A Statistical Comparison of HD DVD & Blu-Ray Reviews 179
An anonymous reader writes "Gizmodo today posted a statistical comparison of over 300 HD DVD and Blu-ray reviews published at High-Def Digest since the start of the high-def format wars last Spring. Their findings? Overall video quality between the two formats is nearly identical, however Blu-ray titles were slightly, but definitely superior in audio playback, while HD DVD titles had far superior standard def features and moderately superior high-def features."
Re:HD-DVD no DTS? (Score:5, Informative)
The reason why Blu-ray is credited with 'sounding better' is because many Blu-ray discs use raw PCM encoding for audio, rather than any sort of compression (lossless or not). Some purists believe they can hear the difference between compressed, lossless and lossy compression.
While many HD DVD titles use lossless compression, not all of them do.
When an HD DVD title does have lossless compression, its audio is ranked as good as Blu-ray's (and it had better, given that the decoder should be seeing an identical bitstream).
To be honest, I'm a believer in lossy compression; at the bitrates used in HD DVD, I seriously doubt anybody could tell the difference between lossless and lossy in a double-blind test on identical equipment; the bitrate is well above the level of transparency.
Re:HD-DVD no DTS? (Score:5, Informative)
On DVD, your 5.1 audio codecs are DTS or Dolby Digital up to 448 Kbps. HD DVD supports Dolby Digital Plus up to 1.5 Mbps. Even professional film mixers tell me they feel that DD+ north of 1.2 Mbps is pretty much transparent to them.
Note that Blu-ray doesn't make DD+ mandatory, nor does it require players to have built-in compression for TOSLink output, which is why the Sony discs use AC-3 @ 640 Kbps (the BD max) AND PCM 5.1 48 KHz 16-bit simultaneously. So it takes more than 5 Mbps to provide the audio experience that HD DVD does in 1.5 Mbps.
Re:Academic discussion to me (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed, it has been pointed out that the sales for Blu-Ray versus HD-DVD is roughly proportional to the number of new titles that came out for the two formats, which suggests that PS3 is having very little halo effect on Blu-Ray disc sales at all.
Re:HD-DVD no DTS? (Score:3, Informative)
I was looking at players and titles, then I decided to postpone untill I can decide where to upgrade my projector (plasma, lcd, dlp projection).
Did not really take the time to search for it, it just looked that HD-DVD did not list DTS at all (4-5 random disks I picked up at bestbuy.
Compression: I think compression really depends on the application. I do not want to listen to classical music in MP3, and I hear the difference. With rock/electronic music, it is OK on an ipod, but then again on my home gear i prefer CD.
With movie audio, DVD DTS is fine with me, it is just the pic res that bugs the hell outta me:).
BTW anyone knows what audio comes with XBOX live marketplace downloads when you buy/rent "HD" movies ?
Re:Audio is better? (Score:5, Informative)
I've noticed that the propaganda machine is in full force right now for Blu Ray. Sony declares the "war over". Web sites galore are touting that Blu Ray is now dominating sales, when in reality they're basically equal. And here they take a miniscule difference and blow it up and make it seem important.
disclaimer: no dog in this hunt. Don't own either format, or even a high def tv.
Statistical comparison??? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Article Summary (Score:5, Informative)
Blu-ray doesn't have better support for advanced codecs. In terms of 'optinal' formats, it's a wash; both support the same list. In terms of mandatory codecs, HD DVD gets the win. HD DVD requires many codecs that are merely optional for BD. The (lossless) Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD codecs are optional, not mandatory, on Blu-ray. TrueHD decoding is mandatory on HD DVD.
That being said, I can see how an audiophile would say that Blu-ray has better sound. Since TrueHD isn't mandatory, most BD discs target compatibility by using raw uncompressed PCM. (BD also uses Dolby Digital & optionally DTS, as does HD DVD). So the 'better' sound comes down to the old argument between uncompressed/lossless vs high-bitrate lossy sound. (HD DVD titles with TrueHD soundtracks rank on the same level as BD's raw PCM).
The bitrate of the lossy Dolby codecs on HD DVD is 1.5 Mb/s. This is well above the transparency level of 1.2 Mb/s for the codec. I wonder if it's a case of subconsciously thinking "this one is lossy, so it can't sound as good," and that a double-blind test would have different results.
BD-J is also an optional extention to Blu-ray; it's not a mandatory part of the spec. While BD-J has the possibility of giving excellent interactivity, the end result may be far below the potential. The reason: HDi is not much more complex than editing HTML, whereas BD-J requires Java skills. Ease of development counts, and BD-J doesn't appear to have it.
Extras are for filling the disc (Score:3, Informative)
More like extras are for filling up the DVD ... or, these days, to give them an excuse to add a second DVD to the package and jack up the price. Seriously, how many times can you watch a 10-minute documentary on how they used a computer to create a certain effect? Or interviews at press junkets where the actors explain how great it was to work with the director? The so-called extras they cram onto most discs are obvious filler. Even the deleted scenes are usually just slapped on there, not even formatted anamorphic, sometimes with time codes still onscreen.
There are very few DVDs in my collection that have made an effort to provide good extras. The Lord of the Rings movies are one example -- in fact, their extras include more information than I'd ever want about any movie. "Taxi Driver" is another -- it has a button that you can press at any point in the film that takes you to the corresponding page of the script. But otherwise I'm usually ecstatic to see DVDs packed full of extras...because I know the main feature will look that much better once I run it through DVDShrink.
Obligatory (Score:3, Informative)
RTFA (Score:3, Informative)
The summary is quoting the article, but not the explanation.
The audio advantage seen in the blu-ray is about more audio tracks with better formats (or even uncompressed audio), not any encoding/decoding difference.
BD is using its additional space to offer more audio tracks.
On the other hand, the interactivity feature is mandatory on HDDVD and still developing on BD, so the HDDVD gets the edge there. So, those are not so much qualitative judgements as more of a snapshot of the current state of affair. BD leads with better storage (expected) and lags with their BD-java that is not quite understood by the studios yet. As time go, BD should retain the audio advantage while negating any interactivity advantage of HDDVD (provided that both tech should be about equal).
Nothing really surprising here so far. The bigger sale number of BD *is* surprising though, as the player that sold the most *IS* the PS3. Those numbers are showing that people use it as a video player, as Sony had planned.
Only the futur will tell us if this will give them the dominance in video players at the cost of video games and especially if that sacrifice was indeed a paying strategy.
Re:just wait until ... (Score:3, Informative)
2.) Consumers are pretty indoctrinated into believing that more is better. We've got multi-disc boxed sets for DVD already -- quite often, it's not because there's a need the room on the second disc. Consumers just feel they get more for their money when they get 'extra' discs.
Bottom line: The single-disc version is a pipe dream that doesn't face the hard facts. The complete LOTR trilogy is on 12 dual-layer DVD's, or ~96 GB of data. And that's in standard definition, and much lower audio bitrates. And, even if they could fit it onto one disc, they wouldn't, because consumers are already conditioned to believe multiple discs are better than one.
Re:Physical media? (Score:1, Informative)