This one is from a site called CampaignHD, and is obviously a very pro-HD-DVD site working to encourage publishers to support the standard. Just want to be very upfront about that as this article is definitely down on Blu-Ray and quite positive on HD-DVD.

I'd normally not share because of that, but I did find the sheer number of documented links in the Blu-Ray issues section to be interesting. Worth taking a read if you're following this struggle - but make up your own mind on the merits of the supporting links.

Some interesting news on the net this weekend about Walmart apparently placing a two million unit order for HD-DVD players (worth USD$100 million). Assuming those numbers are correct, Walmart's cost per player is about $50 each. According to the articles, a possible retail price for this holiday is $299, but there's a lot of speculation that it could be as low as $199.

Assuming all the above is true, the news is a pretty significant blow for Blu-Ray. When you look at stand-alone player sales (excluding PS3), Blu-Ray and HD-DVD unit sales are roughly equivalent. Sony likes to tout every additional PS3 as being yet another Blu-Ray player on the market - while there's some truth to that, it's also extremely unclear whether or not those PS3s are being used primarily for movie playback, or for games. Even if you posit every PS3 in consumers' hands is being used as an HD movie playback device, the price point is still incredibly limiting. And with stand-alone Blu-ray players still costing around $800 today, it's hard to imagine the price dropping to below $400 by holiday. A $299-$199 stand-alone HD-DVD player could well be what tips the masses to one format over another. (The availability of pornography may well be another.)

I've said before that I believe HD-DVD will end up "winning" this particular format war (pyrrhic victory it well might be). When we look back at the end of the year I suspect this will be one of the major inflection points.

[Edit - looks like there may be translation confusion - so we need to wait for clarification. From Engadget:

Pull back the reigns [sic] HD DVD fanboys, Akihabara now says that they've made a "huge mistake" with their translation: the original source called it "藍光 HD DVD and 藍光 means Blu-RAY." In other words, Blu-ray HD DVD. Huh? Word to the wise: since both formats use blue lasers, it's best to wait for an English press release before either camp celebrates.

Thanks to "ericdrum" for the catch!]

Possibly, according to this article (and reported all over the web). However, it's early yet, and unclear just how real this might be... we'll need to wait and see.

For those of you who don't know, AACS is the copy-protection scheme used by both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs. (It's worth noting Blu-Ray has an additional protection layer on top of AACS that hasn't been broken yet.) Just as CCS was cracked for DVDs, it appears we may be on path to where it will be possible to rip high-definition video content to PCs. Obviously, that opens up a variety of scenarios, from what I personally consider cool (storage on home media servers) to uncool and illegal (piracy).

I won't quote the whole article, but this aspect of the crack is worth discussing:

The approach of AACS provisions each individual player with a unique set of decryption keys which are used in a broadcast encryption scheme. This approach allows licensors to "revoke" individual players, or more specifically, the decryption keys associated with the player. Thus, if a given player's keys are compromised by an attacker, the AACS licensing authority can simply revoke those keys in future content, making the keys/player useless for decrypting new titles.

In short, there's a faint chance that AACS licensing authority may choose to invalidate existing HD-DVD players, meaning they would be unable to play future HD-DVD releases. However, what's unclear to me is whether the ability to deactivate these players can be done surgically (ie, only deactivate individual players known to be cracked), and how these players would be identified. Even if a "bad" player (and presumably, the operator of that player) could be identified, the hole already exists for all of the currently available content.

For what it's worth, I doubt there will be HD-DVD player deactivations coming down the pipe. Even assuming this route was chosen, I have absolutely no idea how they'd identify individual players and users. That leaves the nuclear option of deactivating all existing HD-DVD players such that they couldn't play future releases - and that would never happen. I have no secret insight into this, but I can't see the association wanting to take the PR hit on this right now.

Where it gets interesting is when you think about the ramifications on this crack for the HD-DVD / Blu-Ray "war". You can spin this two ways. One is that this is a net benefit for Blu-Ray as studios may see it as a more secure format and choose to release more content for it. Another is that the (still hypothetical) ability to rip HD-DVDs and use them on home media servers (and unfortunately, enable piracy) may make the format significantly more popular with users. No one likes DRM, after all.

For the sake of the argument, let's posit two stakes: 1) this crack is real, and will lead to HD-DVD ripping utilities, and 2) the AACS authority will not deactivate HD-DVD players in any significant number. Assuming these prove true, I think what we may see here is a tipping point in the battle in HD-DVD's favor. My suspicion is that we'll begin to see HD-DVD sales take off as consumers vote for DRM-"free" content with their wallets. This could prove wrong if every studio suddenly tips to Blu-Ray, but I just don't see that happening - it's still too unclear which format has an edge right now for them to want to take that chance.

Saw a post from Shaheen Ghandhi (of the Xbox Platform Team) describing the work that went into enabling Xbox 360's HD-DVD player. Here's a quick quote:

The Xbox 360 HD DVD Player, for the most part, is an entirely software based implementation.  Other players on the market have specialized chips (called DSPs) that decode things like H.264, MPEG, VC1, DTS, Dolby Digital, and other codecs.  Much like how backwards compatibility for Xbox 1 works on Xbox 360, the heavy parts of HD DVD are all done on Xbox 360's triple-core CPU.

If DVD is an audio/video pipeline with some navigation data (go to the menu, start playing, etc.), HD DVD can be considered a runtime environment where audio/video playback is just one major feature.  So let's break down that 4.7 million lines of code.  I don't have the numbers for each component, but each of these is a very significant chunk:

• Video Codecs: H.264, MPEG-2, VC1
• Audio Codecs: Dolby Digital+, DTS, TrueHD, LPCM, MPEG
• HDi: The HD DVD runtime engine.
• GDI: Drawing stuff like menus
• AACS: Cryptography/DRM stuff
• MF: Audio/Video pipeline

Sure, the guys didn't write every line themself, but you still have to take a pause when you think about the manhours in total that went into enabling that drive. Pretty amazing. Also helps explain why the 360 HD-DVD drive is a bargain to anyone who wants to get into high-def DVD playback.

Anyway, the whole post is a good read, so I'd suggest taking a moment.

Just a quick note on something I found scary amusing yesterday. Had some friends over for dinner, and swung by Blockbuster to pick up a couple of movies. I'm generally a Netflix sort of guy, but just didn't have anything in the house. Anyway, while there I made the mistake of asking whether they'd be carrying HD-DVDs for rental. The conversation went something like this:

Clerk: "Do you want to sign up for our new Blockbuster online promotion that I'm mandated to ask everyone who comes in the store about?"

Me: "No thank you."

Clerk: "Why not? It's great! Here are exciting details!"

Me: "No thanks... I'm happy with Netflix. They carry HD-DVD, you don't."

Clerk: "Oh, well, we'll be getting HD-DVD in a week or so for rental... sign up! It's great!"

Me: "No thanks. But do you know whether you'll be selling HD-DVDs as well?"

Clerk turns to Manager: "Will we sell HD-DVDs?"

Manager: "Yes, we'll be getting BluRay in to sell at the same time as we rent them."

Me: "Hang on - not BluRay, HD-DVD."

Manager: "Oh, are they different? You know better than us I guess!" (And I kid you not, she giggled.)

Me (nice and polite): "Yes, they are quite different and one won't work in the other player - you guys might want to get the details as you're probably going to have a bunch of people looking for both formats in the future."

Moral of the story - just one more brick in the wall as to why I hate Blockbuster. But I did find it interesting that Blockbuster corporate appears to have decided to support only BluRay. Not a criticism - from their perspective it's a really tough call to make, and I'm sure the upfront cost of buying units to both rent and sell is significant. They probably had to pick one or the other - we'll see whether they made the right choice.

As for me, it's just one more reason I'm sticking with Netflix for now... they made the smart choice and have both HD-DVD and BluRay for rental. Nope, I'm not shilling for them - and you won't find a magical "sign up here" referral link on my website. Consider it a friendly recommendation from a happy customer - that's all.

Oh, probably worth noting that I'm traveling to Asia on business for the next three weeks, so posts will probably be somewhat intermittent. On the other hand, both the PS3 and Wii will be shipping, so I suspect I'll have something to say.

Few folks wrote to ask what I thought about the news that Sony had cut launch volumes from 4 million units to 2 million, and delayed the European launch until March of 2007. In addition, Sony also announced that they would have just 500k units for launch, with 100k going to Japan and the remaining 400k to the US. The stated reason is production issues with the blue laser diode.

Frankly, there's not much to say. Launching a console worldwide is really, really hard, and I'm not terribly surprised. The game industry seems to not be overly-surprised either. Most game company stocks are down by maybe 1%, and even GameStop is only down a point (as of 9:45 this morning). That's noise for these traditionally volatile stocks. I suspect you'll see analysts speaking up in the coming days and basically pointing to the "Wii60" picking up the slack that Sony can't fulfill - people need to put something under their tree, after all.

I think the biggest impact on Sony is that this reduces the number of Blu-ray sockets in the market for holiday. I can guarantee you that Sony's conversations with movie studio execs would have included promises about the number of PS3s that would be sold this holiday, and those numbers would have been used to help justify the investment those studios would have to do in Blu-ray movie mastering and manufacturing. This news is going to make a lot of those studios look twice at their Blu-ray strategy. Sony will likely have to make good on those missing sockets (which could be expensive), and it's quite possible you'll see some of the Blu-ray only studios hedge their bets and start supporting HD-DVD as well.

I don't think Sony will delay their Japanese and US launches until next year, however. Not having Blu-ray in the market for holiday would effectively give HD-DVD a huge boost, and Sony simply can't afford that. Blu-ray (not video games) is what Sony is betting the company on; they can't afford to not launch in some fashion, even if the games aren't there.

Saw that Mark Deloura (former head of Sony Developer Relations and an industry friend of mine) had some things to say about my recent Blu-ray disc speed/capacity post. Not a surprise considering his background, but I have to say the most interesting aspect of the conversation is that we're basically in violent agreement on most aspects. Strange but true.

Some quotes and comments:

My good friend Ozymandias has been going off lately about the decision to put a Blu-Ray drive in the PlayStation3. Aside from the fact that he works for Microsoft, I really don't see how he could argue that the Blu-Ray drive is not exactly the right move for games on PS3, when it comes to capacity. Here are two reasons why.

Mark goes on to list a historical perspective discussing how games have grown over time, as well as a content perspective where he gives some hypothetical numbers to illustrate why he believes games will need significantly greater capacity in this generation than afforded by DVD-9. I won't quote his entire article here - it's worth reading for yourself - but I'll say that we're in a bit of an argument bind in that the numbers we have to play with are a bit apples to oranges. Here are just a couple of examples:

The texture resolutions have increased closer to 16x, which would push us to 32GB if all that data was texture. Yikes!

Resolutions have increased, but so has compression technology - especially over what was available five years ago for the PS2. Add to that the greater real-time decompression capability of today's more powerful hardware, and that it's really not possible to compare the two without a great deal more sophisticated side-by-side testing on common assets. And that'll be tough, unless Mark has an old PS3 devkit he might want to bring over for an afternoon? 

Audio on PS2 was mostly stereo, two channels. PS3 is 5.1. That's a 3x size increase without even considering fidelity.

True, but the Xbox had 5.1 audio and managed to fit just fine on standard DVDs. Sure, you might have multiple languages and other localized content stored on the disc, but you don't have to have it there for the game. Shipping distinct localized versions of the game works just fine (and has been common for years).

Default video format has moved from 480i, or roughly 640x480 at 30 frames per second (9.2 million pixels per second), to 720p. 720p is 1280x720 at 60 frames per second (55.3 million pixels per second). That's about a 6x size increase. 6 x 2GB would again push us over the DVD-9 size.

This one comes back to codecs and compression again. We don't know what these numbers are based on (MPEG2? VC-1? Super Special Sony Fractal Compression Technology? ), nor do we have common assets and tools (aka Sony/Microsoft Devkits and SDKs) to get real numbers off of common assets. But as with texture resolutions, significantly more powerful hardware enables the use of much more efficient compression mechanisms that just weren't possible on the PS2 or Xbox.

Mark had some other candid thoughts as well, particularly around Blu-ray vs. DVD throughput and market demand. This is where the "argument" gets a bit odd, because... well, we're basically in agreement.

The Other Sides of the Coin: Throughput and Market Demand
Admittedly, Blu-Ray looks dicey from several non-capacity angles. Blu-Ray movies require a 1.5x Blu-Ray drive, or 54Mbits/second. Sony announced that PS3 uses a 2x BD drive, which is 72Mbits/second or 9MB/second. The Xbox360 uses a 12x DVD, which should give it about 16MB/second. That is significantly faster for games and will result in shorter load times. And that 12x DVD drive should be a whole lot cheaper. (Note that the PS3 drive will do 8x DVD, and even that is faster than 2x BD.)

What can I say? This is pretty much what I've been saying regarding drive speeds. <shrug> A good example of where we're pretty clearly agreeing. He goes on to poke a hole in the "cheap Blu-ray player" theory (which basically states that Blu-ray will drive PS3 sales just as DVD support did for PS2 sales).

Of course the big play from Sony is that Blu-Ray will not only be popular for games, it will also be popular for movies. One of the reasons the PS2 initially sold so well in Japan is that it was very inexpensive for a DVD player. But unfortunately we're just a bit early on Blu-Ray awareness at this point for something similar to likely happen with PS3.

According to Wikipedia, DVD players launched in Japan in 1996. They came to the US in 1997, and by the spring of 1999, DVD players had reached down to the $300 price point. PS2 launched in the US in 2000.

Contrasting that with Blu-Ray, BD players launched in Japan in 2003. They really didn't hit the US significantly until this year, 2006. BD players currently are around $1000 in the US. And the PS3 is launching this year, 2006. From one perspective PS3 is launching just one year earlier than the time from DVD launch to PS2 launch in Japan. But Blu-Ray drives and discs have been very sparse so marketplace awareness is slight - it is more accurate to compare against the BD launches of 2006, which would make Blu-Ray for PS3 significantly earlier in the marketplace than was DVD for PS2.

The result is that the Blu-Ray drives for PS3 are expensive, and the demand for Blu-Ray movies in the marketplace has not flowered open yet. PS3 could stoke that fire, but it doesn't seem likely that Blu-Ray will significantly drive sales of the PS3 beyond a small hardcore market, in the short term.

It seems the decision to include Blu-Ray on PS3 must have been a difficult one. Long term it seems like a smart move, at least from the perspective of capacity. But short term that decision has definitely had some striking ramifications for PS3.

Again, we seem to generally agree from across the (former) divide. Blu-ray as a system driver would be a lot more effective if there wasn't this whole format war thing going on. Until that's satisfactorily resolved (or dual-format players come on the market), consumers are just going to hold off. From my perspective it doesn't really matter as I'll have both a PS3 and an Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive the day they come out. But people with families to support or less disposable income are going to be deciding their PS3 purchase decision based on the system's merits as a game player, not a movie player.

Mark's final quote?

Now don't get me started about the idea of shipping an HD-DVD drive for Xbox360!

A consumer choice, my friend... a consumer choice.

Couple of you wrote asking what I thought of the recent announcement by Insomniac that their PS3 title Resistance: Fall of Man would use 22 GB of a Blu-ray disc's capacity. I also had someone point me to a recent CNET interview with Kaz Hirai in which he said the following:

Given the differences in pricing, which is fairly significant between Microsoft's Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, are there any chances of a PlayStation 3 down the line that doesn't have Blu-ray built in?

Hirai: The PlayStation 3 uses the Blu-ray as its storage medium for both games and for movies as well. We wanted to take advantage of the storage capacity that Blu-ray offers in terms of motion pictures and other content, but most importantly, for games as well. Our decision to include the Blu-ray player from day one in all of our PlayStation 3s was the right decision and, quite honestly, the only decision we can make.

Look at the massive amounts of data that's required to provide a truly immersive gaming experience in true HD. If you only have a DVD ROM drive, which can only go up to about 9GB or so, you're going to end up with a game that's going to have two or possibly even three discs. And then you're going to have to ask consumers to swap discs out or cache all the game onto the hard drive which I think is an inconvenience--not to mention the fact that you're going to fill up a 20GB hard drive very quickly with some of these games. So trying to go without a Blu-ray drive in the PlayStation 3 really is a nonstarter.

I've already written some thoughts about Blu-ray's capacity being irrelevant for games in this generation. In that article I stated that while I believed we'd see games released on larger discs, I didn't believe the content on those discs would directly impact the game itself (versus having "making of" or other random bonus material).

Appears this is the case with Resistance. A recent interview with the developer in the Unofficial Playstation Magazine stated that the 22 GB "game" size was made up of localized content. In other words, instead of having an English version of the game, a French version, a Japanese version, and so on on separate discs, all of that localized content is simply being bundled on one disc. While that makes things a bit easier for the developer, the disc capacity isn't being used in any meaningful way to improve the game. And frankly, I believe time will show (after the game is released and people start poking around the file system) that there isn't any reason the title couldn't have shipped on a DVD-9.

As to Hirai's quote on next-gen games needing 2-3 discs, the simplest answer I can give is to just look around. There appear to be plenty of next-generation games out today that are doing just fine on one disc... I'm really not sure what game store he's been shopping at. And this holiday when you're able to compare next-gen titles side-by-side on multiple platforms, I suspect you'll quickly find the vast majority are on one disc, and that the game content is identical.

I thought the the poke about "caching the game to the hard drive" was a bit odd as well. At GDC Europe last year Sony mentioned in their presentation that the PS3 Blu-ray drive would have sustained peak transfer rates of 36 MBit/s (4.5 MB/s) at 1x speed. Since then it appears that the drive has been upgraded to a 2x drive, which would enable transfer rates of 9 MB/s. Assuming a full 50 GB Blu-ray disc, at this speed you'd need just over 90 minutes to read the entire disc through memory. Of course, you can't fit all of that data into system memory at the same time, so you'll either be streaming a great deal (hard even with faster optical drives) and/or caching data to the hard drive. There's a reason the PS3 is so expensive - once Sony committed to Blu-ray as a corporate strategy, they were also forced to bundle the hard drive in every box to help mitigate slow disc data transfer rates. PS3 games need that hard drive to load in any reasonable time - just look at the PSP for an example of the effects of a slow optical drive on game loading times.

One last thing to think about. Put yourself in the shoes of a game developer faced with loading game assets into memory from a slow optical drive. You're going to have to be clever and find ways to try and make sure the data is laid out on the disc where it's most quickly accessible. You might do things like burn chunks of data to the disc in multiple locations to cut down on seek times, or duplicate assets such as level textures in each level's package so they can be read serially on level load. In other words, you might start storing data inefficiently and duplicatively to better conform to the drive's poor speed characteristics. It's not too hard to see how a game could quickly balloon in size while not adding any actual value or gameplay.

Just saw on Major Nelson that Battlestar Galactica: The Story So Far is available for download from Marketplace. Gamespot has a good article summing up the show as well. To quote:

When it debuted in 2003, the new Battlestar Galactica was greeted with skepticism. After all, it was a remake of a 1970-'80s series with a strong cult following produced by the Sci-Fi Channel, a cable network then infamous for its low-budget TV movies of the week.

Surprisingly, Battlestar Galactica proved the naysayers wrong. Its innovative plotlines, which were created by ex-Star Trek: The Next Generation writer Ronald D. Moore, won it critical acclaim and solid ratings. The series has also garnered a major following for its unusually gritty atmosphere. Instead of the clean-cut, sober officers of the Star Trek shows, Galactica's crew is an unkempt, hard-drinking lot whose demoralized dialogue is peppered with the fictional expletive "frak."

In 2004, the show was picked up as a full-time series. It ended its most recent season, its second, in March with one of the more shocking cliff-hangers in sci-fi television history. Such boldness helped the show win one of this year's Peabody Awards, the prestigious honor for excellence in broadcasting, which it shared with CNN, NBC Nightly News, and South Park, among others.

The third season of Battlestar Galactica is premiering in October, and the Sci-Fi channel is pulling out all the stops to promote it. It has put together a television special, titled Battlestar Galactica: The Story So Far, summing up the key events of the Battlestar Galactica miniseries and its first two seasons. The special will air on all the cable stations owned by Sci-Fi parent NBC Universal, which includes Bravo and USA, as well as the West Coast affiliates of the NBC broadcast TV network.

I can't stress enough how good this show is, and what you're missing out on if you're not watching. I'll be the first to say that TV programming is mostly drek. I have friends who give me the hardest time for having the home theater I never use to watch TV (would much rather use it with movies and games). Battlestar Galactica is one of the first TV shows in a long time that I personally think is worth watching, and I'd encourage you to check out the free summary show if you're curious. That said, if you know you're going to watch it, I'd skip the summation and just get seasons 1 and 2 on DVD. I'm waiting for the recently announced HD-DVD versions - the show is filmed in high-def, and looks spectacular. No, I don't know why only the SD version is available on Marketplace - bummed by that.

P.S. - Muffy the robot dog is nowhere to be seen. This is a good thing.

There's been a lot of interest in the PS3 due to its stated 1080p output for both games and movies (via Blu-ray). What's interesting is that a lot of folks don't realize how meaningless 1080p actually is in this generation.

Let's take games first. The PS3 has roughly the same pixel-pushing capabilities as the Xbox 360. Don't need to take my word for it, it'll be obvious soon enough over the next year. Even if this wasn't the case, consider we now live in a multi-platform development world, and that the current sweet spot developers are targeting is 720p due to the extremely similar system specifications. Simply put, a developer who is planning to release their game for both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 will aim for a common attainable ground. In fact, I'll stick my neck out and predict that that you won't see any 1080"x" games for the PS3 this year.

Let's move on to HD movies. Home Theater Magazine (recommended!) has a sister website, and I wanted to point you to a great blog post by Geoffrey Morrison discussing the topic. To quote:

"Movies and almost all TV shows are shot at 24 frames-per-second (either on film or on 24fps HD cameras). All TVs have a refresh rate of 60Hz. What this means is that the screen refreshes 60 times a second. In order to display something that is 24fps on something that is essentially 60fps, you need to make up, or create new frames. This is done using a method called 3:2 pulldown (or more accurately 2:3 pulldown). The first frame of film is doubled, the second frame of film is tripled, the third frame of film is doubled and so on, creating a 2,3,2,3,2,3,2 sequence. It basically looks like this: 1a,1b,2a,2b,2c,3a,3b,4a… Each number is the original film frame. This lovely piece of math allows the 24fps film to be converted to be displayed on 60Hz products (nearly every TV in the US, ever).

This can be done in a number of places. With DVDs, it was all done in the player. With HD DVD, it is done in the player to output 1080i. With Blu-ray, there are a few options. The first player, the Samsung, added the 3:2 to the signal, interlaced it, and then output that (1080i) or de-interlaced the same signal and output that (1080p). In this case, the only difference between 1080i and 1080p is where the de-interlacing is done. If you send 1080i, the TV de-interlaces it to 1080p. If you send your TV the 1080p signal, the player is de-interlacing the signal. As long as your TV is de-interlacing the 1080i correctly, then there is no difference. Check out this article for more info on that."

Most modern HD displays (Plasmas, LCD, DLP, etc.) display content progressively, even if they first received an interlaced signal. Let me restate that: when you're watching a 1080"x" signal on a modern HD display, you're almost always watching a 1080p signal. The only difference is where the de-interlacing happens - but the displayed output is always 1080p. (Minor caveat is that there are rare TVs that don't de-interlace correctly, as described in the link above. But this is very rare today.)

This is why I get hung up on the image encoding quality of HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray. That's where you're going to see a perceivable difference. As to games, 99% of PS3 titles will natively render at 720p; the few that come out with 1080"x" support are either going to be simple classic arcade ports that don't need to render complex scenes (think the original Battlezone), or will give up a lot of in-game visual effects and simply won't look very good (hence the poor showing of Gran Turismo "HD" at this past E3).

To sum up, don't get sucked into all the 1080p hype. Just make sure you have a recent HDTV that de-interlaces 1080i signals correctly and you'll be just fine.

Just saw an article on Slashdot that points to the first side-by-side comparisons of movies that have been released on both Blu-ray and HD-DVD. As discussed earlier, it appears HD-DVD seems to have the edge for now. Quoting Slashdot:

"With today's release of three movies on Blu-ray, Warner Home Video has become the first studio to release movie titles on both high-def formats, making it finally possible to do an apples-to-apples comparison of the same titles on both formats . High-Def Digest has just posted reviews of all three titles -- 'Training Day,' 'Kiss Kiss Bang Bang' and 'Rumor Has It' -- comparing video, audio and extras to the previous HD DVD releases. Their verdict? Due to issues with image cropping, audio selection and supplemental features on the Blu-ray discs, the HD DVD versions win this first face-off."

I'm looking forward to doing some side-by-side comparisons. Any of you guys had a chance to do this yourselves yet?

Some of you may recall the earlier article I posted on Blu-ray. In that article the opinion piece I quoted from Projector Central detailed concerns about the image quality of Blu-ray over HD-DVDs. The primary reason given was that for whatever reason, Sony is currently using MPEG-2 to compress Blu-ray high-definition video (the same codec used in standard DVDs today), and not using newer, better quality codecs such as VC-1. (It's worth highlighting that the article did also go on to say that larger Blu-ray disc capacity may help image quality in the future.)

Now, I'm a big home theater nut, and image quality is one of those things I take very seriously. I've had the plasma TV color-tuned for movie playback, and have also used some of the picture calibration tools such as Digital Video Essentials to verify color accuracy. (For what it's worth, I have a totally different color mode that gets switched to when playing games. It's a bit brighter, with deeper color saturation and contrast.) Suffice it to say, Joe Kane is a bit of an image-quality god to me, and so I personally take his thoughts on this subject very seriously.

This article from hometheaterblog.com quotes from a video interview with Mr. Kane (which can be found here). The article goes into more detail about Mr. Kane's credentials, but includes some quotes which gave me pause. I won't quote every comment he made since I'd be almost quoting the entire piece, but I thought these in particular were worth sharing:

“For example Sony has said their only going to do MPEG2 rather than the newer codecs, either the advanced video codec that was pickled here in Europe or the SMPTE standardized VC-1 codec, both of those codecs are superior to MPEG2”

“Sony’s claim that MPEG2 is equal to or superior to VC-1 clearly says they haven’t been looking at it, in a manner in which they can see it’

“I’ve been doing demonstrations now for over a year, of what MPEG2 looks like versus VC-1 and in all cases in audiences I do it for; no one misses the differences between MPEG2 and VC-1”

It's worth highlighting that this is one man's opinion. Still, it definitely puts a bit of a caution flag up for me personally, and I'll be looking at side-by-side demos with much interest in the future. Anyone know if there are any movies available yet on both formats (to better do a side-by-side)?

Just seems to be a Blu-ray sort of week. Following up on my earlier posts about Blu-ray disc capacity being irrelevant for games and the potential for dual-format HD-DVD/Blu-ray players in the future, we now have an opinion piece from Projector Central about whether Blu-ray can survive against the current advantages they perceive with HD-DVD.

It's a good read, although does have a definite pro-HD-DVD bias. Their argument for HD-DVD's superiority can be summed up with this quote from the article:

"HD-DVD is currently well-positioned to take the lion's share of the market for one very simple reason: HD-DVD offers a much better value proposition to the consumer. That value proposition comes in the form of three formidable advantages: (1) At this writing, HD-DVD image quality is clearly superior to Blu-ray, (2) HD-DVD player prices are half those of Blu-ray, and (3) HD-DVD has twice as many movie titles on the market as Blu-ray, and that ratio will hold through the end of this critical launch year. In short, HD-DVD is aggressively delivering what the consumer wants today. Meanwhile, Blu-ray is far behind the power curve with overpriced and underperforming products. If it does not turn itself around its survival as a vehicle for home theater movies is questionable."

I haven't had a chance to do the in-depth side-by-side analysis Projector Central has, but I have to say the demos I've seen so far of Blu-ray have left me somewhat underwhelmed. I do buy the statement the authors make that the quality of Blu-ray movies will likely improve to HD-DVD's levels in the future as they're able to take advantage of dual-layer, 50 GB discs (and hence utilize higher-quality codecs). But it remains to be seen whether that will be too late for the format.

I've also seen a couple of high-end home theater magazines highlight that for 24 FPS films, there's no technical difference in playback between a 1080i and 1080p signal. Hence there's no picture quality advantage to Blu-ray either. To quote the article again:

"At this point we should address what can only be characterized as a hoax—the notion that Blu-ray must be technically superior to HD-DVD because the Samsung player outputs 1080p, whereas the Toshiba player is "only 1080i." One high-end home theater retailer told me last weekend that the reason you pay $1000 for the Blu-ray player is for the "higher resolution 1080p output." This is absolute baloney. If you encounter any retail sales rep feeding you this line, keep your wallet in your pocket and leave the store.

The truth is this: The Toshiba HD-DVD player outputs 1080i, and the Samsung Blu-ray player outputs both 1080i and 1080p. What they fail to mention is that it makes absolutely no difference which transmission format you use—feeding 1080i or 1080p into your projector or HDTV will give you the exact same picture. Why? Both disc formats encode film material in progressive scan 1080p at 24 frames per second. It does not matter whether you output this data in 1080i or 1080p since all 1080 lines of information on the disc are fed into your video display either way. The only difference is the order in which they are transmitted. If they are fed in progressive order (1080p), the video display will process them in that order. If they are fed in interlaced format (1080i), the video display simply reassembles them into their original progressive scan order. Either way all 1080 lines per frame that are on the disc make it into the projector or TV. The fact is, if you happen to have the Samsung Blu-ray player and a video display that takes both 1080i and 1080p, you can switch the player back and forth between 1080i and 1080p output and see absolutely no difference in the picture. So this notion that the Blu-ray player is worth more money due to 1080p output is nonsense."

At the end of the day we're still caught in a format war. As I said earlier, it's somewhat irrelevant to me because I'm a audio/video geek and will pick up both (although I admit I'd only get Blu-ray as part of the PS3). My hope is that a dual-format player will come into being sooner rather than later so we can all get on with our lives and start watching HD movies independent of format.