HD and DVD DL?

[ebenton]

I know that it is probably way early for this, and maybe it's a stupid question.
I know that the basic Blu-Ray disk will have 25 GB capacity on a single-layer disk. Presumably, a HD version of a movie could fit onto this disk. How much of the 25GB would be consumed by the movie? (just the movie, not the extras)
Is it possible to compress HD video enough to fit on a regular 9GB DVD DL disk? (similar to what DVD Shrink does with regular video) I'm sure the software doesn't exist currently, but it may some day.
Is it possible to fit an hour or so of uncompressed HD video onto a 9GB DL disk?
I am asking these questions without regard to copy protection, DRM or any other impediments to getting a movie from cable/satellite/Blu-ray disk onto your PC hard drive.

[Cornucopia]

How much will be used by the HD movie? Depends on the length of the movie(s) and the bitrate of the compression. Could be anywhere from a couple of hundred MB to the full 25GB.

Is it possible to recompress to fit an 8.5GB (fixed size) std DL disc? Yes, think about the T2 HD disc that fits on a std DVD-9. Especially using h.264 or VC1 (WMV) encoding, should be quite possible.

There is no such thing as "Uncompressed" HD in the HD-DVD or Blu-Ray video specs for consumers. If you're thinking of putting some of your own material onto a HD/Blu-Ray recordable data disc, then here's the math:

Resolution: 1920x1080 = 2,073,600 pixels
Framerate: 60i = 29.97fps
Bitdepth: uncompressed YUV 4:2:2 using 8bit quantization = 12bits/pixel

Total: Rez * Bitdepth * Framerate * Time (1Hr) = 2,684,698,214,400 bits or 312 1/2 GB!
The most you could get of uncompressed HD on a 25GB disc would be ~4.8minutes.

Since I'm guessing that you won't have access to uncompressed HD, you don't have to worry about it so much.
If you have an HDV camera, you'll be able to get almost 2 Hours on a disc.
If you have a sat feed, amount will depend upon the transmitted/stored compression bitrate.

HTH,

Scott

[Marty2003]

I would guess that it might be possible since BD's and HD-DVD's will use MP4 compression. Since Microsoft currently has WMV-HD dvd's which contain HD feature films on a DVD-9, I'd guess you could fit a Blu-ray movie on DVD although you might have to downsize to 720p and reduce the bitrate.

What do you mean by "uncompressed HD"? If you mean Uncompressed AVI I highly doubt that's possible as it will have huge bitrate. If you mean Uncompressed as in a direct copy off the BD/HD-DVD, I'd say it's impossible to answer right now since we don't know what codecs and bitrate the majority of movies will be using.

[Cornucopia]

We do know the codec choices: MPEG2 (MP@ML, MP@HL), h.264 (MPG4 AVC), and VC1(WMV9pro). These are locked in by now.
We can also guess the bitrate ranges (assuming HD footage on disc):
for MPEG2 MP@HL = 8 - 20Mbps, averaging ~15Mbps depending upon length of program, visual/motion complexity, and acceptable quality requirements
for h.264 and VC1 = ~1/4 to 2/3 of the above rate, averaging 1/2 (7.5Mbps)---they are more compression-efficient.

Scott

[Wile_E]

If you have an HDV camera, you'll be able to get almost 2 Hours on a disc.
If you have a sat feed, amount will depend upon the transmitted/stored compression bitrate.

HTH,

Scott

It doesn't look like blu-ray nor hd-dvd will support DV or HDV format directly. So even though you can backup and store your DV/HDV files on the disc, you can't play it on the player. This sucks. They should at least add DV-AVI as a supported format for all players. As you said, a two hour DV file would about fit on a 25GB disc. DV bitrate is 25Mbps. I'm sure they could get the drives to spin fast enough to sustain that rate.