HD isn't necessary?

[FlimsyFeet]

SD video, on DVD, etc., is oftern filtered vertically to remove fine horizontal detail that would otherwise flicker on interlaced displays.

This is why some HDTV to DVD conversions look better than retail DVDs.

[zambelli]

This is a nice real-world DVD vs HD comparison:

http://usuarios.lycos.es/jfksmeagol/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=17

The HD source was 1080i HDTV at 17Mbps (MPEG-2).

[Mackintire]

:helpful: I love reading things like this. I m not sure if I should laugh or cry.

First I own a old normal TV 420x240i if your lucky
I own a Panisonic Tau TV 540x480i I believe
I also own a Dell 2405FPW 1920x1200

Before anyone says it the Normal TV is connected via Coax, and tau using componant, and the Dell via DVI connection. I have access to plasma TVs and DLP's that a few of my friends have.

I can tell you that all DVD's, even badly encoded ones, look the same on the old normal TV. HD movies 720P or 1080i played via my media center all look the same.

On the Panisonic Tau you can tell the difference between a bad DVD and a good one. My references are SuperBIT encode s or movies that have a 6+M avg bitrate (pirates of the carrabean)
HD content on the Tau almost always looks identical to a high quality DVD encode.

Now I have access to EDTV/480P content that is encoded at 10Mbps. It looks equal in quality to the 720P content encoded at 7mbps on the Dell and my friends 1024x768 plasma.
Assuming the reference is the same and the recode is a lesser resolution.........
If the bitrate is the same or better and the compression is equal or better the output will almost always look better.

How much better HS looks depends on the source content (It better be 1080P or higher), the player, the decoder, the screen, and the viewers eyes.

GO ahead and argure with the above facts, you can't.

If your talking oranges to oranger a 720P encode with the same datarate per pixel will look 35% better then a normal DVD
period.

That would be because there IS 35% more data there.

I have seen, cough cough, Gladiator in 1080i on a screen that can show it. The movie is over 25gig in size! it looks massively better then the DVD version, so much so that it gave my poor wife nightmares for a few nights. Why, because many details that are in the movie are not seen clearly on the DVD encode and you tend not to notice them due to the lack to definition.

Seriously it IS that more graphic to watch that movie in HD with the proper equipment.

Want a more extreme example find someone who has seen a movie or two on Sony's new 2K cinema projector. It's being used in a few select theaters in the US. The movies are being shown at 2048x1080P. Just incase you were wondering the avg movie is 800Gig in size.
I haven t seen it but sony showed a 4K cinema display showing spiderman 2 to a select few, supposedly the data file is 6-8 TB in size. If the data's there, It will look better.
:p
Lets anwser the next question.....Does everybody need it. repeat after me NO.

Am I personally going to buy every movie HD.........No

Will I buy...LOTR, Starwars movies, Matrix....in HD As long as the master was recorded in HD or Super38 then YES.

If it looks better on my display the yes.

Should you buy it? Does it look better to you?

Is chocolate or vanalla better, you tell me?

:thanks:

Bah......Onward!

Mackintire

[Soulhunter]

Want a more extreme example find someone who has seen a movie or two on Sony's new 2K cinema projector...

Or go into a non-digital cinema and watch stuff at "infinity" resolution... ;D


Bye

[siddharthagandhi]

btw i have a question...which looks better plasma on SD or HDTV w/ HD

[SirCanealot]

Or go into a non-digital cinema and watch stuff at "infinity" resolution... ;D


Bye

More like blur-ass resolution :/

And on the original post: you need better sources! :/

http://www.williams1.homechoice.co.uk/HDTest1.png
http://www.williams1.homechoice.co.uk/HDTest2.png

[Soulhunter]

@ SirCanealot

Depends on the cinema and the film quality i think (2k digital upsized to a 20m screen would be even more blurry, heh!?) So, good hardware + a good film copy should easiely beat 2k digi projection... Anyway, I wish they would film/show everything like IMAX it does (10x bigger frames than 35mm, up to 96 fps, 15.000W projection) coz this even beats 4k digi projection... ^^


Bye

[Mackintire]

Sorry I screwed up its called Super 35 film you can read about it here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_35

It does look better then standard 35 when converted to digital.

Honestly I will be impressed when HD is offered at 24FPS 1080P with Mpeg4 at 11Mbps

Later,

Mackintire

[Slitheen]

I have also noticed this. I think the issue is that resolution is not the end all be all determination of picture quality. A clean encode free of articacts at DVD resolution and above is probably the most important factor and I can only hope that HD-DVD stuff will be cleaner than DVD.

Which fits with a demonstration I saw with some badly compressed HD and upscaled normal DVD side by side. The upscaled DVD was better to look at and freeer of artifacts. The HD had more resolution but was ugly with compression.

The best picture, be it SD or HD is the picture that is the most clear and clean.

[zambelli]

Sorry I screwed up its called Super 35 film you can read about it here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_35
It does look better then standard 35 when converted to digital.
You either didn't read that article or you misunderstood it. Super 35 is not "better than standard 35". Super 35 uses the same full area of the film negative (including area reserved for optical sound) as original silent films. When prints are made from the negative, the 1.37:1 image is cropped down to 2.39:1 (thing letterboxing on VHS) and then blown up to to Cinemascope anamorphic prints or 70mm prints. Thus the quality is actually decreased because you only end up using 60% of your shot vertical resolution.

From the article: "Super 35 is a production format. Theatres do not receive or project Super 35 prints. Rather, movies are shot in a Super 35 format but are then - either through optical blowdown/matting or digital intermediate - converted into one of the standard formats to make release prints."

Native Cinemascope will always look better than Super 35 because it's using a bigger area of the negative. The only incentive for using Super35 is that it's cheaper and it allows usage of spherical lenses.

It's a shame that directors such as James Cameron and Peter Jackson choose to shoot in Super 35, considering the epic proportion of their films. Can you imagine how freakin' awesome those battle scenes in "Lord of the Rings" would've looked if they had been shot in 70mm or even Cinemascope?

[Slitheen]

It's a shame that directors such as James Cameron and Peter Jackson choose to shoot in Super 35, considering the epic proportion of their films. Can you imagine how freakin' awesome those battle scenes in "Lord of the Rings" would've looked if they had been shot in 70mm or even Cinemascope?

Yes but is it worth the extra billions it would have cost to render all the CGI at the scale of 70mm.

[IgorC]

In less than 24 hours there will be HD-DVD movies.
The whole world is waiting. Great.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=br_ss_hs/002-7173024-4904818?platform=gurupa&url=index%3Dblended&keywords=hd-dvd&Go.x=0&Go.y=0

[communist]

Hehe I like it how they repeat the features of the Sony player in order to make up for a real reason why one should go out and buy those overpriced and mostly useless players ;)
Amazon Specs of Sony's BDP-S1 (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000DZS0G8/sr=8-2/qid=1145486017/ref=pd_bbs_2/102-0603160-0785705?%5Fencoding=UTF8)

Technical Details

* BD-Java interactive capability
* Full HD 1080p video output through HDMI connection
* DVD upscaling to 1080p
* Uncompressed multi channel linear PCM output
* Build quality with rigid beam construction
* Full HD 1080p video output through HDMI connection
* DVD upscaling to 1080p
* Uncompressed multi channel linear PCM output
* Build quality with rigid beam construction
* BD-Java interactive capability


Sure the world is waiting - but I'm more on the sit back and enjoy the show side.. I'm gonna buy a HD player once the studios / industry has made up their mind about the 2 formats. Why one would pay 500+$ for a player that may not be supported in a few years is beyond me. And with all the blacklisting or remote locking players of players via internet or new movies there is even less incentive for me to splash out money for this.

[siddharthagandhi]

Isn't there a Toshiba player that will support both HD DVD and Blu-Ray? Get that one.

[HardwareGeek]

Isn't there a Toshiba player that will support both HD DVD and Blu-Ray?
I don't think so. Can anyone confirm or deny? Thx.

[communist]

LG or Samsung (?) plan to create players that will take both disc types - but there arent available yet.

The only thing I'm looking forward in regard to the new media is being able to backup more data per disc and update it regularly :)

[siddharthagandhi]

I dunno who the company is, but I am certain I heard about a company going to support both disc types.

[HardwareGeek]

thx, guys.

[MrTroy]

Isn't there a Toshiba player that will support both HD DVD and Blu-Ray? Get that one.That would be real stupid of them, as they are the producers of HD DVD. :p

[Audionut]

That would be real stupid of them, as they are the producers of HD DVD. :p

Yes but, the left arm of the companies, don't always talk to the right arm.
Go figure.

[siddharthagandhi]

Its some other brand but someone is producing a both Bluray and HD DVD player.

[lexor]

This (http://www.saitti.org/images/HD-DVD.jpg) is why HD is necessary, as far as I am concerned.

[siddharthagandhi]

That proves that HD is much better than SD, but that doesnt prove whether HD is necessary. Necessary as in, you must have it whatsoever.

[foxyshadis]

Heck, TV and movies aren't necessary by those standards, we could get all our entertainment by playing sudoku. xD But the emergence of even more vivid, life-like, larger than life detail is quite addictive, it's one of the reasons why people still go to the theater. And given the way films add so much contrast to further heighten the effect, it's quite powerful with well-made movies. People were content with tiny tvs and later vhs for a long time, after all, when they didn't know what they were missing.

Personally, I won't hop on this bandwagon for a while, just because my finances are better put elsewhere, but I'm salivating over the extra crispness.

[Mug Funky]

http://www.sonic.com/about/press/news/2006/04/HighDefAuthoring.aspx

first HD authoring software, apparently (i wonder where the first releases got authored? hardware rigs i guess, or in cooperation with sonic?).

anyhoo, definitely isn't a bandwagon i'm jumping on yet either. i'm not too keen to have a better picture of Russel Crowe thankyou very much... if i want that i'll just make him angry with a telephone :)

however, as sources for DVDs it's looking promising. my experiments with something as lo-fi as HDV showed there's a lot that can be done at this resolution if the destination is SD size (16mm is SO GRAINY at HD size. but you can filter like 8x as hard at this res and not lose much useful detail when you resize to D1).

[DeepDVD]

Anyone already found out, what codec they use on their first releases and other details?

Is HDCP the reason we won't see a screenshot of hd-video in here anymore? xD

[HardwareGeek]

Hi DeepDVD,Is HDCP the reason we won't see a screenshot of hd-video in here anymore? xDThat's high-bandwidth digital content protection. I think it protects digital streams after they've been decrypted, once again by encrypting them, but with a different system. I don't think it has anything to do with posting of images in this forum.

[siddharthagandhi]

VC-1 is the codec for all releases right now.

[DeepDVD]

@ HardwareGeek

I meant that getting 1:1-Screenshots isn't possible anymore. If there's a chance to make screenshots of a film, there will be people do batch-scripts and could get a digital copy of the whole film and so on. I doubt they give us the chance to do it.

@ siddharthagandhi

Thanks, that was all I wanted to know. So they still have problems to build a system with H.264-hardware encoder I think.
Wheather the players support other codecs for the future?

[siddharthagandhi]

Everything, including MPEG-4 AVC and MPEG-2 and VC-1 is supported by the current players, its just that the first video HD DVD releases are encoded in VC-1, they plan to do the other codecs sometime later.

[smok3]

how much more/less cpu intensive decoding is with vc-1 compared to h264 and compared to mpeg2? (educated guess will do fine.)

[foxyshadis]

smok3:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=832229#post832229
Along with the rest of that thread's discussion.

[zambelli]

It's somewhat pointless to make H.264 vs VC-1 generalizations. It's really a battle of implementations, not specs.

[temporance]

It's somewhat pointless to make H.264 vs VC-1 generalizations. It's really a battle of implementations, not specs.
Hmm. So there's no point comparing any compression standards then? Maybe MPEG-4 ASP is better than H.264, and MPEG-1 better than VC-1, but we haven't seen those implementations yet!

[foxyshadis]

I think zambelli was referring to the fact that VC-1 AP is so similar to AVC HP that encoders will likely further approach the efficiency of current AVC codecs (as well as the speed, hopefully) as time wears on. If you were to compare it to the x264 of a year ago (have I only been using it that long?) you'd probably find its quality higher and faster. It's impossible to say whether one or the other will make major gains over the other in the coming years or keep parity.

[Dayvon]

I don't know if this discussion subsided, (i didnt take time to read the ENTIRE thread) but I kind of agree with Zarxrax. HD is impressive, no question. But I do have to say that we can all agree that the SOURCE video quality is most important.

So many people here are saying, "put in a DVD and compare it to the HD version!!! HD is better!!" Well, of course it is. The HD encode is being upsized to whatever resolution your screen is at, and so is the DVD (if both are viewed full screen).

What happens with HDMI is that resolution is taken away, or reduced. But you have to consider that the resolution WAS there. This is not the case of a DVD compared to the HD source. You have to consider them seperately. In other words, DVD vs downsampled HD vs HD. What Zarxrax is saying is that downsampled HD is looks almost as good as the HD source it came from, and I say, it should!! If a good downsampling is done properly, then the downsampled version should look dang close to the HD, and better than if a version was made at the downsampled resolution (because of encoding).

Maybe I'm mixed up in this, but I really don't think so. We all know that the higher quality the source, the higher quality your picture will be especially since the source will be modified in some way once it hits your processor. HD downsized is better than DVD because the source WHEN IT HITS YOUR PROCESSOR is higher quality.

[Blue_MiSfit]

HDMI doesn't take any resolution away...

[Dayvon]

HDMI doesn't take any resolution away...
LOL
I'm talking about the HDCP AACS "Image Constraint Token" that can be implemented through lack of HDCP compliance on the HDMI connections.

[mercat1]

I have a HDTV tuner in my PC. The resolution is definitely better than what I see on DVD (these being viewed on a 17" monitor, full screen).

[unmei]

I have the feeling that when the image constraint token takes effect, the resize algorithm used will not be a very high quality one. Maybe it is defined what to use - if not my bet would go for most implementations to use bilinear or bicubic. and your screen upsizing again probably also uses something like bilinear/cubic which might be "a problem" when the upscaling factor is rather large.