Sorry there has not been a lot of news today. I have spent most of the day working on the code for the Blu-ray Stats site, more specifically the Imports section.

Today the old Import section was removed (though it is still online) from the navigation bar and the new UK imports section is now active. The selection of titles is considerably wider and English language support is assumed since the Brits for the most part need it as much as we do in the USA.

A second addition is a details page for both the UK Imports and the Amazon UK pages. This page shows large cover images where available as well as title details including director and actor information where available from Amazon. I expect to add this type of details page to the Amazon US, Amazon France and Amazon Germany pages very soon.

I also expect to add support for German and French imports again, though I have yet to decide how best to incorporate those into the new structure.

In any case, enjoy the new pages and feel free to contribute ideas, complaints and comments on this post, at the forum or at the site email addresses.

Good news for Nielsen VideoScan adicts.

I have updated the Market Share pages to include the new format of the Home Media Magazine market share reports that include Top 20 DVD vs Top 20 Blu-ray ratios.

I have also added a new details page that currently only covers the dates with the new reporting format. I hope to back date this details page at least to the beginning of 2008, as well as add more information on each title in the HD Top 10 chart.

Feel free to comment if you see anything strange or have any suggestions for improvement.

Amazon have a Buy Two Get One Free sale that runs through to April 16th. Nice to see that they are now listing the time line for their sales.

There are currently 58 titles listed in the sale. To be honest I am a little disappointed in the selection but for people just starting out with Blu-ray there are many must have titles in the list including The Fifth Element, Blade Runner, 300, The Departed and Black Hawk Down.

Of course you can always see the latest Amazon promotions in the upper right corner of the Blu-ray Stats Home Page - that section is automatically updated, so sales are listed within minutes of being published.

In this week’s Home Media Magazine we see that Blu-ray gained a little over last week compared to DVD sales, and slipped a little against HD DVD.

No doubt thanks to strong Blu-ray sales of I am Legend, the Blu-ray Top 20 titles week ending March 30 sold 8% versus the Top 20 DVD titles for the week. Against HD DVD the ratio was 84:16, with the ratio since inception remaining at 67:33. It will be interesting to see the impact of I am Legend when it gets its HD DVD release, since it will no doubt be a desirable title for HD DVD owners, but finding one to buy is becoming increasingly difficult as retailers move away from the format.

I am Legend easily led the top 10 followed by No Country for Old Men and Enchanted. Other recent titles in the top 10 were Gone Baby Gone and Hitman. The remainder was rounded out by strong selling Disney catalogue titles including the first two Pirates of the Caribbean, Cars and Apocalypto, as well a surprise entry by Terminator 2, one of the Lionsgate lauch titles. All in all a good week for Disney with 7 of the top 10 titles this week.

Another surprise was the return of the combined HD DVD / BD top 10 and the top 5 per format. Adding on the HD DVD sales for the titles, the Planet Earth series made it to the top 10, as well as the newly released Digital Video Essentials Basics title.

Also a little bit of site news today - the home page has been updated to include the new Blu-ray versus DVD market share statistic. Once we get a few more weeks of these the market share page will start to reflect this as well. The older market share page will be archived for reference.

Today I decided to write my first ‘article’ as opposed to a ‘blog entry’ - the subject at hand - the BD-Live Roll Out.

Since we are in the middle of this ‘event’, I thought it a good time to round up the news regarding BD-Live as it stands today and what to expect moving forward based on announcements so far.

Please take a look and if you like it feel free to Digg it, or Stumble it or share it as you prefer.

For those interested in shopping around a little more, we have added a new important feature to the database.

Now as well as the retail price for titles, the site lists the Amazon price and the Deep Discount price for the titles. Clicking on the price will take you to the page on the respective sites.

Also interesting to note that Deep Discount has a different range of Paramount titles still listed, for those who need to have them as soon as possible!

Feel free to comment on these and other features. Currently it is not possible to sort based on the Amazon or Deep Discount prices in the main database, but if people want that capability it should not be too difficult to add.

With today’s releases we hit a milestone - blu-raystats now has 500 titles in the database!

Granted we still have the Paramount and DreamWorks titles listed when technically they are discontinued - though I get a feeling that they will become available again before too long.

It has certainly been fun for me at least watching the mix of titles shift over the last year and a half or so from predominantly BD25 titles encoded with the less efficient MPEG2 to the current dominance of the dual layer BD50 discs encoded with AVC and to a lesser extent VC-1 - all the while largely maintaining lossless audio tracks for the major Blu-ray only studios at least.

During this time it has also been fun to grow the site, adding new features and new databases, including a new details page (which will become even more detailed in the future) , actor and director searches, and databases for showing all titles available on Amazon in the UK, France and Germany (as well as the USA of course). Naturally we also now have this News Log as well as a small forum for feedback. In the near future we hope to add review information for the titles, giving new ways to find the best movies for your collection. If you have any requests or ideas for features, feel free to leave comments here or on the forum.

In any case, it is nice to see this milestone met - looking forward to 1000 title milestone - may it come sooner than the first 500!

The Market Share page has been updated to a more readable ‘calendar’ style format.

There is also now a detail page for each week that shows the market share pie charts and where available the top 10 titles.

I guess this information will become less relevant over time with the expectation that Blu-ray will move to dominate the market share as HD DVD is phased out. None the less we will track this information and archive the historical results.

Today we made a large Region Code update to the main database. Now we have Region code information for almost 90% of the US domestic releases. With any luck we will manage to keep it somewhat maintained at this level.

Interestingly enough we get a better indication of the percentages for Region Coding. We see that roughly 2/3 of the titles are coded for all regions, though the different studios have different approaches to Region Codes.

Warner as well as Paramount / Dreamworks are all region free. Sony has 2/3 of their titles coded for all regions, Lionsgate is closer to 60% unrestricted releases. Disney only has 1/3 of titles region free and Fox is the Region Coding king with no discs coded for all regions in the USA. It should be noted however that some Fox titles in other regions are not restricted. The general policy for Sony, Disney and Lionsgate appears to be that day and date releases are region coded where catalog releases are not.

While New Line falls under the Warner umbrella, only one of their titles is coded all regions, which coincidentally is the one title that was released on HD DVD before New Line ceased HD DVD support. With their DTS Master Audio usage, you have to wonder if New Line is in fact Fox in disguise!

It will be interesting to see what Universal does when they release Blu-ray titles. We will be sure to report any apparent change in Region Code policy we see it moving forward.

Please feel free to provide region code information for titles in this thread on the forum.

With only a few hours to go until what is expected to be the termination of the HD DVD format by Toshiba, I have had other things on my mind.

Over the US holiday weekend (and before)  I have been working on this blog, my ‘News Log’, in order to get some back and forth communication with the site users and to generally track Blu-ray releases and bargains for users of the site.

Over the next few days I intend to start potential discussions about site features and the site pages and will hopefully get some feedback from the users about what they like about the site and what they would like from the site in the future.

I expect readership to be somewhat light for a start but hopefully we can build some enthusiasm and get things moving towards goals that make the site more useful and enjoyable for the users.

Please be patient as I work out how this publishing software works. It is not clear if comments can be added at this time by casual users - I will try to ensure that it becomes possible moving forward.