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High Definition DVD
Vinnie_333 writes "Looks like the specs for HD-DVD are currently being discussed by Hollywood big wigs, with an optimistic product release date of Xmas of 2003. Unfortunately, they seem to be completely disregarding the higher storage capacity of the Blu-Ray disc standard, that will hold 6 times the amount of a DVD-9, for the current red laser format with a different compression algorithm. Come on, more storage is always a good thing. Not only will it give us the quality we deserve, it is likely to cut down on Hollywood's largest fear (piracy) by making the media ungodly HUGE."
once the writes for those huge disks come out, hollywood would be shit scared. you could burn all of your mp3's on 3 disks and send them to anyone anywhere.
plus you could still compress the movies down to regular cdr sizes. you would just loose all that extra stuff you dont have now.
-- john
It seems to me the reason why hardly anybody owns HDTV is that there aren't many broadcasts in HDTV. But, there aren't many broadcasts in HDTV because there aren't enough people out there that have HDTVs. So, if people start buying HDTVs in order to take advantage of the better quality of HD-DVDs, will this provide incentive for more HDTV broadcasts since more people will own HDTVs? Or, are we just going to go another decade without HDTV?
i dont have a dvd player, and the only people i know who rip them use windows. shouldnt it be possible to pipe the information between programs?
/dev/dvd | avi_compressor -o dvd.avi -
something like this:
$bash: decss_dvd
surely this is possible, and it wouldnt require any more disk space than that required for the avi file.
-- john
The problem with the red-laser DVD is that it is already pushed to its limits to hold ordinary encoded PAL/NTSC video data plus the new high-data-rate audio (DTS and/or DD), and even then critical viewers mutter about compression artefacts. HD TV displays are, to make them sellable to Joe Public, going to require about four times as many pixels on screen as ordinary PAL/NTSC. Compressing HDTV harder is going to result in a display which is pretty well identical to existing DVD playback, rather negating the point of shelling out the bucks for a new receiver/display unit.
If they want four times as many pixels on screen, the designers are going to have to use a record media with a higher data transfer rate; they can't get that from DVDs except by perhaps spinning them at four times their rated speed, and that only works for 44 minute TV episodes. If they want to sell two-hour long movies without having to do the laserdic thang of flipping and changing discs every hour or so, they'll need the blue laser.
Blu-Ray (tm) is backwards-compatible. It'll play anything that comes in a 12cm optical disc -- CD, CD/G, DVD, SVCD, maybe even DVD-Audio, but HDTV replay is the reason it was designed in the first place.
Don't expect to see Blu-ray (tm) recorders for a while though. It was bad enough getting DVD-R lasers to work.
I was talking to some people on an HDTV forum about this. I want an HDTV, but I'm not going to get one until I can get a DVD player and an HDTV that can do 720p
To have a DVD that can contain enough information to have that kind of resolution, you need the blue laser.
Someone said that currently, blue lasers have a lifetime expectancy of 300 hours. Does anyone know if this is true? Is this a major roadblock?
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
HD TV displays are, to make them sellable to Joe Public, going to require about four times as many pixels on screen as ordinary PAL/NTSC.
Check your math.
720 x 480 = 345,600 pixels in an NTSC picture
1920 x 1080 = 2,073,600 pixels in a 1080 picture
That's exactly six times as many pixels, not four.
(Oh, and for the record, 720 pictures have 2.25 times as many pixels as NTSC pictures.)
If they want four times as many pixels on screen, the designers are going to have to use a record media with a higher data transfer rate
Again, just for the record, 1080i--including a Dolby Digital audio track-- compressed to about 20 Mbps is acceptable. (OTA HD is encoded at slightly over 19 Mbps and it's usually very good, while D-VHS at 25 Mbps is exceptional.)
Superbit DVDs are encoded at around 7 Mbps. So the difference between today's DVDs and HD-DVD-- not counting capacity, of course-- is only about a factor of 3. That wouldn't be too hard to achieve.
Then there's the capacity problem. I'd hate to have to buy a twenty disc set of a movie and have to flip discs every three minutes.
Not really sure what the purpose of region coding was, beyond forcing people to buy multiple DVD players or to use them illegally.
The purpose of region encoding was to allow them to sell the same movie at different prices in different markets and also to control their "marketing strategy". They'd want to do this for a number of reasons:
1. Different economies: The ideal price of a DVD (that at which the makers make the most money i.e. where price x #sold is maximized) is very different in France than in Japan. In order to maximize their revenues, the producers want to price them differently. Now, they don't want people buying the DVDs at the cheaper markets and selling them at the other markets because that negates the whole thing.
2. Distribution rights: Typically distribution rights to a movie are sold to a local distributor who then makes all the money off of it. If people are able to buy the same movie in Region A and import it in to Region B (they'd want to do this because of cost and availability), the distributor for Region A loses to the benefit of the distributor in Region B. They wanted to prevent that happening.
3. Marketing: Movies are (used to be more in the past) released at different times in different markets for various reasons (translations, legal, lazy asses, etc.). This is accompanied with advertising campaigns, star appearances, etc. They didn't want to undercut that by making DVDs from other regions available via import and mainly because they liked being in full control of distribution.
For all those reasons, region encoding seemed like a great idea to them.
Personally, I think it was a dumb idea and they should just have relied on the fact that in most situations it would just not be practical or cost-effective to import DVDs en masse just like book distributors do when they sell books at different prices in different parts of the world.
Mmmm.. Donuts
transfer rates are irrelevant in most cases, I don't care if I can get 6MB/s or 600MB/s after the DVD has spun up if takes 5 seconds to spin up and over 100ms to reposition.
That's why SCSI-drives are still better than IDE-drives, because they just don't make any > 10000rpm IDE-drives...
Then it's still feeding pixel data to the display driver, where it's in RAM, where it can be snooped.
Some of the early DVD decoder cards didn't place any RGB data on an AGP port or the PCI bus; they had their own display connector with a passthrough cable for the PC's video output, somewhat like what the first couple generations of Voodoo video cards did because 3dfx didn't yet have a VGA chip designed.
Or the DVD Forum could pressure Microsoft to introduce Secure DirectDraw in parallel to the current Secure Audio Path that only lets MS-signed codecs and MS-signed audio drivers touch DRM'd media. (Can NT apps running with admin privileges access arbitrary parts of RAM?)
Will I retire or break 10K?
Current-model DVD players use their 650nm lasers to play CD-Rs which are written using 780nm lasers with no problem. It can't work the other way around -- a 780nm laser is too crude to accurately decode a DVD track, but there's no reason why a 405nm Blu-Ray laser shouldn't track and read a regular DVD or a CD. One caveat is that CDs and DVDs are made in such a way that in their native pressed media, the depth of the pits is 1/4 the wavelength of the light normally used. This allows the laser optics to use an interference effect to enhance the signal; typically a pit in a pressed CD produces a 90% swing in the signal voltage from the optical detector. On a modern CD-R that drops to 30% as there is no pit involved, just a discoloured area of dye (CD-R/Ws are worse, at anything down to 14%).
First-gen Blu-Ray layers will play Blu-Ray pressed discs perfectly, DVD and CD pressed discs very well, DVD-Rs and CD-Rs not so well and rewriteable CD and DVD discs will be problematic. The next gen players will be better, just as modern DVD players don't have a problem with CD-R/W VCDs unlike the early days.
Hollywood's biggest fear is not piracy... It's that someone will be able to create and distribute a popular feature film outside the studio system. That would be the beginning of the end of their monopoly on popular film and hence culture.
Like DVD, expect it to be extremely difficult to author a properly formatted and encrypted HD DVD (not ripped from an existing one)...