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Author Topic: HD DVD or BLU RAY
Kevin Faulkner
Film God

Posts: 4071
From: Essex UK
Registered: Jun 2003

- posted June 04, 2006 05:34 PM      Profile for Kevin Faulkner         Edit/Delete Post 
"also im not very happy with the quailty of dvd recordings i've made,not much better than v.h.s"

Andy I have a Philips DVDR610 and I have to say that I cant tell the diff between the original and the DVD when recorded on the 2 or 2.5hr modes. Just a shame the machines reliability has been bad.

John, C-Mac well that took me back to the days of BSB and the squarial for Satalite. They were using a system called D2-Mac and again it gave superior results to what we are now getting from Sky. Funny how a lot of these systems were a head of their time and then got scrapped.
I was watching a prog on ITV2 tonight and I kept thinking how soft the image looked on Sky. I went into the other room and switched on the freeview digital box and the image was superb.
Hate to think what Sky Satalite will look like when they try to squeeze all the HD broadcasts in to the existing bandwidth.

Kev.

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GS1200 Xenon with Elmo 1.0...great combo along with a 16-CL Xenon for that super bright white light.

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John Clancy
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1954
From: Cornwall
Registered: Jun 2003

- posted June 05, 2006 02:52 AM      Profile for John Clancy   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
I wonder if the original BSB 6 channel satellite is still up there. If it is then presumably Sky could make use of it for the new (lesser) version of HD broadcasts. Perhaps then those with Sky would be able to receive the good quality broadcasts they should be getting.

Somewhere I still have the IBA television yearbook from 1964 where there is much talk about the new HDTV broadcasts. That was due to the change from the 325 line system to 625. Funny how these acronyms and terms just keep going round and round.

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Kevin Faulkner
Film God

Posts: 4071
From: Essex UK
Registered: Jun 2003

- posted June 05, 2006 05:02 AM      Profile for Kevin Faulkner         Edit/Delete Post 
Yes your right how these keep coming round. The BSB sats had their position moved and were sold to the Norwegians I think. As far as I know they are still up there and being used. The quality off the D2-MAC transmissions was really good. I kept with my box for as long as I could but it eventually had to be junked in favour of a Sky box [Frown]

Kev.

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GS1200 Xenon with Elmo 1.0...great combo along with a 16-CL Xenon for that super bright white light.

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Mike Peckham
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1461
From: West Sussex, UK.
Registered: Jun 2003

- posted June 05, 2006 10:19 AM      Profile for Mike Peckham     Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
John

Was it really only 325 lines before the move to 625? for some reason the figure 405 sticks in my mind. I can remember the big change over to 625, lines indicated by a UHF aerial on the roof, usually strapped to the side of the much larger VHF version, something of a status symbol at the time [Smile] .

Our first colour television when I was a child was a Philips 'Dual Standard' that had a big changeover switch to switch it between VHF and UHF. At the time I think it was only possible to get BBC2 on UHF.

I can also remember the anouncer saying "the following programme can be viewed in colour or black and white".

Funny to think how we've moved on...

Mike

ps. Adrian, sorry for taking this off topic. [Smile]

Mike [Cool]

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Kevin Faulkner
Film God

Posts: 4071
From: Essex UK
Registered: Jun 2003

- posted June 06, 2006 03:32 AM      Profile for Kevin Faulkner         Edit/Delete Post 
Yes that spot on Mike. We were 405 lines and yes I too remember the big clunky switch that changed over to UHF from VHF. Yes it was only BBC2 on UHF to satrt with but slowy they all went over to UHF and colour. My goodness they were the days. Incredible to think that we didnt get colour till the mid 60's but the US had colour right back in the 50's.
How technology has moved on since those days of TV with enough vlaves to warm a house. Even some of the first 8mm projectors had valves for the sound!

Kev.

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GS1200 Xenon with Elmo 1.0...great combo along with a 16-CL Xenon for that super bright white light.

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Barry Johnson
Master Film Handler

Posts: 358
From: United Kingdom
Registered: Jul 2003

- posted June 07, 2006 12:43 PM      Profile for Barry Johnson   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
Well I use a Goodmans DVD recorder and it records,clone like,anything you feed it with.I say clone like because it will replicate the old maxim of 'rubbish in,rubbish out'.If I copy vhs,it will 'copy vhs' exactly the same asa the original.If I feed it with a signal from my cable supplier I defy anyone,BluRay or Stingray to tell the difference!!
All the new ideas are generally improvements only electronic machinery can measure and are practically invisible to the naked eye.
No,its all to keep the market forces and juices flowing.TV will be no good until (HA!) an 1100plus (not line doubled) sustem is utilised.
Long time coming methinks.Enjoy DVD,it really is good you know.

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Standard8 rules!!

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Kevin Faulkner
Film God

Posts: 4071
From: Essex UK
Registered: Jun 2003

- posted June 07, 2006 06:05 PM      Profile for Kevin Faulkner         Edit/Delete Post 
Hi Barry,

You are spot on and that reminds me what did happen to the promised 1250 lines they kept on about here in the UK and Europe?

Kev.

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GS1200 Xenon with Elmo 1.0...great combo along with a 16-CL Xenon for that super bright white light.

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Barry Johnson
Master Film Handler

Posts: 358
From: United Kingdom
Registered: Jul 2003

- posted June 08, 2006 08:08 AM      Profile for Barry Johnson   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
Yes indeed Kevin,what a load of jhot air that turned out to be.But actually having witnessed this system of 1250 lines coming off broad band open reel videotape back in the eighties,the image quality was,well stunning,and that was before widescreen TV.
Mind you,the cost was off the planet!

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Standard8 rules!!

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Joerg Polzfusz
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 815
From: Berlin, Germany, Europe, Earth, Solar System
Registered: Apr 2006

- posted June 22, 2006 09:17 AM      Profile for Joerg Polzfusz   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
At least you can now throw away all your old HDTV-gadgets: HDMI 1.3 is coming soon [Wink]
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/74582

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Jan Bister
Darth 8mm

Posts: 2629
From: Ohio, USA
Registered: Jan 2005

- posted June 22, 2006 09:23 PM      Profile for Jan Bister     Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
Actually you can possibly forget HDMI, too - it looks like it's all going to be thrown out in favor of one single connectivity standard for digital A/V, called DisplayPort...

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Call me Phoenix. *dusts off the ashes*

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Paul Adsett
Film God

Posts: 5003
From: USA
Registered: Jun 2003

- posted June 25, 2006 12:03 PM      Profile for Paul Adsett     Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
Looks like initial testing of Blu Ray players and discs is extremely disappointing, to say the least:

http://www.projectorcentral.com/blu-ray_initialreport.htm

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Jan Bister
Darth 8mm

Posts: 2629
From: Ohio, USA
Registered: Jan 2005

- posted June 25, 2006 01:35 PM      Profile for Jan Bister     Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
Nobody but the most daring early adopters usually goes for a first-generation product. Poor Samsung, they're setting themselves up for failure by being the first. [Frown]
Was surprised to read that Blu-Ray uses the aging MPEG2 codec for video... I thought they went the same route as HD-DVD and went for an MPEG4-based codec. [Eek!]

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Call me Phoenix. *dusts off the ashes*

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Joerg Polzfusz
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 815
From: Berlin, Germany, Europe, Earth, Solar System
Registered: Apr 2006

- posted June 25, 2006 04:20 PM      Profile for Joerg Polzfusz   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
I don't care whether it's MPEG2 or MPEG4 - in fact I'm more disappointed that they're still using any form of lossy compression [Frown]

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John Cook
Expert Film Handler

Posts: 183
From: Papillion, NE
Registered: Apr 2004

- posted June 25, 2006 06:43 PM      Profile for John Cook   Author's Homepage   Email John Cook   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
Jan

MPEG2 encoding is the norm for hi-def material. If you've tuned in HDTV over the air with a set of rabbit ears you're watching a 19.2Mb/s MPEG2 data stream modulated via 8VSB, or QAM if using cable.

The newer MPEG4 codec is hit and miss. From my experience viewing MPEG4 encoded material on our 106" NEC XG1352LC MPEG4 comes across with much more macro-blocking when compared to a typical MPEG2 encoded stream (either DVD or MPEG4 content of HDTV comarible resolution/quality.) I've yet to have any direct experience with HD-DVD at local A/V dealers on anything other than large 60-80" LCD or Plamsa displays, hardly a large screen experience so I can't honestly say if HD-DVDs MPEG4 quality can compare to HDTV MPEG2 when viewed on a truly large display.

That being said my two experiences demoing Bluray left me concluding either the material isn't encoded correctly (poor master, rushed to release) poor disc player (Samsung) or a little bit of both. Whatever the cause for the initial Blu-Ray problems I can say without a doubt that HD-DVD MPEG4 encoded materials are clearer and sharper than the initial Bluray releases.

What I would like to see is material shot on HDCAM mastered for simultaneous release as MPEG2 and MPEG4 content on both HD-DVD and Bluray. Everything I've seen to date on either format is film source material. An HDCAM material comparison would provide an accurate accounting of what both formats and their respective hardware are capable of.

The best content I've seen to date has been on either DiscoveryHD, Vooms Equator channel (before the switch to Dish) or occasional sports content on OTA HDTV or ESPNHD. All of the aformentioned content is MPEG2 encoded and makes what I've seen on HD-DVD and Bluray to date look as muddy as the Mississippi!

Regards, John

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Come visit The Pit
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Jan Bister
Darth 8mm

Posts: 2629
From: Ohio, USA
Registered: Jan 2005

- posted June 25, 2006 10:15 PM      Profile for Jan Bister     Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
I wasn't trying to suggest that MPEG2 is a visually inferior codec vs. MPEG4 - obviously that matter is much more complex and it comes down to the quality of the source material as well as the encoding parameters (and algorithms) used for creating the compressed video stream. [Smile] However, I understand that in simplified terms, MPEG4 is able to achieve considerably higher compression while maintaining roughly the same video quality. This is evident in the fact that you can "rip" a DVD and transcode it to a DivX or XviD file that is no larger than about 700MB (with audio) and fits on a regular CD - all with minimal quality loss vs. the original DVD.

Joerg, from what I hear, lossless video codecs are in the works but need further development at this point... even lossless audio codecs can only crunch audio down to about half its size, and uncompressed video streams mean HUMONGOUS amounts of data.
Consider the following... a 720x480 image with 24-bit color depth consumes very nearly one megabyte of data. Storing 30 such images per second would bring you up to 30MB for one single second of DVD video, or 30GB (in the neighborhood of Blu-Ray capacity) for less than 20 minutes of video! [Eek!]

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Call me Phoenix. *dusts off the ashes*

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John Cook
Expert Film Handler

Posts: 183
From: Papillion, NE
Registered: Apr 2004

- posted June 26, 2006 05:40 PM      Profile for John Cook   Author's Homepage   Email John Cook   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
"while maintaining roughly the same video quality....- all with minimal quality loss vs. the original DVD."...this is where you and I disagree. I haven't seen any MPEG2 material reencoded to MPEG4 that looked good although the above may be partly true when viewed on a typical computer monitor but when blown up to 106" you'd quickly be reaching for the stop button and the source DVD, I jsit can't stand micro-blocking or what I like to call crawlies.

Prior to HD-DVD nothing on a consumer level had been released in the MPEG4 format authored directly from a high resolution Master (the only notable exceptions being a few half hearted attempts from microsoft such as Terminator2 in XVID-wmv.) So HD-DVD and MPEG4 are in a sense of the word just now cutting new ground.

I would love to spend a weekend with an HD-DVD player and a handful of discs. Considering Best Buys liberal return policy I could borrow one of their players for the weekend...did I just say that! [Roll Eyes]

An HD-DVD drive for use in a HTPC (home theater computer) would be the way to go.

Even though I am a fan of Sony video products and display devices Bluray had better start making a better showing of themselves or yes, I believe their horse will be stalled at the gate.

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Come visit The Pit
http://members.cox.net/home-theater

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John Cook
Expert Film Handler

Posts: 183
From: Papillion, NE
Registered: Apr 2004

- posted June 27, 2006 10:24 PM      Profile for John Cook   Author's Homepage   Email John Cook   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
Jan,

What no reply? I purposely disagreed with you just to see if you're as tenacious as my dog!
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My dog, Mrs Piggy, is the white bull terrier. General George Patton was right, these dogs are ferocious! [Roll Eyes]

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Come visit The Pit
http://members.cox.net/home-theater

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Jan Bister
Darth 8mm

Posts: 2629
From: Ohio, USA
Registered: Jan 2005

- posted June 28, 2006 09:22 PM      Profile for Jan Bister     Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
Ohh, impatient, are we [Big Grin]

Well, all I can say is that maybe (just maybe) you haven't seen a good MPEG4 - that is, DivX or XviD - movie file... perhaps you watched badly decoded video, for when it comes to MPEG4, a good decoder is almost as important as a good encoder. Deblocking algorithms are particularly effective in eliminating the macro blocking you mention. I've done a few of my own encodes from DVDs and they came out mighty good. Also... I dare say that my monitor, which was a $2,000 high-end display in its day (1996-1997) and currently runs 1280x1024 at an 85Hz refresh rate with 32-bit color depth, is a pretty decent tool for judging the quality of both MPEG2 (DVD) and MPEG4 (.avi file) video streams. Therefore I stand by what I've said. [Wink]

That wasn't too tenacious, was it? [Razz] [Wink]

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Call me Phoenix. *dusts off the ashes*

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John Cook
Expert Film Handler

Posts: 183
From: Papillion, NE
Registered: Apr 2004

- posted June 28, 2006 09:43 PM      Profile for John Cook   Author's Homepage   Email John Cook   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
Bill over at the digital bits had this to say about the new Blu-Ray hardware just hitting the market...

quote:
Those of you who are interested in how Blu-ray displays VC1 material will be pleased to know that it looks absolutely spectacular. Unfortunately, I can't talk about the specific clips we saw, but it wouldn't be fair to compare Blu-ray's VC1 quality to that of HD-DVD at this point anyway, especially not from a single short clip. I will tell you, however, that one specific piece of test footage we looked at (in MPEG-2) was hands-down the single most stunning high-def video I've ever seen. I've seen a lot of HD video in my day, but NOTHING this good in terms of detail, color, contrast and lack of compression artifacting. I have no doubt that both HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc are capable of delivering video quality of this level eventually, but I'm betting full-length movie discs this good won't start hitting store shelves until mid-to-late next year... when the authoring and compression folks have had enough time to really hone their wizardry with these formats.
There's plenty more of this article to read on his site thedigitalbits.com, after reading this latest update to his ongoing Blu-ray review my interest has been raised a notch. I'm hoping his PS3 review will have a similar outcome.

John

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Come visit The Pit
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Jan Bister
Darth 8mm

Posts: 2629
From: Ohio, USA
Registered: Jan 2005

- posted June 29, 2006 12:27 AM      Profile for Jan Bister     Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
Sounds very promising! For once, the two formats warring for consumer acceptance and eventual supremacy appear to be very close in terms of quality and features (potentially, at least). Not so much like VHS vs. Betamax, where Betamax should have been the clear winner. It seems that whether Blu-Ray wins or HD-DVD wins, we'll all be happy either way.

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Call me Phoenix. *dusts off the ashes*

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Kevin Faulkner
Film God

Posts: 4071
From: Essex UK
Registered: Jun 2003

- posted June 29, 2006 08:13 AM      Profile for Kevin Faulkner         Edit/Delete Post 
or to put it another way....its all down to who does the better marketing job. This was where Sony fell down with Betamax years ago. Al the rental outlets in the UK were renting out VHS machines and tapes which is why the consumer in the UK went VHS.

Try and find a Rental company in the UK which had a Betamax machine until Sanyo came out with their cheap machines and let them go into the Renatl market unfortunateky the damage was done by then and VHS ruled the roost. I dare say this was similar in most other countries.

As I said in an earlier post...the Sony Demo I have seen here in the UK was absolutely stunning and I too didnt see any artifacts which is so common with all forms of lossy compresion.
The Demo was using NTSC materail as they said it would be another year before we saw a PAL version! But where is it? Its now nearly 18 months since seeing that Demo.

People I work with are all talking about HD-DVD never a mention of Blu Ray [Frown] Have the other camp perhaps got it right from the start by calling it HD DVD.

Kev.

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GS1200 Xenon with Elmo 1.0...great combo along with a 16-CL Xenon for that super bright white light.

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Joerg Polzfusz
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 815
From: Berlin, Germany, Europe, Earth, Solar System
Registered: Apr 2006

- posted June 29, 2006 09:53 AM      Profile for Joerg Polzfusz   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
VHS also won over Video2000 simply because Video2000 didn't allow pornos to be produced/released in this format [Wink]

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Jan Bister
Darth 8mm

Posts: 2629
From: Ohio, USA
Registered: Jan 2005

- posted June 29, 2006 09:51 PM      Profile for Jan Bister     Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
Eh...?

Um, nevermind that. Anyway, I was going to say it's not surprising people talk about HD-DVD... everybody knows DVDs and knows right from the start that "HD-DVD" is the logical next step... the average consumer hears that term and thinks "Ah, the new high-definition format. Cool" whereas he/she might hear about Blu-Ray and wonder what the heck that is - or who thought it would be cool to spell "blue" without an "e." [Roll Eyes]

On another note, I don't understand why the distinction between PAL and NTSC is still being made with these hi-def formats? One would think it was time to start fresh with one worldwide set of standard resolutions and refresh rates, but apparently not. (Sigh) Not to mention the actual definitions of the terms PAL and NTSC really have little to do with the video format, but rather with the way its signals are encoded (particularly the color information) so they can be transferred through a single composite video cable. (For example, there is PAL60 which uses PAL color encoding but displays the same resolution and frame rate as NTSC...525 lines at 60 fields per second.)

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Call me Phoenix. *dusts off the ashes*

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John Cook
Expert Film Handler

Posts: 183
From: Papillion, NE
Registered: Apr 2004

- posted June 30, 2006 12:34 AM      Profile for John Cook   Author's Homepage   Email John Cook   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
Kevin

I agree with your comment about name recognition of "DVD" in HD-DVD is a trump card in Toshiba's hand.

Jan,

You're right, HD-DVD and Bluray are not NTSC. They are in fact a subrate of a totally new format called ATSC. NTSC was a 525 line field (480 line field viewable,) interlaced at a vertical refresh rate of 60fields or 30frames/second. The ATSC standard is much more than that, 24/30/60f/s as well as 480i/480p/720p/1080i/1080p and not to mention all the combinations of each of the previous with either a 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratio. NTSC was a single format standard, ATSC which includes HDTV is comprised of 18 different video frame rate standards. Only the 720P, 1080i and 1080P (1080P is becoming more prevalent here in the US) qualify as HDTV formats (exceeds of 1 Megapixel.) You can't compare old apples to fresh oranges. ATSC is primarily an MPEG2 format, the newer MPEG4 codecs used in HD-DVD and Bluray are not ATSC specific but the new disc formats do conform to the ATSC refresh rates, display aspect ratios and pixel counts. New encoding scheme, same underlying ATSC frame format. HDTV capable, 1080p capable, oh hell yes. No other consumer format on the planet (including PAL) comes close!

With regards to VHS vs Beta wars the prominent deciding factor in the US was the long play speed (4 hour) introduced by JVC and the eventual straw that broke the camels back extended long play (6 hour recoding time) introduced by Matsushita (Panasonic.)

The 2/4/6 hour VHS recording times vs the 1.5/3/4.5 Beta recording time per tape, at a time when video tape was quite expensive, was the deciding factor here in the US.

This time around, all other criteria being reasonably equal between the two formats, it appears that Sony has the longer recording time albeit at a higher cost.

Current score looks to be a tie! Could the Sony Play Station 3 w/integrated Bluray be the tie breaker? I'm anxiously waiting Bill Hunts review over on the bits.

John

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Jan Bister
Darth 8mm

Posts: 2629
From: Ohio, USA
Registered: Jan 2005

- posted June 30, 2006 07:20 PM      Profile for Jan Bister     Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
I forgot there was a name to the whole setup: ATSC. Thanks for reminding me. [Smile] Now my question is, is ATSC going to be adopted globally or have people in PAL-land already come up with their own HDTV set of standards? I hope not, because I still think having PAL and NTSC (or their HDTV counterparts) is just plain silly when other things like cassettes and CDs (and of course film) work anywhere in the world.

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