Bandai Visual Japan (Snubs Microsoft)

[Chris Beveridge]

From http://www.animeonblu-ray.com:

Bandai Visual Japan Goes Dubs (07:30 AM EDT): Well, sort of. One area that's been little discussed by Bandai Visual Japan regarding their slate of Blu-ray titles is what kind of features will really be on them. A new article at Watch Impress has started to clear things up a little bit. There is a lot of intriguing information here that shows some very different results from what Bandai Visual initiall presented.

On the language side, Akira (BD), Wings of Honneamise (BD + HD DVD), Patlabor Movie 1 (BD + HD DVD), Patlabor Movie 2 (BD + HD DVD) and Ghost in the Shell will have English language dubs. Steam Boy is Japanese language only while Avalon and Jin-Roh have no details yet.

All of the discs are dual layered releases (30 gb for HD DVD, 50 gb for Blu-ray) and the audio features are pretty varied. All of them have PCM tracks for Japanese language and several of them have Dolby TrueHD 5.1 tracks as well for Japanese. The releases that do have English audio tracks appear to be Dolby Digital+ tracks.

For those that are interested in the codec side of things it's far more interesting I think. When the initial press release came out, Bandai Visual Japan touted Microsoft's involvement in their HD DVD releases by talking about the specially tuned version of VC-1 that they were using that would help animation. That codec is present on the three HD DVD releases listed (Wings of Honneamise, Patlabor Movie 1 and Patlabor movie 2. The Blu-ray versions of those three movies plus the rest of the releases are all done in AVC/MPEG-4. Since there are specific tools to "port" an HD DVD VC-1 encoding to Blu-ray that makes it identical (which is what Warner Bros. does in the US), this is very surprising. Bandai Visual Japan is using a different set of authoring tools for what it considers it's "home" releases on the Blu-ray format.

There's a general discussion of the titles in another thread, but I felt for those that aren't following the anime side that the news about the codec change merited its own discussion.