Warner Bros. Offers $4.95 Blu-ray Upgrades from HD-DVD

Still saddled with high-def movies on HD-DVD? Warner Bros. will upgrade your titles to Blu-ray for $4.95 each.

It’s been over a year since Warner Bros. effectively rammed a stake through the heart of Toshiba’s HD-DVD format by switching to the Blu-ray camp…but that doesn’t mean that the HD-DVD discs Warner Bros. produced suddenly went away. As home theater fans who embraced HD-DVD face the prospect of retiring their HD-DVD hardware, they also must consider whether to re-purchase their HD-DVD titles on Blu-ray media. To ease the transition, Warner Bros. has announced a new Red2Blu upgrade program, whereby owners of Warner Bros. HD-DVD discs can get Blu-ray versions of their titles for just $4.95 (plus a whopping $6.95 in shipping and handling in the continental United States). All it takes is sending in the original cover art from the HD-DVD title, then waiting four to five weeks for the Blu-ray editions to arrive.

There are some restrictions on the Red2Blu service: obviously, Warner Bros. is only honoring Warner Bros. titles, so users won’t be able to get Blu-ray versions of titles from Paramount or Universal using the program. A given movie title can only be upgraded once per household (so you can’t upgrade all four HD-DVD copies of Blood Diamond you bought on close-out), and there’s a hard limit of 25 Blu-ray upgrades per household. There are also a few cases where Warner released a movie on HD-DVD but it isn’t yet available on Blu-ray; in that case, no upgrade is available.