HD-DVD Launched Early!

[SeeMoreDigital]

According to Doom9's News page today (I hope it's not an April Fools joke) HD-DVD has been released in Japan: -
HD DVD was launched early.

Yesterday, the first HD DVD players were being sold in Japan and a reader managed to grab one and two discs, and he was not pleased. I haven't managed to get any details yet as to which codec was used and if the disc was single layer or double layer, but 1080i content encoded with MPEG-2 to a single layer HD DVD would indeed be a disaster..

two times the space for 4 times the amount of pixels - you do the math.In-fact it's even worse when you do the math... 5 times the amount of pixels for conventional PAL DVD spinners and 6 times the amount of pixels for NTSC DVD spinners!

Anybody here bought a player?


Be seeing you.....

[random asshat]

If it's a hoax, someone is a convincing prankster.

It's also been picked up here (http://www.cio.com/blog_view.html?CID=19788) [cio] and here (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/31/177238) [slashdot]

/ saving my money for a flying car

[MrTroy]

I was going to shout 'April fools!' but you already said it yourself.:D
I hope it's not an April Fools joke

[Doom9]

I got the mail when it was still March, even in Japan. And a launch in Japan prior to the US and Europe is normal, and the US launch is only 3 weeks off.

[Soulhunter]

And, this CIO article is from 31/03 not 01/04... ;)


Bye

[zambelli]

I don't know if that's true or not, or what exactly happened in Japan, but I can assure you that the first HD-DVD titles released in the U.S. will not be MPEG-2 encoded.

[happycase]

I don't know if that's true or not, or what exactly happened in Japan, but I can assure you that the first HD-DVD titles released in the U.S. will not be MPEG-2 encoded.

My guess would be VC1, single-layer for ALL launch titles and for the immediate future.

[Mug Funky]

dang, i hope not. why not AVC?

[happycase]

My guess would be because VC-1 doesn't have to do as much spacial filtering as AVC at comporable bit rates. When there is progression to double layer, I think we'll see AVC and MPEG-2 show up.

[MrTroy]

And, this CIO article is from 31/03 not 01/04... ;)

I noticed that this year a lot of April fool's jokes actually began on March 30th. So this could be a joke after all.

[CruNcher]

it is reality and its AVC you can see a Video of the Toshiba Player playing Biohazard (Resident Evil) here http://blog.livedoor.jp/hddvddegogo/ and as i allready mentioned before the actually video is embeded in a .EVO file it's like .VOB
and the First now Available Consumer Authoring Programms seem to not give us the possibility to use AVC only Mpeg-2 called HD-DVD type 1 i think.

[bond]

afaik hddvd type 1 refers to how teh menus are structured, meaning its very similar (or the same?) to normal dvds but able to use the new codecs

why is it known that its avc?

[CruNcher]

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/printthread.php?t=662312&p=7410771

http://image.blog.livedoor.jp/hddvddegogo/imgs/e/6/e6c91fbe.wmv
http://image.blog.livedoor.jp/hddvddegogo/imgs/0/f/0f2b6367.wmv

and here a selfmade one with Ulead Movie Factory 5 (DVD-R)
http://image.blog.livedoor.jp/hddvddegogo/imgs/a/6/a61e92a8.wmv

I can't understand that Toshiba and Constantin Film should have screwed up the Biohazard release even on SL HD-DVD visible blocks shouldn't happen really strange.

Also the booting and loading time is absolutely strange Toshiba didn't researched for nothing with others on CeLinux

[bond]

- Demonstration disc at store is very simple, without any menu and chapter, PQ is not so good, macroblocking is seen in the sky area, softness, even though it's AVC.i wonder whether they forgot to enable --no-fast-pskip when encoding ;)

[Doom9]

i wonder whether they forgot to enable --no-fast-pskip when encodingYou don't really beleve they used a good encoder? Studios only use hardware encoders and we all know how early DVDs looked. I'm reasonably certain any member here who knows his way around x264 could produce a better looking disc given an uncompressed 1080p source.

[Soulhunter]

Indeed, even current DVDs are far away from what you could achieve via software processing/encoding... Grab some HDTV flick, filter it properly via avisynth, downscale to D1, encode it to MPEG2 via CCE, author it to a DVD and compare it to the retail version... I bet you will be surprised how bad some the retail versions look compared to a self-authored version! Considering that using the master as source and not "just" a HDTV version would probably give even better results makes me wonder why the big companys not simply hire some ppl from this board and let em encode the stuff on PCs for em, would be also cheaper, no? ^^


Bye

[zambelli]

Considering that using the master as source and not "just" a HDTV version would probably give even better results makes me wonder why the big companys not simply hire some ppl from this board and let em encode the stuff on PCs for em, would be also cheaper, no? ^^
You'd probably have to join some industry professional union first. :)
A lot of the people at these production houses are people who come from an analog video background and have limited knowledge of digital video. Consequently, the video industry loves turn-key solutions. The simpler you can make it, the better.