High-Def Movies: Interesting Bedfellows, Interesting Times

Want to watch ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End‘ in high definition, but don’t have a Blu-ray disc player? There’s another way, and it may surprise you as it did me given that it involves a HD DVD playback platform, although in retrospect it isn’t so surprising. Last night, in search of some rental entertainment for the upcoming weekend, I fired up my Xbox 360 and perused the ‘new movies’ section of the online Video Marketplace. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End was at the top of the list, and the reason I was surprised to see it there was because until this morning when I updated my understanding via some Google searching, I’d though that the film was produced by the movie studio division of staunch Microsoft foe (and staunch Blu-ray advocate) Sony.

As it turns out, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End is produced by staunch Blu-ray advocate (but fairly Microsoft-agnostic) Walt Disney Studios. The high-def (720p) version of the film is a 7.7 GByte payload (definitely not instant gratification over a 1.3 Mbps downstream DSL connection) and costs 480 MS Points ($6), which may sound expensive until you realize that my alternative is going out in the middle of a raging snowstorm…which come to think of it actually isn’t an alternative at all, given that the local video store doesn’t stock either HD DVD or Blu-ray discs. The standard-def (480p) version of the Video Marketplace download, by the way, is 2.1 GBytes in size and costs 320 MS Points ($4) to rent.

Post-viewing, I’ll update this writeup with some thoughts on how the movie looked on the 37" LCD TV.