why blue ray for h264 hd films???

[Morte66]

And yet again, does your screen have a physical 1920x1200 dot matrix ?

I see. Yes, it does have 1920x1200 actual dots.

[nm]

At work I have a 1600x1200 LCD, which means the picture will get downsized to fit in the 1600px width (and that the whole purpose of HD is rendered useless in my case).
You could also play the video without resizing so that 160 pixels get cropped from left and right sides. Probably not the best option for the cinematic experience, but good enough for quality comparisons. At least when used that way, I wouldn't say the display renders HD useless.

[Jay Bee]

Well, my views have not really changed:

- The noise in the film original creates a false impression of detail. The encodes mostly lose noise, not real detail. But they do lose some real detail.

- x264 is not ideal if you want to retain grain. I don't like grain, if I were encoding this stuff for myself I'd denoise and sharpen it. But some people like grain, and x264+DVD9 will not serve them so well.

- It would be interesting to see what VC-1 does with grain on this material. Ditto grain retention tools for h264.

- Absent grain, the DVD9 movie encodes are very good. You have to take still frames and do direct A/B to find fault. They're good enough for the vast majority of the market, but people who own ten thousand dollar projectors with thousand dollar lamps would get some advantage from bigger files.

- I would rather have DVD9 encodes than pay 500 pounds for a Blu-Ray drive. My DVD-RW drive cost less than the average Blu-Ray disc. If the drives come down to fifty pounds, maybe the quality gain is worth the money.

- Sports are different. High motion 720p/60 is a solid justification for big discs. But I don't buy any sports stuff.

In other words... it depends what you're after.

Yeah, good summary. It really depends on which factors you take into account. When comparing the price difference between DVD and DVD-HD/BR hardware then of course the above seen differences in quality aren't worth it. We'll just have to wait and see how long it takes for prices to drop.

[Sharktooth]

The most important fact is probably a triple layer HD-DVD (51Gb) would be still cheaper than a dual layer Blu-Ray (50Gb) offering almost the same space...
However the quality difference (using modern standards) between actual Blu-Ray and HD-DVD at those bitrates is negligible.

[Soulhunter]

Why? Hmm... Recording HDTV? Must be realtime [no 2pass, probably not so complex coding... So you need much higher bitrate to get artifact-free results]. Storing Data? Nice alternative to tapes which have a higher capacity but no direct data access like you have on a disc... And its much easier to make the ppl buy BluRay burners and blanks if its a format which is used anyway as it replaces the DVD, no? So corps can sell new stuff? Nah, for h.264 on DVD9s youd need a new player as well... To flood us with DRM shit? Nah, they could do the same with h.264 on DVD9s!

Ps: Imo -> You need much more space than a DVD9 offers to get transparent results for 2h of average compressible 1080p content... And if the runtime is longer and/or the content is very incompressible you probably need the reserves BluRay/HD-DVD offer... Tho the bitrate-limits of the video standards render this useless what I read, no!?


Bye

[reepa]

Again the high bitrate encode has clearly the best detail although CompositeSVT-002.mkv is a lot better than the clip from the last comparision.

Any particular reason the restricted version actually has more detail (roof tiles for example) than the unrestricted one? Shouldn't it be the other way around? Or is the unrestricted pic from the 50fps version?

[Jay Bee]

Yes, the restricted one actually has a higher bitrate. Morte66 explained why in his post.

[plonk420]

Apart from the 120 black lines, what's the difference between my 1920x1200 LCD (hardware calibrated for photo proofing) and a "native 1080p monitor"? I can't see why you're drawing a distinction.

he was sarcastically referring to the majority of (affordable) widescreen LCDs being 1680x1050 (or even mid-range). not everyone is rich like you do get a 1080p (or better) native LCD.

edit: FFS i need to stop reading/replying to threads i'm not specifically looking for, especially when i don't have anything productive to add :(