BluRay Vs HDDVD

[da.bell]

i have had friends that have bluray and they complain about the loading time every time I talk to them about HD. I would hope that Sony would take notice of the delays and decrease the amount of time it takes to load a movie. Possibly v2 of bluray might do that.

Over all, I wasn't very happy with HD disc players in general about 5 months ago. But I am with you Rag, I wish HDDVD would be the primary HD player but again, you also hear about Microsoft and terrible load times with their Windows OS. Well, apparently I am sure they had some say with Toshiba about this load time issue. Ya think????

[dogbert]

Good stuff, thanks for sharing

[ragboy]

My Lowdown

OK, so before I give my "lowdown", I thought I would preface by saying that I am not a completely uncontrollable tech purchaser or whatever. I have to master a couple of HDDVD projects this year, and I was planning on doing it with HDDVD, but now I think I have to switch to bluray. So I went to best buy and circuit city this weekend, and I noticed bluray players were all sold out, just one left at circuit city and they had quite a few hddvd players stacked off to the side. It was def NOT like this a week or 2 before. I think the word is def hitting the streets. Anyway I got the Samsung BD-P1400 for $399. For those of you looking for a deal, you can refurbished bluray for like $230.

http://www.refurbdepot.com/productde...roduct_ID=5795

Thats a steal. Now there were 2 main reasons that I thought, even though the huge juggernaut bluray was pressing hard, hddvd would win the battle. First, was dual format HDDVDs. I have several HDDVDs that are HDDVD on one side, and regular DVD on the other. This is not possible on bluray. This may be insignificant, but how many people have multiple dvd players. One in the car, in the RV, other rooms. And they will probably only have one HDDVD player in the house. With a dual format disc, you buy one disc, and can play it anywhere. Very cool. The other reason I thought HDDVD would win, is the fact that the HDDVD spec was complete. I have seen this first hand now that I have a bluray player. The bluray spec that is considered 1.0, is really like a beta. And now it is 1.1, and many players cannot play 1.1 features, and they CANNOT be upgraded to 1.1 via firmware, because its a dual tuner picture in picture issue. Then, later this year, is supposed to be the full bluray spec, 2.0. So if you buy a bluray player now, you will probably have to buy a new one later.

So I get my bluray, and I am excited cuz I get to get a couple of my favorite movies not on HDDVD. My all time favorite, The Fifth Element, and then a 4 movie set of all the Die Hards. Comparing the 2, the picture is basically as good on both, and its fantastic, I love HD content. The one thing I noticed more on bluray, is almost all the discs I saw had uncompressed PCM 5.1 sound at 24bit/96khz which my receiver can handle. Wow, that was cool. Remember that part on Die Hard where McClain uses C4 down the elevator blows a whole floor? Al says, "The building is going to need a sh*tload of screen doors". I love that part, and my 700 watt amp and big subs just blew me and my son off the chair. It was awesome.

Thats the good part, the bad part is the menus and stuff. On the bluray player, you have load times, and sometimes a long time. Ratatouille took like 2 minutes to load the menus and certain features, it was a pain.

I have had my Toshiba HDDVD player for some time, I have never noticed any wait. And my Toshiba has the picture and picture features for extra that the bluray spec 1.1 is just bringing out. This may sound like no big deal, but it is pretty cool. I watched "The Kingdom" the other day and it had this feature, where you could watch certain scenes with overlays of how they filmed at the same time, picture in picture type commentary. It was very cool.

Here is another interesting link.

Anyway, I just thought I would share that, since I get to write this stuff off for R&D, plus I love it too.

One last note, don't think that because you have HD from your Cable or Dish, you don't need or want HDDVD or Bluray. Those on demand movies and stuff are encoded horribly. The network stuff is good, but the movies are aweful. They look great on scenes with little movement, and very clear, but then some action, and you get all kinds of compression artifacts (jaggies). I was watching shoot em up on HD on demand from comcast, and turned it off. I had version that I ripped from reg dvd and put on my apple TV and it was much better. Maybe not as clear in the slow parts, but the action was crystal clear, where HD on demand was blurry and blocky from compression artifacts. This happens for one of 2 reasons, they either encode in real time, or use a low bit rate to get more data and channels down. I think it is a combination, but I would guess its more of the real time issue. The only way to encode data into digital format, is to use multipass encoding. What this does, is the content is first read in all the way through, and a log is created about the content. When is the big action, and when does it slow down, and such like that. Then on the second pass, or third pass, it encodes and makes decisions based on the log. Any device has a threshold of how much bitrate it can handle, and you set a bitrate when you encode. Encoders use variable bit encoding and need more bits when encoding action, and less when encoding slow scenes. When encoding, its ok to burst above the target bit rate, but not for too long, or it will skip on playback. In real time encoding, during an action scene, the encoder doesn't know how long this action scene is going to last, and so it must be careful bursting. What if this action scene goes forever? Or what if another on its heels? Multipass encoding use the log to know exactly how to optimize encoding to get it as perfect as possible for the target bitrate.

Anyway, those HD movies, most of them anyway, on cable or dish, aren't even as good looking as a good dvd. Bluray and HDDVD discs on the other hand, every one I have seen, are pristinely encoded. Absolutely beautiful. Plus the dolby true HD, or dts HD, or uncompressed 5.1 PCM is amazing.

Hope that is helpful, I am sitting here finishing a oracle to mysql db migration, just monitoring, had some time to kill!

[Domsz06]

Well, yes I would agree now... The was the same when this specific industry went with VHS vice Beta from what I understand.

for sure the nail in the coffin

[da.bell]

ok, now this has GOT to be the nail in the coffin.

http://www.i4u.com/article14003.html

Well, yes I would agree now... The was the same when this specific industry went with VHS vice Beta from what I understand.

[dogbert]

It had nothing to do with the playstation, that would be very naive to think so.

It's scary when Sony can strong-arm its way like that. I'm still ticked off about their little stunt with their CDs.

[ragboy]

It had nothing to do with the playstation, that would be very naive to think so.

[zad0030]

I personally would buy bluray due to the fact that I own a Playstation 3 and it plays bluray disks as an added bonus for a lot less then the conventional player.

I said it first folks..

I think Sony thought the PS3 was going to be thing that won it for them, now that it isn't, they have to come up with another game plan.

ok, now this has GOT to be the nail in the coffin.

That article-

Joone sees the reason for the Blu-ray success in the Sony PS3 adoption.

Where is the foot im mouth smiley???

The lowering of the PS3 will surely give the blueray people more lift and probably start selling the product a little more. However, I find it odd that over the Black Friday weekend, I think I saw an article that said that BlueRay sold 1000:1 over HD DVD... I have to go find the article and post into here. But again, I think it was a survey taken at the Best Buy stores....

Me thinks you were right.

Crap, I have a Toshiba HD-DVD player. Well hopefully this doesn't hurt Toshiba too bad, I'd hate to lose my job

Its ok, half my entertainment center is toshiba and actually most of our TVs.

[ragboy]

ok, now this has GOT to be the nail in the coffin.

http://www.i4u.com/article14003.html

[ragboy]

Y, but if there is no choice, they will buy bluray.

[dogbert]

Bluray has a ton of money behind it. They are the gorilla.

But survey after survey says customers want something else or don't care.

[Domsz06]

Bluray has a ton of money behind it. They are the gorilla.

you could say that bluray is the bully at lunch taking all the little kids money right

[ragboy]

Bluray has a ton of money behind it. They are the gorilla.

[dogbert]

The sad thing is that our local Blockbuster store did this same survey. Virtually no one had Blue Ray and lots of people had HD DVD. Now Blockbuster no longer carries HD DVD.

What's up with that?

[Domsz06]

i'm with spharis, still waiting!!