What's in a codec? At 18MBs, Charlie's Angels eats up the better part of a 25GB Blu-ray Disc.(Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc is planning to encode Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle on a Blu-ray Disc)

Video Business, December, 2005 by Sweeting, Paul

Sony Pictures caused a bit of a stir in the high-def world the other day when it announced the first full-length film to be authored and encoded on a Blu-ray Disc, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, was compressed using MPEG-2, the same codec used for standard DVDs. Moreover, in comments to reporters following the announcement, Sony officials indicated that all of the initial batch of titles at launch, from Sony as well as other studios, would also likely be encoded in MPEG-2.

Although the for mat is designed to support two newel, more efficient codecs, Microsoft's VC-1 and a version of MPEG-4, Sony said it is likely to rely on the tried-and-true MPEG-2 "for the foreseeable future." The decision surprised people, because it could be seen to negate one...

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