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View Full Version : Difference between AVC used on Blu-ray and HD DVD

TinTime
24th February 2010, 15:56
Is there a difference between the AVC video streams found on Blu-ray and those used on HD DVDs?

I use eac3to to demux the video streams and then MKVMerge to, well, mux to mkv :)

The reason I ask is that for playback I use DXVA bitstreaming with MPC-HC. My graphics card is an Nvidia 8600GT. This works fine with Blu-ray AVC streams. However I get corruption with HD-DVD AVC streams. The picture sort of freezes every few frames and then bits of the frozen frame hang around for a bit. Playing these back with CoreAVC using CUDA works fine though.

Does anyone have any ideas about this? It's not exactly a showstopper for me as I can just use CoreAVC for the two HD DVDs I own that actually use AVC. I'm just curious to know what the problem might be.
nurbs
24th February 2010, 18:14
As far as I remember the main differences were VBV and the keyframe interval. The HD-DVDs I had were also all soft telecined while non of the Blu-rays I have is, so maybe that somehow causes problems with the player.
laserfan
24th February 2010, 18:39
Are you sure the streams are AVC and not VC-1?
TinTime
24th February 2010, 18:58
As far as I remember the main differences were VBV and the keyframe interval. The HD-DVDs I had were also all soft telecined while non of the Blu-rays I have is, so maybe that somehow causes problems with the player.

That's a point - eac3to removes pulldown. Perhaps there's a problem there. I'll try playing the original EVOs and see what happens. It just seems strange that DXVA is broken for these streams but CUDA isn't. Admittedly I don't really understand what the difference between CUDA and DXVA bitstreaming is.

Are you sure the streams are AVC and not VC-1?

Positive. I wouldn't have had much joy with CoreAVC otherwise :)
setarip_old
24th February 2010, 22:24
@TinTime

Hi!
Originally Posted by laserfan and TinTime
Are you sure the streams are AVC and not VC-1?

Positive. I wouldn't have had much joy with CoreAVC otherwise

If I remember correctly, the vast majority of the earlier HD-DVD releases (by Universal, Paramount, and Warner) used VC-1.

(HD-DVDs may have used MPEG-2, VC-1, or AVC (h.264)...
TinTime
25th February 2010, 21:34
Yes, every other HD DVD I've got uses VC-1 for the main feature. I've just got the two that use AVC.