End of the Blu-Ray / HD-DVD Format War? 266
Next week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas should shake up the format war. The NYTimes reports that Warner Brothers will announce the Total HD disc that can store both Blu-ray and HD-DVD content. The article also mentions that LG (along with "possibly other gadget makers") is expected to announce a player that can play both formats. According to Yahoo, LG has not announced pricing, but the Times notes that such dual-format devices are bound to cost more than existing players. And the Times outlines the many considerations that would come into play before studios decide to release their content in both formats on a single disc.
Re:Total HD Player (Score:4, Informative)
No, its the other way round. They are claiming that these Total-HD disks will play in both HD-DVD and Blu-ray players flawlessly. If the manufacturing costs of these disks is comparable to HD-DVD/Blu-ray disks, it might just click.
Mods do not RTFS (Score:5, Informative)
The ability to make a player that plays both formats has been around for a while now (nearly as long as the formats infact), however Sony (and the rest that hold the patents on Blu-Ray) were refusing to sell a license for any device that would play both formats. Now LG is announcing that they will be sellign one.
so either they are ignoring the Patents (and will get sued horribly for it) or have gotten a License (or found a work around).
Re:As much as I hate Sony... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Death To Discs (Score:3, Informative)
Yea, because all those people that don't have access to broadband are not worth selling to. All those people who are too poor to pay for internet connection consistently every single month (or Cable TV with digital and pay-per-view fees, or plain old standard telephone line even) , but who could afford a DVD or two now and then are also not worth selling to. You'd be suprised how many people that don't have any phone, TV cable, and other basic services have quite nice stereos, TVs, game consoles, DVD players, etc. They just choose what to save up for and what to not keep paying for again and again and again. Do neither of those two groups of people deserve to watch movies?
Sorry, but we're not quite to a point where your everything from the internet and nowhere else market works.
Re:Total HD Player (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I know we all hate Sony but... (Score:3, Informative)
Comparisons at this time are mostly inconclusive as well.
Re:Total HD Player (Score:5, Informative)
Standard Television signal is approximately 480 lines of resolution, meaning there are 480 different pixels in every vertical line on the television, and the signal is interlaced, meaning that the TV displays 1/2 of the lines in the first scan (1st, 3rd, 5th, so on) and then the second half of the lines in the second scan (2nd, 4th, 6th, so on). This means that at any given time, only 240 of the lines of video on your TV are being updated, meaning that you're not getting all 480 lines of solid resolution. They are _there_ but they are not being displayed at the exact same time.
HD Television is either 720 lines of resolution in non-interlaced format or 1080 lines of resolution in interlaced or non-interlaced format. Even with 1080i, you're still getting 540 lines of resolution per scan -- more than double that of standard television. The actual resolution is almost 3 times as high as standard definition television. With 720p, you're getting more than 3 times the detail per frame than on 480i! You'll note if you research that there is a strong following of videophiles who claim that 720p is actually a more detailed picture than 1080i/p, but personally, I like my 1080i just fine.
The moral of the story is that if your brother can't tell the difference between an HD source and a 480i source, he needs a new set of eyeballs or to clean the 3 feet of dust off the television.
I have a Hitachi 51s715 51" HDTV and the difference between standard definition content and HD content is more than apparent, it is _obvious_. Anyone that isn't truly blind can see the amazing difference in clarity, color depth, black reproduction, etc.
I'm not sure if you're making your story up, your brother is a blind moron, or his TV sucks wastewater, but one of the three is true -- an HD signal cannot be mistaken for an SD signal by anyone with eyesight!
Lastly, regarding programming, Comcast offers free HD with any PVR system, DirecTV has a solid lineup of HD channels, Charter offers a good selection for no additional cost (you just have to call for the receiver), Dish Network has a poor selection but also has HD... Anyone saying it's hard or difficult to get HD service in their area must not be in an area serviced by any of those four major providers.
(ps, I'm not a video scholar, and my description of TV resolution is probably far from 100% accurate, but does cover the basics. Correct me on it if you want to, but I'm not claiming to have pioneered the NTSC standard or anything.)
Re:Total HD Player (Score:4, Informative)
Many cable guys don't set the box up properly when they come to your house.
Re:Total HD Player (Score:4, Informative)
1: sdtv is 480 lines. But those lines are measured as fine vertical lines. Or dots per horizontal scan line.
But, the fact that ntsc is also interlaced is also in this context, irrevelant. That only becomes revelant when talking about how many scan lines there are horizontally. Thats in the next kettle of fish.
2: There are 525 of those scan lines in ntsc, but only the odd lines are refreshed, then the even ones, in any two vertical scans. In ntsc we lose about 22 lines for vertical synch and hidden data, like closed captioning yadda yadda.
3: By the time the video is filtered well enough to keep it in its assigned ntsc channel, we have only about 330 dots per scan line left, nothing higher gets through else the Friendly Candy Company comes calling with a citation in hand for adjacent channel interference. Done well, this is still subjectively sharper than your old vhs vcr could ever do, which was in the 240 line range.
4: So sdtv winds up being about 480x400, interlaced. This ain't hdtv by any means, but because theres no analog noise, and no analog ringing artifacts or color 'dot crawl' it does look better to the unwashed. ntsc, the best we can put on your scren, is about 330 vertical lines by about 500 horizontal scan lines, which, with the 3 line comb filters we use to enhance the sharpness of horizontal lines in the image, loks subjectively sharper but is in fact the equ of about 200 real horizontal lines. Those filters are why you occasionally see some very slight slanted line in the pix literally snap from one line to the next on your screen. This of course requires matching filters in the viewers set, which only the top of the line stuffs have.
5: 1080i, which I've seen quite a bit of, is much sharper. But I can recall, long before we had an ATSC stds body to codify this stuff, seeing a Zenith demo at the N.A.B. show, a demo tape playing from a specially modified type C 1" machine with the tape moveing at about 30 ips and the drum whining similar to the old 2" quadruplex machines, of about 10 minutes of Stars on Ice, with Red Buttons, all that 1 hour tape could hold.
The stars all had their names embroidered on their tee shirts, and with the camera at max wide angle to show the whole floor, Red stopped and took a bow from center ice. You could read his t-shirt when he straightened back up. On a projection screen 4 foot high and 8 feet wide he was maybe 6" tall in that image. That was a 2x1 aspect ratio pix and I'd estimate the real, working resolution of that setup was at least 10,000x5000.
The image compression wasn't quite as good as mpeg2 (it was still under development itself) then and was done in hardware both ways. The data rate from that modified type C was in the 500 megbytes/second area. In other words, that single picture would have occupied more than all the bandwidth available in a 120 channel cable system. Not terribly practical in the real world.
As an exersize in what could be done, I've seen it, so even 1080i today is just a wannabe to me. OTOH, it (1080i) is far far better than anything I've seen in my 40+ years as a broadcast engineer watching our own on the air ntsc signals through a $5,600 fcc standard receiver. We haven't nick-named it Never Twice Same Color without reason.
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Cheers, Gene
There were technical reasons for the suckage (Score:5, Informative)
Film content/transfers, which has more information than the HD video (which is why you could release the film, transfer to VHS, transfer to DVD, transfer to HD for D-VHS and broastcast (in both 1080i and 720p), and transfer again for the HD formats with a 1080p version), and all look good. However, film is shot in 24 frames/second. To make DVD players cheaper, the content is converted to 480i/60 (one film frame for 2 DVD frames, one film frame for 3 DVD frames). Then, we started to get HD Ready sets that supported either 720p or 1080i, and if you are analog (and therefore 1080i), you can also do 540p, so once you support that, might as well support a 480p signal, analog is cool that way, just update the electronics and show a different image, digital sets like Plasma/LCD/DLP need to scale to their digital output), so we got progressive scan DVD players. Reading notes on the DVD (normally, or comparing and guessing), we convert those 2:3 frames with a reverse pull down, to get back to 24 frames that we show progressively... this matters because if you just show the lines you get:
Frame 1: film frame 1
Frame 2: film frame 1
Frame 3: film frame 2, but half the lines are still from film frame 1
Frame 4: film frame 2
Frame 5: film frame 2
Frame 6: film frame 3, but half the lines are still from frame 2
So you can't just add in half the lines and show it progressively, you have to figure out when the frame changes.
So, for film, IDEALLY you want to sent 24 frames/second, and let the set adapt accordingly (whether showing one frame twice, and the next three times, or even better, be able to process the image at 24 frames/second and show them each once for longer).
However, given the allocation of bandwidth for HDTV, and the realities of MPEG-2 encoding, we essentially got 4 "useful' formats, and a bunch of stupid ones, 480i/60 4:3 (for simply digitizing existing legacy content is useful), 480p/60 (kind of useful for game systems) in both 4:3 and 16x9, this was pointless, a 480p 16x9 format was sufficient to handle digitally sending DVD quality images, and 720p/60 and 1080i/60. 720p/60 is the most resolution you could get in the stream at 60 frames per second, progressively, and 1080i/60 was the most resolution you could get at 60 frames/second interlaced.
Now, should we have both progressive and interlaces, I would say maybe...
If you are shooting something fast moving like sports, you want the 60 frames/second, so 720p/60 was the ideal format for broadcasting sports events. If you are shooting something slow moving, like a nature show (which was a lot of early HD programming, and it looks great, but not sure the purpose), you don't care about as many frames, and interlaced vs. progressive matters less, but getting 1080 lines was useful, making 1080i/60 a useful format for these. However, for film transfers, which will be a large portion of HD footage for a while, 1080p/24 made a lot of sense, you are only sending 24 frames/second, so why not get the extra resolution.
Remember, the TV stations had a dream, promise HDTV, and deliver it maybe to the cable/satellite operators over a line, but not OTA. Only 10% of people got their programming OTA, so TV stations largely existed because of government decisions to keep them (as opposed to the network simply selling content to cable/satellite directly), so their idea: either broadcast 6 480i signals, requiring no new equipment other than digitizing, and all of a sudden, you have 6 channels to sell ads on. A local market with 7 stations would conceivably have 42 channels available without paying a monthly fee, that's kinda cool, and all the networks have a bunch of digital stations that the created fo