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."
What about the players? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Physical media? (Score:3, Insightful)
Academic discussion to me (Score:5, Insightful)
Betamax was superior to VHS...and the MacOS was superior to Windows (at least for some time...let's avoid the flame war on the current state of affairs). They were both beaten by superior positioning of technically inferior competitors...and the PS3 has been a huge success for Sony in one regard - it got a lot of BluRay players in the hands of consumers...and the sales of BluRay titles are dwarfing those of HD DVD correspondingly.
Will the trend continue? Who knows, but I'd rather have momentum than not have it...so I'm not betting against Sony yet. The posted article may be interesting for some, but I am disinterested in any discussion of quality or features until the market settles. I do not have the discretionary income to buy an expensive player that will be obsolete before it is useful...regardless of any perceived quality difference. Early adopters may disagree, but Joe Sixpack and I are sticking with our standard DVD players and HD over cable/satellite until we see who wins this war.
Your mileage may vary.
Audio is better? (Score:3, Insightful)
Or is there something else?
Re:Blue ray is gonna win (Score:5, Insightful)
What's sad is the parent is rather insightful. Not so much that HD-DVD is easier to spell than Blu-Ray but looking on the package it's painfully clear to your average joe with a HDTV set that the HD-DVD is for HD-TVs. The Blu-Ray disc doesn't in it self say "i'm for your HDTV".
Re:Academic discussion to me (Score:2, Insightful)
No it wasn't. The tapes weren't as long. When VHS was released, Btamax could only handle 60 minute tapes.
and the PS3 has been a huge success for Sony in one regard - it got a lot of BluRay players in the hands of consumers
True. And this is probably why Sony were son insitent on the Blu-Ray drive. But it's too soon to call. The PS3 may not be successful enough, and the recent sales my just be a blip. Once the players go down to below the cost of a PS3, we may see another reversal if consumers prefer HD-DVD for whatever reason.
Re:Blue ray is gonna win (Score:5, Insightful)
bort.
Re:Academic discussion to me (Score:2, Insightful)
Most consumers had no idea what a PSP even was...let alone know much about its video playback features...or being able to relate those capabilities to their expensive investment in their home theater. In contrast, most consumers are painfully aware of the PS3, BluRay, and HDTV.
Sales of HDTV-capable are rising exponentially, yet most owners still do not have an HDTV feed. "Of the world's 48.2 million HD households, only 16.4 million have sets with an integrated HD tuner or a HD set top box." (http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/9498/1085/
Many, like myself, view an HD-capable disk player as a very attractive first step to be able to view HDTV content at home. While I do not disagree that many will hold off until less expensive players are available, many others have been waiting (literally) for years for an HDTV feed for their existing television...and they may bite early. In fact, everyone who bought a PS3 already has. Sure, those numbers are small, but they allow Sony to show 3:1 sales ratios of BluRay disks vs. HD DVD disks and declare victory. Such incremental marketing measures create a general consumer perception...and perception is reality to many. Perception also often ends up fostering an environment in which that general perception actually becomes reality.
Inexpensive players require economies of scale...OR vendors willing to take a loss, which is what Sony did. I just don't see that happening on the HD DVD side...and I am not sure that we will.
Of course, whoever gets an exclusive deal with Vivid Entertainment will probably win the war.
just wait until ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Academic discussion to me (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't hide it
After having my Sony Wega TV, Sony DVD player, Sony Reciever and 3 PS2 systems die in a given year I really started to dislike them
When I had to fix my sister's computer (the only person I know who buys music) after Sony installed a rootkit on her system I started to hate them
Then I watched them release exploding batteries, sell an overpriced gaming system and use questionable legal tactics to run a legal company out of buisness (lik-sang)
Re:As I get older (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of the reason DVD caught on quickly was that it offered a bazillion advantages over VHS. All that the HD formats really have to offer is that a small percentage of the consumers can view movies at a higher resolution than they could with DVD. The rest have to buy a new TV or computer for there to be any advantage, which is going to retard the adoption of both formats.
Re:What about the players? (Score:4, Insightful)
The only way you could have a non-biased study of this sort is if you selected random candidates, had them watch a movie on your hi-def setup without telling them what format it was (or even know yourself), and then ask them to rate the A/V quality (a crude double-blind study). If you're thinking about investing in one of these formats over the other, take this "study" with a very large grain of salt, especially when the differences are so small. The only thing I'm believing is that HD-DVD *probably* has a bit better extras, not that I care one whit for these junk formats.
Re:Physical media? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Pixel Reviews ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Audiophile: Somebody who listens to the equipment rather than the music.
Looks like this one is rapidly being translated into the video domain.
Re:Academic discussion to me (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple's been attributed with kick-starting modern television advertising with its 1984 ad. The technologies you mention may have been very good products with a smaller advertising budget than their competitors, but none of these are clearly superior products with "modest" marketing.
And let's not forget that marketing is more than just promotion. I was going to rattle off ways in which Compuserve wasn't so great, but a quick look at Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] reminded me of the most serious flaw in Compuserve's marketing: "it was sidelined by the rise of information services, such as AOL, who adopted pricing models based on monthly subscriptions rather than CompuServe's hourly rate approach."
Oh, and since I mentioned a Superbowl ad, whatever happened to all those dot-bombs that spent big money on advertising? A larger advertising budget helps, but does not guarantee, success; a smaller one, conversely, does not guarantee failure.
Re:Blue ray is gonna win (Score:2, Insightful)
Oddly, I noticed distinct bias from the manager, who, when I asked again where the HD DVD players were, pointed to the Blu Ray (take THAT, Parent!!). When I insisted that I was looking for an HD DVD player, he eventually told me that the HD DVD player they had was not on display near the HDTV's in the store, like its Blu Ray cousin, but actually on a completely different floor.
Because of that bias (as well as my own bias in favour of HD DVD -- not a fanboy, just don't like the idea of closed formats dominating markets), I don't go to that store any longer.
Re:As I get older (Score:3, Insightful)
But perhaps not so much as you might think. Fourth Quarter 2006 HDTV Sales Doubled Previous Year's Total [tekrati.com]
All that the HD formats really have to offer is that a small percentage of the consumers can view movies at a higher resolution than they could with DVD
50 GB disks now, 100-200 GB disks down the road.
9 hours of MPEG-4 HD video, 23 hours of MPEG-4 standard video. Blu-Ray Disc [wikipedia.org] The boxed set shrinks to a single disk.
The Geek may fret. But features like "mandatory managed copy" will be marketable.
Re:Blue ray is gonna win (Score:2, Insightful)
When I worked at Philips, we had such a friendly relationship with a couple of stores that they let our marketing guys design their AV dept layouts.
Three more Blu-Ray players sold and that manager was probably gonna get a free weekend in a beach house or some shit.
Re:A codec is a codec is a codec (Score:3, Insightful)
In reality, there are quite a few differences, and good reasons.
1.) Blu-ray often has an uncompressed PCM track for audio. Whether you can actually hear it or not, there's at least the psychological thing saying that uncompressed is going to sound better than compressed. HD DVD can also do uncompressed PCM, but they choose not to; Dolby TrueHD is lossless (similar to FLAC), but takes less space on disc than uncompressed PCM. Even then, only a fraction of HD DVD's have lossless audio. Most HD DVD's use 1.5 Mb/s Dolby Digital, which is a number of times greater than the bitrate in movie theatres.
The sound argument is dubious in my head; just like there are people who still assert that vinyl records sound better than digital, there are people who claim that they can tell the difference between lossless and lossy audio. It's not a knock against Blu-ray; they have the room for uncompressed audio, so why not. I just don't buy into the arguments about compressed audio being undeniably worse; espescially at the bitrates that BD and HD DVD use for lossy audio.
2.) Early BD releases only had MPEG-2 compression available. It wasn't a hardware problem, but a problem with disc authoring software; you just couldn't make a BD disc that used VC-1 or MPEG-4, because the tools to make them didn't exist. The video took a lot more space on disc, due to the efficiencies of MPEG-2 vs VC-1 or MPEG-4, which coupled with uncompressed PCM audio and only having one layer to work with, the bitrate for the video had to go down for the whole thing to fit. And it showed.
3.) Now that they can produce dual-layer BD discs, and the authoring tools allow for VC-1 and MPEG-4, new BD releases have the video quality that HD DVD always had (HD DVD started out, and is still almost exclusively VC-1, although there are a few MPEG-4 releases). But that doesn't change the 'early' BD releases that relied on MPEG-2, single-layer discs, where quality suffered, and brought the average down.
There are subtle differences, but for the most part, there's hardly any functional difference. Hidefdigest (the source of TFA) had an article where Microsoft mentioned that they wrote a tool for Warner Brothers that would convert a VC-1 HD DVD to a BD release. This means that Warner makes the HD DVD version, then runs Microsoft's script to convert it to BD. This in turn means that when all is said and done, both formats have the exact same data on the discs, with the only difference being the menu system. So in the end, BD has more space, and costs more to produce. The thing is, few movies would require a full BD, so the advantage of the extra size is questionable.
And I'm left deciding which I dislike more: Sony or Microsoft. Tough call.
Re:Academic discussion to me (Score:3, Insightful)
The PS3 is merely a short time phenomenon. The only reason it is showing a blip on the BD radar is because it is cheaper than any other Blue-Ray player (not very hard to do) and doubles as a game system. This allows them to tap into two markets: the videophile and the games enthusiast and hope that there is a lot of "Cross Mojination" going on.
But come on guys. Just because geeks are buying it does not mean that it will win the war. The truth is that Joe Beer Pack looks at a PS3 and still sees $600 for a movie player or video game machine or whatever.
The PS3 Blu-Ray phenomenon is absolutely short lived and driven by movie enthusiasts who want Blu-Ray movies but doesn't want to pay the $1k tag that the other players demand.
The real winner will be the one who hits the $200 mark and not with some add-on either (sorry MS you don't get off easy either). It has to be easily understood and replace the current dvd player profile which I think that HD-DVD has the best chance of doing.
Then Joe Beer Pack will be like hmm I got this big tv for the Super Bowl. Maybe I can use it to play this nifty High Def DVD thing what is it called again oh yeah HD-DVD and impress the ladies with my tech savvy. He is not going to say well I want high-def movies let me buy a PS3 or Xbox 360 + HD-DVD addon and be viewed as a video-game playing geek.
Disclaimer: I own the X360, I am a video-game playing geek and received the HD-DVD as a gift. I would not have purchased it by myself but I must say I enjoy the HD-DVD experience so far.
Re:A codec is a codec is a codec (Score:3, Insightful)
Also its how you use the codec; you can both use VC-1 but if I have 50GiB and you only have 35GiB to store the data on, I might encode with a higher bitrate and therefore it would look better.
This isn't rocket science.