With today’s release of the blockbuster movie “300” on HD-DVD comes a first important step by Warner Home Video and Toshiba in introducing popular trends from today’s internet culture to the home video market. For the first time you can now use your TV remote to completely re-edit a movie and offer your own version through a file-sharing server being run by Warner Bros. By submitting your own edit of the movie online, others who also own a copy can download, view, and even rate your personal “cut”. The disc includes the additional ability to connect online so you can have a 300-themed wallpaper or ringtone delivered wirelessly to your cellphone. While both features are fairly primitive, the experience of editing the movie is certainly powerful and interesting enough to prove that Toshiba is on to something important here, and that these first baby steps will lead to big changes in the way we watch movies at home.

While “300” tells the story of the Battle of Thermopylae, the addition of new interactive features in its release is the next stage of the current on-going war between HD-DVD and Blu-ray, between creators Toshiba and Sony. While both companies have launched fairly similar disc technologies and have experienced very similar sales success in the past year (together they both make up less that 2% of the market and have a long way to go to replace DVDs), they have each taken a very different strategy in terms of finding leverage. Sony has focused their efforts on influencing retail partners such as Blockbuster and Target to devote more shelf space and exclusive services to their products over their rival, while Toshiba has chosen instead to concentrate on more technical advances, creating enhanced disc features that allow fans to manipulate their movies (for example, changing the colours of the cars in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift) or connect online (Blood Diamond comes with online polls). These innovations allow Toshiba to get studios like Warner Bros to offer more exclusive features for the HD-DVD versions of their movies over the Blu-ray versions for their rivals.

In both cases, the advantages will disappear in time, Sony’s retail exclusives are expected to be in place just for this coming 2007 holiday season and Toshiba’s interactive innovations will eventually be duplicated with similar features by Sony down the line. Only time will tell if one format will win over the other, for now they remain in a stalemate that makes it impossible for any consumer to confidently invest in either.

To test out the edit feature, officially called “Pick Your Favorite Scenes” on the disc, I decided to use Microsoft’s Xbox 360 HD-DVD player, correctly guessing that it would offer the most technical quirks. After downloading an update patch for the player over Xbox Live, I was harassed with a series of on-screen alerts asking me, in typical Microsoft style, to either “accept” or “decline” a cookie from Warner Bros. I’m not entirely sure if the Xbox 360 HD-DVD Player is capable of saving or using web browser cookies, which may have been the problem as no matter how many times I accepted or declined them, the alerts kept popping back up again and again, regardless of what I was doing, that they almost felt as if they were part of the movie. It got to the point where I half expected a message along the lines of “King Xerxes requests Earth and Water, Deny or Allow?” Eventually I went into the player’s settings and changed it to accept all cookies and the alerts finally stopped.

To create your own edit of 300 you have to first register an account with the new HD-DVD community that Warner Bros has created. This involves typing in an e-mail address with your remote control and then running over to a computer to open a confirmation e-mail and then follow a link to a registration website. Once completed, you can return back to your television and use the movie’s menu interface to “sign in”. This allows your player to access and load the Warner Bros community page onto your television where you can use your remote to manage a buddy list and explore the movie montages and accounts of others in the community.

The process of creating your own edit is fairly simple. You watch the movie until you find a moment you like and then press the “C” button on your remote, once to mark the beginning of the cut, and again to mark the end. You can repeat this again and again, as often as you’d like for as many different moments in the movie, from the opening corporate logos to the last line in the credits. Once picked out, each scene is listed on a separate menu where you can shuffle them around and then view them as a completed film. As an editing system it’s fairly easy to use and powerful to control. Once you learn to compensate for the lag between the split second it takes for the signal to leave your remote and register with the player, you can time it so that you can grab mere seconds of footage or over an hour. You’re fairly free to be creative.

It's best not to use clips that are just a few seconds long, however, as the player doesn’t actually make a copy of the video, but instead merely registers a bookmark of where and when you want each scene to start and stop in the sequence. When you play you’re finished montage back, the player merely sends the laser to skip across the disc’s surface, playing the chosen tracks out of sequence according to your instructions. Because of this, the results are not completely smooth and there is a bit of a pause as the laser heads move to switch tracks. If you use too many small cuts, the number of pauses between scenes can be jarring.

Similarly, the Warner Bros montage-sharing server doesn’t actually upload or download video files to your player, but instead transfers a copy of your bookmarks as a single file that you can assign a title to and that are listed under your account. Others are free to download the file to their player which will use the bookmarks to recreate your edited version and from there they are asked to submit a rating out of five stars. The most popular cuts appear on a ranking board.

In many ways 300 is both the ideal and the wrong movie to launch this feature with. On the one hand, video-sharing communities like YouTube already have large collections of re-edited versions of the 300 trailer along with mash-ups and full-on parodies. For the community that loves to manipulate video clips, 300, with it’s powerful visuals, it’s multitude of popular quotes and lines, and it’s intense collection of hyper-action sequences with wild special effects offer up a buffet of ingredients from which to re-invent and get creative.

But 300 is also a movie driven by narration as most of the film features a voice-over by actor David Wenham who’s character is the storyteller behind the movie. It’s a bit difficult to create your own narrative by taking scenes from the movie out of context to juxtapose them against each other for new effect when the majority of the signature scenes are already labeled by their own piece of narration.

What’s missing is an option to mute or tone down either the narrative track or the soundtrack itself (which also can make connecting different scenes together more difficult). This is the first disc to offer an edit feature and to be sure Warner Bros will be paying close attention to how its received and to the kind of features people will demand. I predict that one of those demands by fans will be an option to cut your own music video using a song from your own music collection. It would be great to load into your DVD player, either from a CD or from a choice of Warner Music tracks supplied, a song that you could use to set your personal edit to.

Already the Warner Bros montage-sharing server is full of edited copies of 300, with users submitting their visions with titles like “CoolClips”, “Killem”, and “Speak”. Some choose to take out just the actions scene while others rearrange the dialogue to get characters who never meet in the official movie to carry on discussions with each other.

There’s a section on the disc entitled “Web-Enabled Features” which according to Toshiba and Warner Bros is one that can grow over time with downloaded software updates. For now it contains a feature where you can download a view a selection of wallpapers and ringtones. These range from stills from the movie and the Frank Miller graphic novel and choice quotes from both Leonidas and Xerxes. In either case, you can place an order by using your remote to type in your phone number and choosing the “buy” option. From there the Warner Bros network will send a text message to your phone with instructions as to how to add the content to your handset. That’s the idea, I’ve tried this a few times with no results and suspect that it may only work in the US.

Although it does not use the internet, there is one more feature that is an exclusive to the HD-DVD version of 300. “Vengeance and Valor” is a video included on the disc, one that uses a three-dimensional map of the Hot Gates to play out a strategy game using your remote control. You get to manage the Spartan army as it meets the Persians in and around the Hot Gates. There’s three different paths and you’re given three different amounts of units to send down either of them. The idea is that you select how many soldiers and what kind of arms to give them (spears, swords, bows, etc.) and try to predict where Xerxes will send his troops to stave them off. Part of the strategy involves using your troops to guide the Persians into the centre so you can surround them (even though you are massively out-numbered). The game uses scenes from the movie as cut-scenes from the game, to demonstrate your success and failure. It’s not a terribly exciting game to play and certainly not something for those who own the DVD or Blu-ray versions to be jealous of.

They should be jealous of the edit feature. My own copy of the movie (titled “Symbols”, and unfortunately once you set a title you can’t change it) has been downloaded and viewed by others on the Warner Bros. Community and has actually gotten a five star rating. I don’t expect it will be used by everyone who buys the movie, but the same could certainly be said of director’s commentaries and picture-in-picture, behind-the-scenes tracks as well. By allowing their movies to become part of today’s connected culture, Warner Bros has created a forum for their most hard core fans to reach the rest of their audience, to create and express new content based on their movies and should they and Toshiba learn to develop more of these features and make them more sophisticated, it will add a new level of addiction for movie buffs.