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Topic: Anyone consuming HD or Blu-ray?
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 03-14-2008 10:39 AM
quote: Scott Jentsch
How many people buy full-frame movies instead of the OAR version? These people either don't know or don't care about composition and are willing to sacrifice it in order to make it work with the device they have.
Those kinds of customers aren't even in the market for high definition.
Most of those who prefer fool screen movies are the same ones who kept their VHS tape machines for as long as possible. Now they're among the folks whose $39 DVD players are still new and they're picking up cheap DVDs at Wal-Mart, pawn shops and flea markets.
Apple and others promoting so called "HD" downloads aren't marketing to that crowd either. Unfortunately, they're trying to market to a lot of people who know better and know absolutely that Blu-ray delivers a much higher quality product.
Movies have never worked well on small devices either, even the fool screen versions. Mobile phone companies and companies like Apple are kidding themselves if they believe people will prefer to watch movies on little tiny devices.
Electronics companies have been trying to sell miniature movie players for over two decades. My parents still have one of those portable Hi8 tape machines with the little LCD screen. Sony sold pre-recorded movies for it and you could dub VHS tapes to it. The device was a nifty little product, but the novelty wore off fast. Watching movies on such a tiny screen is a chore.
Sony also got nowhere selling UMD movies for Playstation Portable. I know lots of people like to crap all over the Sony brand name because it's cool to insult Sony and lick the balls of Apple at the same time. But brand name worship matters little in this regard. Watching movies on a little bitty screen really sucks.
Only two markets have really been able to work for playing movies on smaller devices: notebook computers and video systems for cars. That's it. Mobile phones and iPods can do wonders with music, but they suck for video.
quote: Scott Jentsch
No one I know personally is willing to spend $400 on a Blu-ray player, even if I kept my opinions to myself. It's just too much money to spend on a discretionary (luxury) expense for most people, especially if they are happy with DVD's.
Playstation 3 is a big exception to that. I'm not rich by any means, and I shelled out more for the $500 80GB version.
quote: Scott Jentsch
If someone were to take all the available movies on Blu-ray and put them on a storage network in a local cable company office, that company could technically deliver every movie available for sale without spending a dime in external bandwidth.
It's an interesting idea. However, I'm pretty sure the copy protection system for Blu-ray Disc wouldn't allow that sort of thing to happen.
quote: Mike Blakesley
The movie companies are probably salivating for online rentals. Just imagine. Cutting two steps (distribs, stores) out of the delivery chain; getting people to pay EVERY TIME they want to watch a movie; no inventory costs; no shipping, returns, waste, etc.; and instant delivery to as many people as necessary.
I'm fairly certain Internet-based downloading will kill off traditional video rental stores. But it's going to be several years before Internet infrastructure makes that possible. Even when that happens, most people will still prefer to buy a tangible product when they buy a movie to own for their collection. They're going to want something on their book shelf, not a file hidden away somewhere on a hard disc.
There's also a ticking time bomb of sorts waiting to explode in a frightening way for those same media companies.
While so many are eagerly predicting downloads will kill Blu-ray, the eventual improvements of the Internet may pose a much more dire threat to traditional television broadcasting as we know it.
Your local TV station could be eliminated due to very high speed Internet use.
All TV stations depend on advertising revenue to stay in business. The DVR and "time shifting" has already caused serious problems with the ad revenue stream. The networks are already letting people watch TV shows online from their web sites or download them commercial free for a fee. Viewers are bypassing their local stations at an increasing rate. Eventually, just about any show that is broadcast on TV or cable will have some sort of option to watch online as well and perhaps even in HD quality too. Local stations, even ones in major markets would have a hard time competing with that.
There are some parallels between this issue and that of movie distributors releasing movies in theaters and on video at the same time. The practice is potentially very destructive.
The major broadcast networks get significant revenue from local affiliates. If most local stations fold due to Internet viewing, those networks are going to get seriously hurt as well. Their image and standing as a "major" network would be drastically reduced. And then they wouldn't have nearly as much money to buy rights to TV series or fund their news divisions.
Much higher speed Internet connections would also open huge opportunities for networks in other nations. An Internet user wouldn't have to confine himself with watching programming from the United States. He could check out programming from all over the world. This sounds great, but it also will further dillute the ad revenue stream for American TV networks.
I think the coming next generation of high speed Internet will bring about some big, life changing technologies and products. But it's also going to create a lot of upheaval in the business world too.
The "suits" have tunnel vision with this stuff. They're only thinking about movie downloads. For their own sake they better be thinking about all the other possibilities.
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David Stambaugh
Film God
Posts: 4021
From: Eugene, Oregon
Registered: Jan 2002
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posted 03-14-2008 10:46 AM
Joe, relax, take a stress pill. Comcast demoed their new 160mbps service, downloaded an entire movie in claimed-HD in 4 minutes. The current issue of The Absolute Sound magazine reported that the Comcast demo "wowed the keynote audience", but doesn't go into technical details. Since they could only d/l about 4.4GB in that 4 minutes, what option is there other than WMV-HD? You're the expert, you tell us. ![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif) Now if you're saying WMV-HD isn't HD, that's fine, but it all comes down to what one's definition of "HD" is. I've complained about NBC's craptastic HDTV here. They're calling it HD, but I bet money that WMV-HD looks WAY better than what I see from NBC. ![[Shrug]](graemlins/shrug.gif)
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David Stambaugh
Film God
Posts: 4021
From: Eugene, Oregon
Registered: Jan 2002
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posted 03-14-2008 01:26 PM
FOX has a subchannel here (CW), so the HD channel is getting substantially lower bitrate than the theoretical max. If it's, say, 12mbps, that works out to 5.4GB/hr. When I record something from FOX as a raw transport stream, I get about half that amount of data per hour, so the average bitrate is maybe 6mbps. Is my math wrong?
What resolution and bitrate do retailers like Best Buy and Circuit City use in their in-house demo loop? I mean, if you stand up close to the screen, you can see all kinds of artifacting including horrible mosquito noise around text or other objects. Or is that in the source material, like Discovery-HD or whatever the hell they happen to be showing at the time.
I'm in complete agreement, the current HDTV implementation is not nearly as good as it should be. Mostly because broadcasters and content providers are cheating, ignorant, or just plain stupid. And 4.4GB for a full-length movie in "HD" is not going to stand up to any close scrutiny. Most people won't notice the deficiencies though, so the providers will try to get away with whatever they can, just as they're already doing. But it seems like our arguments are more credible if we can quantify exactly what the deficiencies are that we see and hear and not just go with "Common sense says it can't be any good, therefore it's no good".
End of lecture. ![[Wink]](wink.gif)
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 03-14-2008 01:42 PM
quote: David Stambaugh
What A-B comparison did you (or someone credible you can refer to) perform to arrive at this declaration of fact?
I've downloaded plenty of "HD quality" video material off the Internet -with the main thing being movie trailers. Some look good and others look like ass and mainly so for differences in severity of compression levels.
Anyone with an Internet connected PS3 can see a good example of this. The HD trailer for Hancock looks decent in most spots, but the opening looks just plain horrible! There's some flying titles going through clouds in the sky. And there's just color banding out the ass and the clouds have little to no detail to them. The 1080p version has the bit rate dipping down to 4 million bits per second during that part of the trailer. It just looks like a giant mistake. When the CGI camera points down at the city of Los Angeles the bit rate recovers well over the 20Mb/s level and the trailer stops looking so terrible.
It doesn't matter what codec is used, be it the most latest tweakage of Microsoft's VC-1 Windows Media or MPEG-4 AVC, when it gets crushed down to those bit rates, even at 720p, the image quality is going to look like shit.
MPEG-2 video on DVD is already severely compressed to ratios of 100:1 or better. And that's with a 2 hour movie spanning 2 data layers on one disc. The results are often not without some nagging problems.
VC-1 and AVC are more advanced than MPEG-2, but not so much more advanced that you could fit a 720p movie in half the space normally taken by a dual layer 480p DVD movie. It's absolutely ridiculous. It's equal to taking already severely compressed DVD footage and increasing the compression level another 533%!
quote: Brad Miller
Remember, probably about 90% of the population thinks that a 16:9 set means "HD".
There's some truth to that. A few days ago some fellow at the Blu-ray.com forum was trying to insist the video material on discs 2 and 4 of the Bladerunner 5-disc collectors edition were HD. These 2 discs were standard DVDs, not BDs. The content on them, such as the Dangerous Days: the Making of Bladerunner documentary, were all anamorphic enhanced 480p. But he was trying to insist they were HD, despite others like myself telling him the DVD format wouldn't even support HD bandwidth needs, not even at 720p.
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