capitalization as per the site rules.

As far as the content of your comment, attach rates for the ps3 are way lower than for standalone Blu players. Attach rates being the number of movie discs purchased per system. Average attach rate for a PS3 is .4 for BD movies, while for PS3 software it is much higher than that. So PS3 owners aren't chipping in to buy movies by and large. Meanwhile owners of standalone Blu players are buying at a rate of 2 or 3 to 1 vs. sales of movies for HD DVD players.

The PS3 sales didn't start to rocket until it was $399 and included 5 or 10 free BD movies and an extra controller or game and in some cases the BD remote, which is a great deal. Also interesting is that Blu players outsold HDDVD players last year in spite of an average $100 higher per unit cost and Blu movies outsold HDDVD movies in total for the past 52 weeks running.

If you own an HD capable set (which you will) and eventually you buy a player that plays a high def disc format, you will see a difference. If you don't something is drastically wrong with your setup. If you have double the number of horizontal lines of image data and you can't see a difference...

Remember that the other side of this battle is Toshiba and Microsoft (did we vote them the good guys at some point?) and Microsoft is really only in it to drag the format war out until nobody wins, because at that point Microsoft wins. They are paid royalties on the codec used to encode a majority of HDDVD and BD discs so they win that way, and if the war goes on long enough people will just go to digital downloads, which for a lot of people will be through XBOX Live or a Windows PC, so MS wins there.

And Universal won't be going neutral, they will be going Blu. There are rumors that there is an out clause in their contract about percentage of studios/sales that may let them go Blu sooner. They don't want to be the last ones holding the bag.

Full disclosure - I believe and have believed all along that Blu is the better format. We really could've used an even higher capacity format though, and we could do without region coding at all (at least they ditch it after one year after release on the Blu side). I also own a dozen Blu discs and they look and sound amazing (and our set is only 720p/1080i capable...). HD-DVD looks great, too, by the way, when properly cabled and calibrated. I also own a dozen PS3 games, which means I'm in the minority on attach rate as well. its probably worth mentioning that I prefer to play FPS games on the PC, so the 360 doesn't really have a lot of exclusive titles that appeal to me.

Another bonus of the PS3, for us, was that I could detach the PC I had hooked up to our HD set in the living room. Now I just run TVersity (free program that is a UPNP/DLNA media server) on my main box which holds all of our downloaded video and the PS3 is able to grab streams from the PC (and internet streams as well). Especially cool now that it supports XVID/DIVX natively, although anything that it doesn't support, TVersity will transcode to a format that it does understand. Plus since its able to use nonbranded bluetooth devices and usb devices, I was able to reuse several things we had laying around (wireless keyboard and mouse for one) and since its got onboard 802.11g wireless we didn't have to fork out extra for a wireless network adapter for it or run cat5e or cat6 to it to get it on the network.

Back on topic, the sooner this format war is officially dead, the faster we can all enjoy cheaper HD goodness when economies of scale kick in. Shame on Toshiba and on Sony for not coming to an agreement on a single HD format instead of wasting everyone's time and energy and confusing 90% of consumers. We'll see everything in everyone's library going Blu if the war is truly over. The thing that scared Warner into moving on this was that sales of regular DVDs had gone soft as regular consumers decided to wait out the format war. They don't want to be responsible for killing both emerging HD platforms by keeping things in limbo while their US $40 billion DVD market dried up leaving them no viable revenue streams.

Additional bit of info on the format war, in this quote from an indepth article at the Financial Times: "It was also unclear yesterday whether the other studios backing HD-DVD would change sides, although it is understood Paramount has reserved the right to switch its backing to Blu-ray."

zeitgeist | January 07, 07:49 CET

Very soon I am going to pick up a LG combo Blu-Ray/HD DVD drive, for my HTPC and a copy of Blade Runner on Blu-Ray to watch on my Epson 1080p projector.

And now I can safely order Firefly on Blu-Ray knowing that Serenity will get a released on Blu-Ray (probably next year). Thanks to Warner Brothers for giving Blu-Ray the knock out punch it needed to defeat HD DVD. Once Universal's and Paramount's contracts are up with HD DVD (within the next 12 months), they are sure to cross over to Blu-Ray as well.

Zoic_Fan | January 07, 14:44 CET

How convenient, since I just finally bought a Blu-Ray player yesterday. We already had an HD player, but apparently that horse is dead and beaten at this point.

Haunt | January 07, 21:08 CET

NICE - maybe they'll put together some new extras...

refuge5 | January 07, 22:04 CET

Wha- waitaminnit... Isn't Firefly owned by Universal? And didn't Universal go all "we're strictly HD-DVD format" on us awhile back?

Haunt | January 07, 22:21 CET

Firefly is 20th Century Fox (a Blu only studio), Serenity is Universal (who, along with Paramount, may be exercising an escape clause in their HDDVD exclusivity contract sometime in the near future...).

zeitgeist | January 07, 22:36 CET

At the moment Universal has the rerun rights to show Firefly in the States. And regarding the next gen DVD wars, really not that bothered. DVD is perfectly fine quality for me. Blu-ray/HD DVD just seems to be yet another excuse for punters to fork huge wads of cash in order to feed the comgloms.

Simon | January 07, 22:41 CET

Shouldn't Buffy come out on Blu-Ray or HD-DVD before Firefly?

patxshand | January 07, 23:16 CET

As exciting as this is, I'll wait to until the "war" is over to choose the side. For now, I agree with Simon. The DVD quality seems more than good enough to me.

Valentyn | January 07, 23:51 CET

I don't think Buffy was recorded in a way that could transfer to HD easily. Does anyone know how long Universal (UniversalHD Channel) has the rights to Firefly?

Zol. | January 07, 23:58 CET

Zol., I don't know the answer to your question, but I just want to make sure people understand that Uni only purchased broadcast rights. Universal has no rights at all over Firefly on DVD. That still belongs solely to Fox. Universal will have nothing to say about a blu-ray release of Firefly.

TamaraC | January 08, 00:06 CET

If it was on film, then it can be transferred, but the question is would it result in something worthwhile? Buffy's visual quality improved drastically from year to year, I'm not sure how much you would gain grabbing year one. Plus, Joss doesn't see Buffy as widescreen, and a true HD transfer would be widescreen.

zeitgeist | January 08, 00:15 CET

UniversalHD has the television rights for Firefly. That has nothing to do with home video releases. I see a ton of Blu-ray only films playing on UHD.

Buffy Seasons 1 and 2 would look pretty horrific in HD, as it was filmed 16mm. S3-7 would look better, but Special FX shots would probably look abysmal.

Zeitgeist, several HD films have been released 1.33:1 according to their release format.

The Dark Shape | January 08, 00:26 CET

Well, to fully conform to the spec they need to be 16:9 (1.78:1) rather than 4:3 and 1.33:1/4:3 is an SD aspect ratio. It would be higher resolution, but side-matted if I understand what you are saying correctly. So its sort of HD :)

[ edited by zeitgeist on 2008-01-07 21:53 ]

zeitgeist | January 08, 00:33 CET