Blu-Ray, HD DVD, what's the big deal?

[ebenton]

I have owned an HDTV since December of 2004. Since that time I have watched countless cable HD broadcasts, either 720p or 1080i. I have also rented several HD movies from XBox Marketplace and watched them in 720p or 1080i (I can't remember which) on my HDTV.

About two weeks ago, I bought a Toshiba HD-A2 HD DVD player. It is connected to the HDMI port on my HDTV for best video quality. My HDTV does not support 1080p, so I saw no advantage to buying a player that did, either. I have a Sony KDF42-WE655 42" LCD-projection HDTV. It's max native resolution is 768, so 1080i gets scaled to 768 anyway. Picture looks great.

After watching a couple of HD DVD movies on it (Troy and Disturbia, to be specific), I fail to see any difference between HD DVD and cable HD.

So I am wondering, why does anybody care anything about the "war" between HD DVD and Blu-Ray? From what I have seen in stores, I can't even tell any difference between 1080p and 720p or 1080i on a 42" screen. Maybe on a 60" or larger I could see something. I don't know.

I only bought the Toshiba because it was cheap, and I am certainly not going to spend $600 or more on a Blu-Ray player, especially for no discernable picture improvement. With all of the cable movies and internet movies available in HD and the over-the-air channels broadcasting network shows in HD, why are some people so intense about these two disk formats? Maybe they're waiting for their favorite cult classic or 1940's Bing Crosby movie to come out in HD?

[gshelley61]

Your display is relatively small and has about half the native resolution contained in HD DVD and Blu-ray discs. So, naturally at normal living room viewing distances the difference between HD cable, broadcast or satellite signals and HD DVD / Blu-ray will be less apparent.

The biggest complaint about HD cable and satellite are the terrible motion artifacts (primarily severe macroblocking) that are a result of the cable / satellite companies re-encoding their HD feeds at much lower bitrates in order to provide more channels to their subscribers. HD sporting events and action movies really suffer because of this. This is less of a problem with over-the-air HD broadcast.

HD DVD and Blu-ray have virtually no motion artifacts and deliver a high bitrate, crystal clear image to the display. This is especially noticeable on larger 1920x1080 native displays.

I've got players for both formats and have been mostly renting the HD DVD / Blu-ray discs from Netflix. It's fantastic. So much better than cable HD. I'm format neutral, so I don't give a crap about the "war". I just enjoy HD, regardless of the source.

[Snakebyte1]

I tend to see all this "HD" stuff mainly as a marketing vehicle to whip up consumers into a buying frenzy. It reminds me of the late 1990's when the key word was Y2K. It seemed like everyone was racing out to replace everything. Must buy Y2K compliant toaster!!!

HD is a technological change but the hysteria its causing is amazing (and somewhat amusing, if not outright frustrating). I don't recall this kind of thing going on when TVs went from B&W to colour, but it really amounts to basically the same thing - you'll get a little better TV picture. How much better is really a subjective issue, but if you believe the ads that you're a nobody if you don't have an HD TV with HD Cable/satellite, with an HD DVD player and an HD camcorder, then you gotta have it. Now where can I get an HD toaster?

I remember when you wanted a TV you decided on the size you wanted then looked at Zenith, RCA, Sony and Electrohome at the TV store and got the least expensive. You plugged it in (maybe fiddled with the colour knobs - boy did my dad get pissed off when I did that as a kid!) and watched. Now you have to figure out if you want LCD, LCD Projection, DLP, Plasma. Do you want 720P, 1080i or 1080p? Do you want a low priced mystery brand or an over priced brand name? Then you pay a truck load for a handful of different cables (HDMI, Component, Digital Optical Audio) and of course connect up your surround sound. Then sit back and hope all this made in China stuff doesn't die within a month.

[guns1inger]

This is less of a problem with over-the-air HD broadcast.

Not over here. OTA sports look like crap on digital. HD or SD are full of artifacts, loss of detail and over-all poor quality. Australian Rules football has never looked worse.

[edDV]

...

So I am wondering, why does anybody care anything about the "war" between HD DVD and Blu-Ray? From what I have seen in stores, I can't even tell any difference between 1080p and 720p or 1080i on a 42" screen. Maybe on a 60" or larger I could see something. I don't know.

I'm not surprised you can't see the difference on a 2004 projection LCD (1386x788 native) TV because that set is incapable of displaying full broadcast 1080i. Not that it matters for a 42" screen. Even 42" 1080p TV owners report no difference to 1080i as should be the case since inverse telecined 1080i is the same thing as 1920x1080 24p. The advantages of Blu-Ray or HD DVD result from a higher quality transfer master and higher bitrate encoding. Otherwise 1080p makes no difference if your TV can reverse telecine 1080i.

The issue with these HD discs and machines is not whether they have higher quality than DVD or HDTV broadcast, they do. The issue is whether the difference can be seen on your current TV or is worth the expense.

[lenti_75]

Then sit back and hope all this made in China stuff doesn't die within a month.

[harrisonford]

Year or so back, one company did a survey where, two 60 inch 1080P lcd were set side by side and people were asked to pick the HD/bluray DVD againist a regular DVD, 78% could not tell the difference.

Point, unless you have a 65 inch screen or higher, HD is pointless, unless the encoding for DVD is worse than Bluray or HD dvd content. This is already happening.

Good Luck

[jagabo]

Year or so back, one company did a survey where, two 60 inch 1080P lcd were set side by side and people were asked to pick the HD/bluray DVD againist a regular DVD, 78% could not tell the difference.

They must have been sitting a quarter mile away from the screens.

Point, unless you have a 65 inch screen or higher, HD is pointless, unless the encoding for DVD is worse than Bluray or HD dvd content. This is already happening.

Nonsense. It all depends on from how far away you watch it. At 10 feet from a 46" 1080p HDTV anyone can easily see the difference between upconverted SD and HD.

[ebenton]

The issue with these HD discs and machines is not whether they have higher quality than DVD or HDTV broadcast, they do. The issue is whether the difference can be seen on your current TV or is worth the expense.

Now that statement makes sense to me.

So far, in my case, it looks like it's not worth the expense to buy a Blu-ray player at least.

I have a newer, smaller 32" Sharp Aquos 1080p LCD HDTV in my bedroom, but I only watch cable on it. One of these days I will browbeat my wife into letting me buy a newer, bigger, better-resolution HDTV to replace my 2004-model. Then it will be, "HDTV flea market, here I come!"

[dphirschler]

I'm tickled pink to watch live OTA HDTV on my 800x600 projector. If ever this thing dies, I will of course buy at least a 1024x768 projector, but for now I am very happy with HDTV downsampled to 800x600. And that's on a 8' wide screen.


Darryl

[SingSing]

The biggest complaint about HD cable and satellite are the terrible motion artifacts (primarily severe macroblocking) that are a result of the cable / satellite companies re-encoding their HD feeds at much lower bitrates in order to provide more channels to their subscribers. HD sporting events and action movies really suffer because of this.

FIOS TV has the same problem. Plus it can't produce good true black.

[Seeker47]

The biggest complaint about HD cable and satellite are the terrible motion artifacts (primarily severe macroblocking) that are a result of the cable / satellite companies re-encoding their HD feeds at much lower bitrates in order to provide more channels to their subscribers. HD sporting events and action movies really suffer because of this.

Just as so much SD content on digital cable or satellite (dark scenes in movies; action scenes) really bites, in visual quality -- on just about any type of display. Makes you wonder why customers are willing to pay even more for this in HD ?

This is less of a problem with over-the-air HD broadcast.

And there you've got to put up with all the obnoxiously stupid commercials.

[KBeee]

This is less of a problem with over-the-air HD broadcast.

Not over here. OTA sports look like crap on digital. HD or SD are full of artifacts, loss of detail and over-all poor quality. Australian Rules football has never looked worse.

Yeah, but Ozzy Rules Football looks crap even when watched live

[edDV]

Network TV stations get their optical HD feeds at ~45Mb/s* and recode to 14-19Mb/s for broadcast. I've noticed some PBS stations converting the 1080i feed to 720p at as low as 12Mb/s so they can fit in a couple of additional SD channels with reasonable quality. Cable HD channels here are being fed at 20 or 25 Mb/s and quality is very good. I'm not sure what bit rates satellite is using but they can get them low with reasonable quality by pushing VBR statistical multiplexing to the limit.

* Some networks multiplex this with digital SD and HD versions so individual PIDs may be lower.

[Marvingj]

As the transition to digital TV continues, cable companies and satellite operators can and will “groom” the bit rate of any signals to conserve bandwidth. While two 18 Mb/s HD programs can fit into one 256 QAM carrier, 3 HD programs @ 12.5 Mb/s can also fit into this slot. Two such programs could also dovetail nicely into a satellite 27 Mb/s transponder.

Would the resulting HD images look as good? Nope. Would many viewers notice? Probably not on a smaller HDTV set (screen sizes under 34”). Instead, most of the howls would come from viewers who have invested in large flat-panel and rear-projection TVs, all of which have higher native resolution than picture tubes.

One possible solution to the digital shoebox paradox is to use a more advanced compression system, like MPEG-4. This format allows for much lower bit rates, but is quite a bit more complicated to encode and is not part of the terrestrial digital TV broadcast standard.

Nevertheless, one new satellite service – Voom – claims to use MPEG-4 encoding and decoding for what will ultimately be 39 channels of HDTV (I’ll believe that when I see it!). For a 1080i program, MPEG-4 can get by with about 9 Mb/s. As we saw earlier, a typical transponder channel has a maximum bit rate of 27 Mb/s. So, Voom would (in theory) need only 13 transponder channels to send out those 39 HD programs.

Another way to solve the problem is to preserve bandwidth for the HD programs and not multicast during certain times of the day. None of CBS’ owned and operated stations are multicasting, and their 1080i shows go out at near 18 Mb/s. The same can be said (for now) with NBC owned and operated stations.

Even some PBS stations are looking more at preserving bit rates. The Philadelphia PBS affiliate (WHYY) currently sends out one digital minor channel with 1080i content, having given up on an earlier experiment where a second minor channel was in use to send out classical music.

As a means of comparison, you can see just how good 1080i HD really looks if you have access to JVC’s D-Theater playback system and a few tapes. This digital VHS format has a working data rate of about 25 Mb/s, and there have been several feature films released in this format. That’s 40% higher than terrestrial HDTV, and it shows when watching films with fast action sequences.

[SatStorm]

In Europe we use mpeg 4 for the HDTV channels. There are 4 - 5 channels per Satellite T.P, 1080i of course. We have no 720p broadcasts here.
Personally I prefer the picture quality of mpeg 2. Not that mpeg 4 is bad...

Oh, and a bit off topic: You do know that "OTA" has a different meaning outside the USA? Here in Europe, when we say "O.T.A." we mean "On The Air" and that refers to the OTA firmware updates some manufactures use through commercial satellites (mostly Astra & Hotbird) for their receivers. In Europe/Middle East and Asia, for the free channels, we use the term "F.T.A." which means "Free To Air".