In the spirit of adding the features that I like to have around the site, I have added a gallery of cover art for upcoming and released titles.
I quite like looking through the covers - which link to the details pages for each title - to be reminded of some of the great releases we have had since the inception of the format.
I have added two new pages to the Statistics section of the site.
The pages work much like the current Statistics page, except the filters and information in the table are different.
The Review Stats page focuses on the disc review performance and allows you to narrow down choices based on the reviews that we link to on the details page.
On the plus side, the site was mentioned in postings on CNET Crave and Gizmodo today.
On the down side, the extra traffic generated by these incoming links has given grief to the server.
If things don’t improve over the next couple of days I will talk with my provider about adding ‘more power’ on the server side.
Some of you may have noticed that the navigation bar at the Blu-ray Stats site has had some colour added.
While on the surface it seems like a nice distraction, there is a new underlying mechanism in the Navigation that allows the addition of different pages in the lower bar which depend on which tab in the upper bar you are looking at.
This will allow for a wider range of pages, including a variety of different Stats tables and Import options, to be added in the future.
As always you can have your say or make your requests regarding site features by joining the forum and posting there - or comment in one of the site feature posts like this one.
I have finished some initial work on a ‘My Blu-ray Stats’ feature for the site.
The first feature enabled for My Blu-ray Stats is the Collection - a very simple tool that allows you to enter your collection and look at the stats of the discs you specifically own.
A couple of improvements were added when the new database went online a couple of days ago.
The first is improved audio filtering. Now when you filter for a given selection you will see everything that matches, instead of only exact matches - this is especially useful for filtering on ‘Lossless’ - a term that covers LPCM, DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby True HD discs. You can also filter on 24 bit and 6.1 or 7.1 channels, seeing all audio codecs that satisfy the match.
The more observant Blu-ray Stats users will have noticed that the navigation bar now takes you to a new page for displaying the disc statistics.
While things look very similar to the original page, the underlying database for this new page is also completely new, and designed to be more flexible and to have many more fields on which to search and filter. You can get an idea of some of these fields if you look at the details page for one of the discs. I have been working on the new database for months to ensure best possible accuracy for the new data as well as the best match back to the old database.
TWICE is reporting that Samsung Electronics has launched a new online Blu-ray Resource Center to inform consumers about Samsung’s Blu-ray offerings and provide support, including firmware downloads, for existing models.
Today I updated the Amazon Stats page with a new details page that is linked from the title in the Amazon Stats listing.
The biggest advantage of the Amazon Stats page over the main database is that it lists many of the upcoming titles as well as the ones already available.
Today I added a details page for both Amazon France listings and Amazon Germany listings.
Like the Amazon UK details page, this one will list a number of features as well as actors and director for titles where available from the Amazon database. This kind of information, as well as the cover art, can help a lot in identifying what the titles are.
I will add a details page for the US Amazon list also, giving some insight into the upcoming pre-order titles - details for US releases are not available in the main database before release day (though that may change also in the future).
