Yesterday I went through about 50 Blu-ray discs at the local store. It was a "test" to see what additional language tracks they carry. To my pleasant surprise I saw 6-7 titles with both Castillian and Latin American Spanish, Parisian French and the dreaded Quebecois, German, Italian, and Japanese. I saw several movies with Thai language tracks. I even saw a movie with a Czech and Polish audio track. Subtitles galore, including Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean etc. DRM still sucks but I am mollified about this new format. A "cheap" region A player can be bought for about $200.
The majority of the releases however continue with the old format of adding only the French and Spanish audio tracks or nothing at all except a few subtitles. A few releases in addition to the ubiquitous French and Spanish audio tracks contained Portuguese and a few also had Thai and Japanese tracks (Region A markets). One had only 2 Thai audio tracks.
One problem - Amazon and other online retailers don't correctly list all the available audio tracks.
The new Blu-ray region codes are
A: North America, South America, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia.
B: Europe, French territories, Middle East, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, and all of Oceania.
C: India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Mainland China, Pakistan, Russia, Central, and South Asia.
About one third of region A releases are region-coded. Most region B and region C releases are region free.
More about region coding with a list of movies that are region-free can be found here
5 comments:
What's the most number of audio tracks on a disc?
Seven or eight foreign ones plus two English ones.
hello there! thanks for your comments!
one thing that has annoyed me about DVDs in america - specifically, the movie amelie. there are no french subtitles. sometimes i want to watch a french movie in french with french subtitles.
and baguettes! how i miss them. they're on my "to learn how to bake" list.
good luck with your language learning!
Hello
Good point, I have seen Russian DVDs with Russian subtitles - very useful. I don't remember ever seeing a French movie with a French subtitle but I never really looked very hard. I quickly checked a couple of Bluray movies. Good news, subtitles in French, Spanish Italian etc. Now, I am referring to American movies with foreign language tracks. Original movies might still come without subtitles.
It is not all that common to put subtitles in the original language on a DVD. It happens, presumably out of consideration for hearing-impaired (formerly known as deaf people), but rather spottily, and this seems to be true not just for the US.
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