Bandai to Ship UMD and DVD Discs Together

Anime publisher Bandai has announced that they will be shipping UMD and DVD discs together for some of their releases, and GamesIndustry.biz has the tale. From the article: "Brand new anime series Eureka 7, which has been created by the team behind the hugely successful RahXephon, will be the first to get the treatment - with a single box housing both UMD and DVD, for slightly more than the price of buying both separately." UMD stands for Universal Media Disc, and is the proprietary format that Sony uses for the PSP.

Re:Universal?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sony's marketing execs changed it because they thought "Unversatile" wasn't as catchy.

Universal Marketing Disaster

[spyrochaete]

From the article:

Japanese media giant Bandai has announced the first movie titles to feature both a DVD and a UMD version in the same box, a trend which was widely predicted when Sony first announced the PSP's movie capabilities but has until now failed to materialise.

Yeah right. Consumers won't stand for a price hike for a format they can't use. I bet Bandai will be the first and last company to do this. I think the PSP's much touted and more maligned movie capabilities will fade into vapour within 6 months.

I bet that pink Power Ranger looks just as hot on a 3 inch screen though.

ummmm...

[Rs_Conqueror]

Does even bandai realise that most people can simply rip their DVDs to an avi format and then convert them to UMD with a 3rd party hack?

What follows is a tutorial for doing just that

(lovingly stolen from my friends redvsblue journal).

March 26th, 2005 The tutorial for getting RvB on PSP Important Step Skipped, try again if you didn't get it before.

OK. Many of you have been wondering, WTF, why can't I just drag and drop my files, and bam there are my movies? One of the sad things about the PSP is, the lack of a program on the computer that easily sorts out the files.

Go here [connect.com], and watch the tutorial. If you don't have time... just connect your psp to the computer and make a folder on it entitled: "MP_ROOT." Then make a folder within that called: "100MNV01"

Note: "MP_ROOT" should be right next to the folder called "PSP," not inside of it.Also, although not tested, I don't believe you need a video saying, congradulations on getting video to your PSP.

Download this [nurs.or.jp], next

This is the 3GP website. For those of you that want to know the source of the site, its in Japanese.

When you get it downloaded, unzip the file, and then install the software. EDIT IMPORTANT: Double click SETUP and change it to MP4, PSP (you can use "direct" if you have USB mode set up on your PSP). You'll know that you're good so far when you see a program that looks like this:

http://www.nurs.or.jp/~calcium/3gpp/images/3GPPC onv_01.gif You can change the language to English.

Set a directory (unless you want it to hog up the desktop, two files will be made each time you start a conversion. Drag and drop an episode of your choice, and the program should begin a conversion. Watch the log, to see if it is making good progress. If you want episode fifty-two, the episode is downloadable at the bottom for PSP play.

I ran into a problem with both Windows Media Video, and .mov formats.

Divx versions of the episodes worked fine.

Once you recieve TWO output files, with the beginning numbers "M4VCXXXX" (x=numbers) with a .mp4 extension and a .THM format, drag and drop the two files into "100MNV01."

Enjoy

For those of you who are redvsblue members and would like to go mod him up,the entery from which I stole is Here [redvsblue.com]

Re:ummmm...

[lumpenprole]

You realize of course, that you can not "convert them to UMD" with this method.

UMD is a disc format. You need a UMD drive. There is no such thing as a consumer UMD drive, AFAIK. That's why Sony is using it. They know you're going to put stuff on your memory card. But if you want a collection of stuff, you're going to have to buy stuff on their format.

Re:ummmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no such thing as a consumer UMD drive, AFAIK

Theres no such thing as a non-consumer UMD drive either. Developers don't get one, they get a PSP that hooks to a computer to play games (along with other cool features like profiling battery usage to let them know just how CPU and battery-intensive their algolrithms are). To get an UMD with the game on it they ship the image to sony and get an UMD back.

Re:Actual pricing details...

[UWC]

I'm guessing that a UMD will be more than the 1350 yen diffreence there. 100 yen can be loosely estimated to about 1 US dollar. UMD movies coming out this week in the US are $15 retail, and one is $20 (House of Flying Daggers). Since US DVDs aren't generally $35-$40, I'd wager that a UMD release in Japan would be a little more expensive than in the US, too, so the two-pack looks to be a good deal, relatively. That's assuming you'll be able to make decent use of the UMD, of course.

Re:Universally universal

[palndrumm]

If you look carefully at the region-code map, you'll see it only covers the land-masses. The Atlantic and Pacific oceans are technically not inside any region.

IIRC, places such as cruise ships, aeroplanes, oil rigs and the like are all designated as Region 8...

Re:Actual pricing details...

[patio11]

Alright, since I can read Japanese, I'll help you out: You're correct for the first release (two episodes = 50 minutes). After that, you get four episodes (100 minutes of content) and the bundle is 8,190 yen while the DVD only version is 6,300 yen. They'll be releasing once a month. There is no information about a UMD only option listed on that page. (You can also just rent the DVD, which will be given to rental stores on the same day of its release. Costs like 250 yen here for 3 days, maybe 400 if you live in a more expensive part of the country.)