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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."
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
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)...