Showgate (formerly Toshiba Entertainment) releasing on Blu-Ray

[jd213]

Well, sort of.

http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/av/docs/20080118/spe.htm

Showgate has owned the license for Biohazard (Resident Evil) in Japan, and SPE (Japan) owns the license for Biohazard 2 and 3. The two companies will be collaborating on releasing the Japanese box set in March. SPE will produce 2&3 and distribute the box set, while Showgate will produce the 1st disc and allow SPE to distriubute it in the box set.

Up until now they had remained HD DVD exclusive even after Toshiba sold them off, even though their current parent company (Hakuhodo) is a huge publisher that doesn't appear to have any formal ties with HD DVD.

I wonder if the BD encode will just be a dump of their HD DVD encode (which was AVC) for Biohazard, which was released a few months ago.

According to the specs listed on AV Watch, all three films have an AVC encode. It'd be interesting if the 2nd film got a new AVC encode instead of the MPEG-2 encode used in the single and box set in the US, but the listing might just be a mistake. From what I've read the source materials aren't in very good condition anyways.

Edit: Looking again at the article, it says Biohazard Apocalypse is the extended version, so it probably is a new encode.