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:Physical media? (Score:4, Interesting)
Not to say there aren't HD rips out there, but most are usually at lower res than the original BR/HDDVD and if not are redicuosly huge and you still need a way to get it to your TV (yes, I know you can hook your PC to a TV but that just seems like way too much effort and im damn lazy.)
HD-DVD no DTS? (Score:3, Interesting)
And I was surprised to see that HD-DVD does not list DTS audio, but something else.
Someone may want to enlighten me on this.
I watch everything on DTS and I am satisfied with the sound on DVD, whenevere it is something else I am unhappy by default.
Can it be the cause of the difference ?
Re:Academic discussion to me (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally, I am holding off buying a HD-DVD player until christmas because I believe they will be far more reliable and much cheaper. I do not worry about supporting the wrong format because I suspect that in 2009 most HD players will support both formats.
Re:Academic discussion to me (Score:2, Interesting)
The PS3 is totally immaterial to this "war" not just for the reasons above, but that anyone who IS interested in buying a blu-ray player isn't going to consider a game console - a toy - for the job.
Finally, with multi-format players this close to being a commercial reality, I predict this whole HD video thing will go the way of the burnable DVD - two identical standards that are incompatible, and continue to cause confusion in consumers. Someone should have played the role of diplomat and just gotten this thing over with rather than making us, the consumers,choose fo
Re:Academic discussion to me (Score:3, Interesting)
August 8, 2005
link [arstechnica.com]
Aug 31, 2005
link [pspworld.com]
The fact is that gamers bought a handful of UMD movies after they bought their PSP because of the novelty
Personally, I don't expect either format to die but (at this point in time) I think it is premature to say that the PS3 will lead to the success of the Blu-Ray format.
Re:Blue ray is gonna win (Score:5, Interesting)
Ummm... I diagree. Those early adopters of HDTVs often bought them without tuners, and without HD support from the cable company.
Always bet on stupid. Even the clerks are stupid, you say an HD DVD player, odds are you'll get HD-DVD.
A codec is a codec is a codec (Score:5, Interesting)
Any differences that actually do exist are more likely attributable to the player or the mastering software than the disc it came from.
Anything with DRM will lose (Score:2, Interesting)
Also, having just been through the deep-dive purchasing decision process for a new plasma TV, it was interesting to see that at a normal viewing distance, on a 50" display, HD or good progressive scan DVD produced a similar picture quality to my eyes (HD picture was subjectively about 5% better... this is comapred to 576p upscaled by the TV to 768 lines).
http://www.engadgethd.com/2006/12/09/1080p-charte
Summary- at more than 10 foot viewing distance with a 50" plasma screen there is no benefit to more than 576 lines (us PAL types are in luck here). About 13 foot for NTSC 480P. So for 42" HD is probably a waste of time everywhere. For 50" it is more useful in NTSC territory as long as you sit fairly close up, and marginal for PAL territory.
Also, I saw one HD feed split into similar sets from the same manufacturer, one set was 1080 line the other 768 line. At normal viewing distances no noticable difference.
Re:Physical media? (Score:5, Interesting)
Hell, I've seen some 2 CD sized x264 rips from 1080p sources that blow DVD out of the water. Forget about the MPEG-4 ASP codecs like Xvid and Divx. Now that we have H.264/AVC, we can achieve excellent results at 720p and 1080p down to DVD5/9 sizes.