blu ray wins over hd-dvd

[gamedudex2]

http://ps3.ign.com/articles/611/611379p1.html

[Nick]

*pretends to be surprised*

Sorry wily, I had to do it.

[gamedudex2]

lol ta true, but this is good news, atleast no dual format war crap, and also the better tech finally wins.

now i wonder what nintendo is goign to use its been rumored they would go hd-dvd, i wonder if they still use that format just for games and play normal dvd movies. or they use the new standard

[popley]

i dont know, hd will be a lot cheaper then blue-ray. Whats the major diff.?

[MKE]

lol ta true, but this is good news, atleast no dual format war crap, and also the better tech finally wins.

now i wonder what nintendo is goign to use its been rumored they would go hd-dvd, i wonder if they still use that format just for games and play normal dvd movies. or they use the new standard

im not so sure this is a good thing though, hd-dvd would have been cheaper to manufacture, and also this means if you get 1 smudge or anything on the disc you need to try to clean it..scratches would probably ruin the disc completely....

oh well, it's gonna be a long time before i get an hdtv to take advantage of it so i really dont care right now...

[gamedudex2]

blue ray can go past 200gigs, hd dvd will max out at 2 layers atlike 28 or 32 gigs i forgot,

price really isnt so much of a big deal, its only more expenive to an extent, because new eqipment will be needed to produce media

hd -dvd was basically dvd at higher capacity

blue ray also offers a higher transfer speed

i'm not getting an hd tv til like 2007 anyways, i want prices to come down because i want a big screen 1080p 60fps tv lcd or plasma

[DCFan2004]

blue ray can go past 200gigs, hd dvd will max out at 2 layers atlike 28 or 32 gigs i forgot

Even if thats the case, games are average around 2-4 gigs, and i've seen em as high as around 6-7, so is there really a need for 200 at this point? If I misunderstood what you said I'm sorry, but I'm assuming you're talking about disk storage capacity.

[gamedudex2]

yes well a few years ago did we really need 5-8 gigs?

did we really need more than 8 megs, did we really need the cd rom?

when the cd rom games started comign out they didnt truly use that stroage for a while. most gmaes that did was fmv games.

but eventually some games will need it. think of all the voice work that could be used also higher res textures and all.

only 20 + years ago we was seeing games at a few k and was like WOW.

if someone truly wanted to go out and show off they would use the holo disc and holo hdd

the transfer rate is 1 GB per sec and it can hold from 200 GB to over 1 TB. but beyond storage it really has little backing at this time.

[skar]

it's good they decided for movies since a format war would really have sucked big time. don't care considering games since that's console specific, nintendo using hd-dvd while noone else does might actually turn out to be a good copy protection...

[BlackAura]

I never understood why they wanted a new disc format for HD video anyway. Broadcast HDTV (PAL/DVB-T @ 1080i) is transmitted at around 12Mbit/s. At that kind of bitrate, you could almost (but not quite) fit a movie on a DVD-9. And that's with MPEG-2.

If you dumped MPEG-2 / AC3 and used more efficient codecs (MPEG-4 AVC and AAC are both vastly superior), you could probably reduce that down to the same bitrate as a standard DVD, while maintaining the higher resolution, and even being able to increase the audio quality.

Blu-ray is supposed to use MPEG-2 (at around 30Mbit/s, or two hours per layer), or MPEG-4 AVC (at around 15Mbit/s, or four hours per layer), or VC1 (WMV9, at 15MBit/s).

In my opinion, that's overkill. Even using MPEG-2, 12MBit/s is enough for HD at 1080i. If you wanted to do 1080p you might have a bit of trouble, but it might just about be possible.

My point is this - a new disc format is not required for recording high-def movies. A DVD would be sufficient if decent compression were used. You'll only get (noticeably) higher quality from a new disc format if you were using 1080p, and that's still very rare.

That said, it'd be very useful for data storage.

A few other neat things (from the Blu-ray Wikipedia article). It has TDK's scratch-resistant coating (which is vastly better than current CDs and especially better than DVDs), it's possible to create a DVD/Blu-ray hybrid disc that plays as a DVD on DVD drives, and as a Blu-ray disc on capable drives (so you can have an SD DVD + HD BD on one disc), and the data transfer rate isn't bad at all (almost 50Mbit/s).

[Zealous zerotype]

Exactly BA. I have a copy of Attack of the clones at HDTV res 1920x1080i. I recorded it in xvid with a special q-matrix designed for higher bitrates(beucase normaly when you go too hih with normal q-matrix you will get pixel blending) Anywyas if I rmeebr correctly I used ac3 audio (it was at highest bitrate) and the video was some where with a bitrate over 6000. I fitted it onto 1dvd. It was kinda hard to predict file size. Since I am usualy off by just a little bit when doing 1cd encodes (by like a few mb) and I simply increase the audio bitrate to get it to that 699-700 marker, but since I could make the audio go any higher(even if I could I would not since it would just be wasitng space) so I figured being off by ~200mb on a dvd was pretty good. Now if I had a dual layer burner I could really produce some nice looking stuff. I mean this was indisguingshbal from the orgnail. Going 2-passes with the specialq-matrix with a bitrate of +6000 was guarnteed good results. So a few format is NOT really needed.

[ETR]

And with that Sony finally avenge the death of Betamax

*budumpchink*

I always wanted a beta.

[Ex-Cyber]

games are average around 2-4 gigs, and i've seen em as high as around 6-7, so is there really a need for 200 at this point?

Not really, but that doesn't mean there's no benefit. It will probably be used by higher-budget projects for things like widescreen/HD FMV and bigger surround sound soundtracks. Also, they could possibly reduce load times and drive wear and increase reliability by storing multiple copies of the game (TG16/PCE Super CD-ROM2 games did this for example - one copy of the data track at the beginning of the disc and one at the end).

[MKE]

well, toshiba has denied that story, and also:

http://www.videobusiness.com/article.as ... tType=NEWS

[Lartrak]

yes well a few years ago did we really need 5-8 gigs?

I think a lot of the games that are that size have something wrong with them. I haven't seen any good reason to justify those sizes - it certainly doesn't reflect in the quality of graphics, nor does it reflect the amount of video on those discs.. I've seen RPGs with like 1 hour, TOPS, of pre-rendered video take up more than one DVD - WTF is up with that?

[mankrip]

My point is this - a new disc format is not required for recording high-def movies. A DVD would be sufficient if decent compression were used. You'll only get (noticeably) higher quality from a new disc format if you were using 1080p, and that's still very rare.

How about having something like the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy, or the 6 Star Wars movies, or whole seasons of Simpsons on a single disc, plus all the extras?

[Pyrosurfer]

The new disc format is expandable for future use. Why make new players that use DVD when it will be acceptable for a smaller amount of time than a new format?

MPEG4 throws out a bit more details than MPEG2, it may not be noticable on average. If you look at an MPEG4 encode and a MPEG2 encode scutintly enough, I'm sure you could notice in certain spots that MPEG2 beats it out. That's why the industry uses MPEG2.

[Zealous zerotype]

The new disc format is expandable for future use. Why make new players that use DVD when it will be acceptable for a smaller amount of time than a new format?

MPEG4 throws out a bit more details than MPEG2, it may not be noticable on average. If you look at an MPEG4 encode and a MPEG2 encode scutintly enough, I'm sure you could notice in certain spots that MPEG2 beats it out. That's why the industry uses MPEG2.

Use Mpeg4(xvid sugested) at 2000 and then Mpeg2 at 2000. Then do test decreasing by the 200 mark. You will notice that Mpeg4 rocks mpeg2's socks off. Mpeg4 is not only better at lower bitrates, but better all around.

[Pyrosurfer]

Use Mpeg4 at 6000, use Mpeg2 at 6000.
Now which one looks better?

With xvid at 640x480 any bitrate over 1000kb/s gives little to no gain.

MPEG2 is much closer to lossless than MPEG4

[BlackAura]

How about having something like the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy, or the 6 Star Wars movies, or whole seasons of Simpsons on a single disc, plus all the extras?

They will never produce such a thing.

The new disc format is expandable for future use. Why make new players that use DVD when it will be acceptable for a smaller amount of time than a new format?

In what way would it be "acceptable for a smaller ammount of time"?

Encoded appropriately, a 9GB DVD should be able to hold the same ammount of high-def content encoded in MPEG-4 AVC as it can standard-def content encoded in MPEG-2. Assuming a reasonable quality, that's anywhere between two and four hours.

On that disc, you could fit two complete movies (or one if it's a long one), or six episodes of an hour-long TV show, or 12 episodes of a half-hour TV show, and still have room for a load of extras. That's considerably more than any DVD releases I've seen, because DVD producers just don't want to put any more content on there. They aren't interested in providing DVDs that have that much stuff on them, because they can make more money by selling things separately.

What do either Blu-ray or HD-DVD provide beyond that? Aside from some features that are purely software (and thus could be done on any disc format), they have larger data capacity. However, if you look at the specifications, they don't seem to make good use of that capacity. They can still only hold four hours of video. And that's still more than will ever be used.

There are two possible advantages, but they're not very convincing.

First, you could use MPEG-2 compression. Fine. There's not really a reason to do so, but you could use it if you wanted to.

Second, you have enough space to do 1080p. 1080p at 60FPS isn't actually used anywhere, but it would require twice the bitrate of 1080i. Of course, 1080p at 30FPS would likely work just as well, and that would be able to fit quite nicely on a DVD.

Both DVD Audio and SACD are DVD discs, but have different data stored on them. I don't hear anyone complaining about those.

My point is not that it's a bad idea to use a new disc format. It's just not necessary. A DVD is sufficient.

MPEG4 throws out a bit more details than MPEG2, it may not be noticable on average. If you look at an MPEG4 encode and a MPEG2 encode scutintly enough, I'm sure you could notice in certain spots that MPEG2 beats it out. That's why the industry uses MPEG2.

With a resolution of 1920x1080 (high-def standard resolution), I really do not think you're going to notice any difference at all. MPEG-4 does a lot better (compared to MPEG-2) at high-def than it does at standard-def. MPEG-4 AVC does even better. Either way, it's still far better quality than SD.

The industry doesn't use MPEG-2 because of quality issues. It uses MPEG-2 because MPEG-4 was far too resource intensive, and MPEG-2 is good enough (better than MPEG-1 anyway).

Digital TV in Europe (DVB) was standardised in the early 1990s, using MPEG-2. I think ATSC was developed a couple of years later. DVDs were standardised in the mid-to-late 1990s, using MPEG-2. MPEG-4 just wan't practical at the time.

The latest DVB specs actually allow MPEG-4 AVC as a video codec, and MPEG-4 AAC as an audio codec. That's because they are practical now, but weren't then. They aren't really needed for standard definition material, but for HD they allow massive bandwidth savings (hence, more HD channels available) without a noticable loss in quality. Both HD-DVD and Blu-ray allow MPEG-4 AVC as a video codec. That's because MPEG-4 AVC is now a practical codec, especially for HD content.

I think the only reason MPEG-2 was included in the HD-DVD and Blu-ray specs is that MPEG-2 has quite a lot of momentum behind it, having been used in DVDs, and in broadcast video for a decade. There are lots of tools that work well with it, lots of well-tuned encoders, hardware encoders, decoders, and it's generally well understood. I really do not think it got included on technical grounds.