Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (SPHE) is launching the first high-definition movies to come on Blu-ray discs as planned and officially announced earlier this month.

As you probably already know, there is a war going on featuring Blu-ray and HD DVD formats, the first being backed especially by Sony, and the other by Toshiba. Consequently, it was only normal for Sony to augment its Blu-ray market leadership after it has already released a Blu-ray enabled notebook and has also a future to come player and the most expected Sony product - the PlayStation 3.

"The titles launching today are: 50 First Dates, The Fifth Element, Hitch, House of Flying Daggers, The Terminator, Underworld Evolution, and XXX. Next week, Ultraviolet will be the studio's first Blu-ray title released at the same time as the DVD-only version. SPHE plans to release four catalog titles each month (by the fourth quarter of 2006, the company expects to be releasing up to ten titles per month); in addition, it plans to release new titles simultaneously with their DVD counterparts", further writes Hardware News.

What seems not to be right is the fact that the movies are released before Samsung has shipped its BD-P1000 Blu-ray Disc player on the retail market due to happen on June 25. Sony's Blu-ray player, on the other hand, the BDP-S1, is due to come out in August.

"The lead-up to the Blu-ray launch presented some challenges, but nothing that was insurmountable, "stated Don Eklund, executive vice president of advanced technologies at SPHE. "Our studio has been mastering to high-definition for our feature films for over ten years. So we have a library of over 3000 movies that are already ready for high-definition."

SPHE official also said that the movies will be available in MPEG-2. "We started working with Sony Japan a couple of years ago developing an MPEG-2 encoder specifically for this format," Eklund added.

"What makes the films most difficult to encode, actually, is noise. And to make the best approximation of it, you need to use the highest available bit rate," Eklund says. "The bit rate we use for our typical releases is 18 mbps (megabits per second) average, with a 30-mbps maximum. And that is one of the key differences for HD DVD and Blu-ray: We have a higher bandwidth available for encoding than HD DVD has. It gives us a lot of flexibility even when we're working with the most difficult video masters."