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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."
Now we have to throw away all the current players and TV's to take advantage of this. People are just now getting used to DVD's and they want to switch formats so soon? Bad move.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
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
How does this cut down on fears of piracy? Why couldn't they be compressed back down?
"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."
No it won't, it will have no effect because people will just reencode it to a lower bitrate. Whether the DVD is at9 mbps or 20 mbps people will still encode it to 3000 kbps and fit it on 2 or 3 cd's
That kind of size won't be so scary. Remember when CD media first started coming out and the record industry smugly thought that it was unpiratable because 650M was just so ungodly huge. Even DVD movies, oversized as they are for net piracy, can be recompressed down to a file that can be transferred over a broadband connection with little trouble.
The moral of the story is: size is a poor piracy prevention tool. Technology will eventually catch up no matter how big you make something.
I read the internet for the articles.
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?
Except that Blu-ray couldn't possibly be mass market by Christmas 2003. The nice thing about a red laser system is that the physical medium of the disc doesn't have the change, which means the hardware in existing DVD players can be mostly the same, with just a different decoder chip. Fast computers will just need a software update. And, of course, replication and duplication facilities won't need to chance, so it'll cost well less than $1 to make an HD disc, which means we could start seeing mass market prices very quickly.
This is really good from the Hollywood perspective. They'll get us all to buy 1280x720 red laser HD discs from 2003-2006, and then come out with 1920x1080 Blu-ray as a mass market technology around Christmas 2006-2008, when they get all the kinks worked out. Same way we've already bought DVD and laserdisc versions of the same movie.
The article claims that the compression technology will be from Microsoft, but my contacts tell me it is much more likely to be MPEG-4, in order to have a technology not tied to any one vendor. Of course, Windows Media derived codecs would offer better compression efficiency. We shall see.
My video compression blog
Quite a bit of intelligent and deeply detailed writing on this subject (and many more) has graced the pages of Widescreen Review. Their point of view is strongly in favor of waiting for a higher density, higher bitrate DVD formats over trying to rig the existing DVD format for high definition content. They claim the inside perspective is that high definition DVD is at least five (5) years away. They have also provided extensive coverage of the new D-Theater D-VHS high definition consumer tape format that is available right now for people with fancy video projectors and deep pockets. D-Theater doesn't look like it will ever be a mass-market technology, but its apparently a really nice interim technology and it seems to deliver video that truly does rival quality theatrical media. (If your projector is up to snuff, of course.)
The problem I see is that the existing DVD format has become a huge success, with the consumer electronics and movie industries heavily investing in it and heavily profiting in it. Consumers love the format, despite its irritating, customer-hostile feaures (such as region encoding and material the user interface prevents you from fast-forwarding through or skipping). I doubt either industry wants to compromise or confuse such a successful market. (Similarly, gamers have been so happy playing Half Life and its mods that Valve hasn't bothered to release a completely new game product in many years.)
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
That the primary purpose of reviewing this is to "fix" the "joke" copyprotection that's on the classic DVD. The first time around they either poorly underestimated the abilities of a few dedicated hackers or they just didn't understand simple technology when it came to encryption. of course, as much as the copy protection was considered an important factor on DVDs, the storage capacity, image quality, and lack of degregation were more important when it was designed. The copy protection was an industry requirement, one that despite their efforts has made no difference. Not really sure what the purpose of region coding was, beyond forcing people to buy multiple DVD players or to use them illegally.
Despite their abilities to improve the encryption on their new DVD standard, it will only delay, but not competely thwart the efforts of those who have the desire and the ability to break it. The second ANY software is available to play it back, that software has to be distributed. It can always be disassembled and rebuilt from the assembly level. It will take a LONG time, but if someone wants it badly enough.....
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
VHS became popular in the mid 70's I think. (I don't know, wasn't conceived then). DVD was released in 1996-7. I bought my first DVD player in 1998 from Circuit City. I paid 250 for it, got a new movie, and 5 divx discs. (Still love whipping them out and scaring my friends). When Divx went under I got 100 check in the mail. So my question is, will this new standard be avaliable less than 2 years after its release for 150 dollars? If not, they are wasting theirs and our collective time.
The most good that will come from this format is putting the last nail in the VHS coffin.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
That's all we need. Star Wars: Episode III HD-DVD, now with 12 hours of behind-the-scenes footage, 2 hours of additional footage, and Episode II, just for kicks. All for the low price of 179.99$.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Look at the difference between wavs and MP3s. uncompressed vs compressed.
Even with as huge format, all you need is someone with a acceptable to the mass market format that people will tolerate. People listen to MP3s all the time even though it is usually easy to hear the difference between that and the real original.
depending on the content, people will put up with a lot of stuff.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
actually, there are a few reasons for this:
1) Blu-Ray hasn't come out yet.
3) Writable Blu-Ray hasn't come out yet and won't for a while.
3) Rewritable Blu-Ray hasn't come out yet and won't for even longer.
4) Even when rewritable Blu-Ray comes out, the media probably won't have nearly as many rewrite cyles as you would need to make a hard disk out of it, unless you want to replace it once a week. In fact, the use of a high-refresh rate application like virtual memory would make the disk overheat and fail very quickly.
5)Rewriting it will probably be too slow to be acceptable, especially if you want to use it for virtual memory.
6) By the time all these concerns are addressed, we will all be using 10TB holographic drives.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
... Hollywoods biggest fear is that Britney Spears will try to make another movie.
Piracy is a close second.
I'm imagining that the largest downside with Blu-ray is that it requires the DVD producers to completely upgrade their infrastructure of DVD mastering equipment. With a different encoding standard, you could theoretically use the same equipment to master both DVD's and HD-DVD's. How big of a downside that is... I don't know.
I wonder why the industry doesn't just do both? Better compression, better capacity means even more freedom for content producers.
Are you telling me you have 90 gigs of mp3s?
Assume that three Blu-Ray discs hold 30 gigabytes each for a total of 90 gigabytes. Assume that archive-quality stereo MP3 audio takes 32 kilobytes per second (256 kbps with LAME or FhG). This makes 937500 seconds (260 hours and change) of music spread across 3 discs.
Now assume that a typical album is one hour long (some run shorter, some longer). It's not inconceivable that a collector may have purchased 260 CDs from RIAA and independent labels, not to mention some tape and vinyl that the collector has digitized and DSPd to hide the artifacts inherent in those mediums.
Will I retire or break 10K?
> This could be one of the reasons for keeping with red laser, if blue was used then it wouldn't read the old media.
Of course, high-end players could probably just have multiple lasers if necessary.
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
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.
It isn't bigger media that's the problem, it's faster media. Wider busses, faster record speeds, etc. Nobody wants to bother with a burn if it's going to take all day.
They're going with the red laser for now because later on they can use the same standard with the blue laser to have everyone throw their red-laser equipment out to upgrade. Thus they get money for both technologies rather than skipping a generation. There are always very early adopters who will buy a new technology out of some desperate need to solve an issue, no matter the cost or the marginal benefits.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Only 30 GB?
Damn, it'll still take nearly 20 of the things to store a 2 hour, 720p movie in uncompressed form.
Heck, that (30 GB) is a little less than 2.5 hours of standard DV video. (DV doesn't use inter-frame compression, it's more like motion-JPEG rather than MPEG, to give clean frame boundaries for edits.)
-- Alastair
On the other hand, you may be thinking, perhaps they'll make lenghthier movies then.
You mean like Lord of the Rings (3 parts total 9 hours), Star Wars (6 parts total 12 hours), or Harry Potter (7 parts total 12 hours)?
Will I retire or break 10K?
- Moritz's DVD ripping and transcoding with Linux
howto
- Linux SVCD guide, written in French
- My own Linux Digital Fansubbing Guide (shameless plug) -- intended for anime fansubbers but perfectly serviceable as a ripping guide if you ignore the stuff about subtitles.
The summary is that all the stuff your friends do under windows (divx, vbr, two-pass encoding, pulldown flags, inverse telecine, etc.) are perfectly feasible under linux too, using free software.The only reasons I got broadband were
Software downlaods took such a long time on dialup.
Dialup has a 2 hours line termination time in the UK
I can set-up a pratical home server for mail &co...
dial-up is find for just browsing the web.
I could run my monitor at 1600 x 1200 and get great resolution etc... but i can't tell the difference between 1600x 1200 and 1280 x 1024. and 1024 x 768 is fine for most things!
I could wathch a DVD on my PC monitor at 1600x 1200 (far better than HDTV) but It looks fine on
my crap old TV.
Given that I gan already watch viedos/DVDs at better then HTDV quality but choose to use my old crap TV instead, I don't see myself getting HTDV any time soon.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
OK, I have to say it, but your maths sucks!
/lot/ of music!
90 GB = 92160 MB = 94371840 KB
94371840 KB / 32 KB = 2949120 Seconds = 49152 Hours over three discs, or 16384 Hours per Disc. That's a
Disclaimer: I meant what I thought, not what I wrote! What? You can't read my Mind? Oh dear!
IR lasers are used in the low density storage medium known as the Compact Disc. I think DVDS use a yellow laser, and the newer "proposed standard" uses blue. Notice that shorter wavelength correlates with higher density.
BTW, visible spectrum semiconductor lasers were not (AFAIK) available to the designers of the CD.
Consmers have been screwed by hollywood already, ill break it down:
HDTV, as a potential standard, has been around for a LONG time, but the bug media players keep stonewalling, and pusing back the date the FCC would have them force adoption by, among other things, throwing a million different standards out there and not agreeing on one. I seem to remember the FCC deadline being 2002..... And now, i have to wait another year to get what will more then likely be a defective standard. The reason, is they need to FINALLY invest in an infrastruture change after forcing consumers to stuick with the relativly low bandwidth and quality TV we still have after all these years. This then creates a catch-22, as it has for years... BigMedia doesnt want to invest in something where there is no market, tv makers cant drop prices and make a "standard" box because BigMedia wont decide on a standard and wont/cant release content, and then consumers may want but have no content or way to view it.
The end result of this will be: consumers get screwed out of a GOOD standard that provides (potentially) excellent quality, and i fear it will end up with inferior quality and useability.
On to DVD: People have know for YEARS that DVD does not provide the bandwidth to do full HDTV content. Issue one, 9gb is too small, issue 2, home readrs cant get to the datarate needed to even read off a datastream at that resolution. So, once again,insted of taking an oportunity to think ahead for once, we will end up with a standard that is 2 years dead when it comes out. And consumers STILL need to buy a new player. Most just wont know they are buying obsolete technology as they have been for years.
Im completly frustrated about all this, and the FCC needs to apoint an OUTSIDE firm with no intrest in bigmedia to hammer out standards that are good for the consumer, are timely, and have potential of more then 2 years ago. I dont know why what is happening is acceptable to anyone.
"Stuff... In my home!? NEVER!" - Zim on Invader Zim
"I want the toilet seat!" - Little Dog on Two Stupid Dogs
I hope electronics makers are smart enough to make players with component output and not be forced in to DVI like the film makers want. Really piss off the current HDTV owners.
They're not ignoring the blue-laser encoding. They've dismissed it since it would require a retooling of the entire recording industry, requiring the movie industry to pass the cost on to consumers. Some people might be willing to pay $35 to $50 per DVD, but I'm not, and neither are the vast majority of consumers.
90 GB = 92160 MB = 94371840 KB
I admit that I screwed up and mistakenly did my calculations assuming one disc. You're a lot closer than I was. However, storage device capacity in press releases is generally stated as metric gigabytes (1,000,000,000), not binary gigabytes (1,073,741,824). 90,000,000,000 bytes / 32,000 bytes/sec = 2812500 seconds.
2949120 Seconds = 49152 Hours
No, 2949120 Seconds = 49153 Minutes = 819 Hours.
But that's still a metric buttload of capacity for audio.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Oh my. I have nearly half a terabyte.
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?
I have reservations about both the Blu-Ray and the proposed HD-DVD being standardized in the near future.
First, as many have stated, using a new compression algorithm with the exisitng stoage of DVDs can be both good and bad. It is definitely good studios, who already have the standard DVD mastering equipment, and for DVD player manufacturers, who have already developed the red-laser hardware. It is good for the consumer in that the new players would probably be pretty cheap. I think cheapness is key for the acceptance of HDTV technology. Currently the sets are very expensive, and with the limited number of HD broadcasts, there is little incentive to buy one. Of course supply and demand is at work here--if more people bought them, the price would go down. Therefore, affordable HD-DVD players would go a long way in making HDTV's more attractive and useful, which would make their price drop and increase their market presence. Hopefully we would then see more HD broadcasts.
The problem with using exisiting DVD storage for HD-DVD is that is probably going to be obsolete sooner... bad for the consumer. Plus, I question how good the new compression algorithms really are. HDTV will tend to make compression artifacts and defects all the more obvious... again bad for the consumer.
Blu-Ray has many benefits in that has a much higher capacity (100GB if I remember correctly), so it will probably have a longer lifetime in the consumer marketplace. And, the picture quality would undoubtedly be of higher quality because the compression ratios would be lower. However, I fear that it is too costly of a technology to be a standard today or the next year. It would be great 5 years down the road, but not now. My reasoning? Blue lasers are really not ready for prime time... They are difficult to manufacture and are still extremely expensive. DVD player manufacturers still probably have much work to do to develop a consumer-grade blue laser disc playing system. Furthermore, the disc manufacturers would have to completely retool. I can see the discs and players being very expensive for a long time. This could further delay HDTV's acceptance in the mass market.
If I had to pick a technology today, it would have to be Hollywood's HD-DVD format, because I think it is important to give consumers incentive to buy HDTV's. Unless the Blu-Ray format can be substantially cheapened in one year (unlikely), I say wait a few more years for Blu-Ray.
> I for one REALLY doubt that the movie studios are going to come out with 20 hour movies.
Studios don't like movies which run much over two hours, since they get less showings in an evening at the theatre. Fewer showings means fewer seats, which means fewer paying customers, which means less profits for the industry.
That's at least part of the reason that Terry Gilliam's masterpiece "Brazil" was show for many years in many cinemas as the 90-odd minute "studio" cut, whilst Gilliam's edit (the "Director's cut" I guess) is more like 140 minutes. Gilliam's version is, IM(NS)HO, is by far the superior version of the movie. (OK, it's more complex that that - there's Gilliam's "European" version at 140-ish minutes, his US version at about 130 and the "Studio" version at 90ish. This is far more information than you will ever need, and I apologise now for the fact that I am rambling on in an almost completly off-topic direction about one of my favourite movies. Sorry
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
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)...
Other than that I agree with what you've written.
* I don't have the exact capacities in front of me. Indeed, I don't have the resolutions in front of me, someone quoted SVCD resolution as being 320x240 earlier, which was equally incorrect, it's something like 400x576 but I don't have that figure to hand either. What a day. You can find this kind of thing at VCD Helper, a useful reference for all of this kind of stuff.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Unless you're, like Valenti, suggesting that our role is to give Hollywood as much as possible in return for as little as possible...?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
All this whining about red-laser DVDs not being sufficient is irrelevant. Anyone here taken 1080i HDTV mpeg2 transport stream and transcoded it to 9Mb/s MPEG4, raise your hands -- anyone else, sit down and shut up.
I know some people over on avsforum.com who did exactly that, except they used DiVX which is almost the same as MPEG4. The results were fantastic. For the most part it was not possible to distinguish between the original and the DiVX. With a commercial MPEG4 I am sure the results will be even better.
Other then brand-new copy-prevention schemes, and the whole having to buy it again thing, I look forward to Hi-Def DVDs.
If they are smart, they will also add anamorphic 2.35:1 and pan&scan tracks so that dumb people can buy the same discs as smart people and still be happy. (Yes, I know those two are part of the current DVD standard, but they aren't common enough in players for any publisher to use them.) And, if they are really smart, they will do double-sided discs - one side regular DVD and one side Hi-Def DVD. But when as the MPAA ever been smart?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
So by getting higher quality, you don't feel so bad about getting gouged by the MPAA? If it upsets you, just stop giving them your dollars.
do not read this line twice.
The reason why they're going with the old red-ray instead of the new blue-ray is very simple:
Backwards compatibility.
The only way they can entice people to buy a new HD DVD player, is if it can play their old SD DVD's as well.
Now, of course one could conceivably build a player with both red and blue ray lenses, but sticking with red-ray only means manufacturing the players will be cheaper.
Cheaper players means faster implementation in the market place.
Don't forget, it's all about the Benjamins...
-- This sig for rent.
The first crack was they identified the algorithm and *one* key that was left in the open.
Then someone analyzed the hash-algorith it used.. (The disk stores a 'one way hash' of the correct key.) They noticed that the hash algorithm leaked about 16 bits of the 40 bit key. So, instead of requiring a few days to try a trillion keys, they only need check a few ten million, and any disc can be broken in a few seconds.
40 bits is still too few to be hard to crack, but the real flaw was that they had a crap algorithm. Without the algorithm.flaws, it'd take a day or two to crack a disc. (Assuming that the algorithm was public. Most of their security was in the secret algorithm)
Do you have any of the "Bad news" stuff? I have the tape but it has fallen apart long ago :( Couldn't find them on napster when it existed
He who defends everything, defends nothing. -- Fredrick The Great
one of the resons I don't like the cinima is that the refresh rate isn't high enough for the screen size.
When ther's 'fast action' on the screen evrything flickers, around 4x the number of frames per second would be required to give a reasonable viewing experiance.
The other reason, is that there aren't that many good films around.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Maybe they were produced with a crummy encoder. I get pretty decent quality with the methods outlined here (it's aimed at transcoding TiVo video to SVCD, but the encoding part should cover any source material).
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
As long as theatres are using the pancake platter system, movies can't go over 3 and a half hours and still be shown in the majority of theatres. The old ones that use 2 reels, and the brand new ones that use digital will have no problem... but all the rest will. This is a Bad Thing(tm) for studios, so they will have to limit movies to 3.5 hours at a time for now, for purely physical reasons. Any more than that, and the film falls off the platter and onto the floor of the booth. Whoops.
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
They want to sell the DVD's after the theatre release. Due to the cost of a film print, the prints get sent to other markets after they were shown in the USA. They don't want the USA DVD's in the other country competing with the local movie house opening night.
The truth shall set you free!
output the video to a low resolution flat panel, and use a very high resolution digital video camera to re-record it.
<speculation>
Palladium has that covered too, with subliminal watermarks that survive a conversion to analog and back to digital. In addition, the sale of digital video cameras will be permitted only to those people who have a legitimate reason to own one (scientific research, motion picture production, etc). Just like driving a car or practicing medicine or law, owning or using a digital camcorder will require a license from a government.
</speculation>
Unless Americans get the DMCA repealed NOW, who knows how many more restrictions the movie industry is going to demand, some of which fly directly in the face of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution?
Will I retire or break 10K?