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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
"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:
$bash: decss_dvd
surely this is possible, and it wouldnt require any more disk space than that required for the avi file.
-- john
That the primary purpose of reviewing this is to "fix" the "joke" copyprotection that's on the classic DVD. The first time around they either poorly underestimated the abilities of a few dedicated hackers or they just didn't understand simple technology when it came to encryption. of course, as much as the copy protection was considered an important factor on DVDs, the storage capacity, image quality, and lack of degregation were more important when it was designed. The copy protection was an industry requirement, one that despite their efforts has made no difference. Not really sure what the purpose of region coding was, beyond forcing people to buy multiple DVD players or to use them illegally.
Despite their abilities to improve the encryption on their new DVD standard, it will only delay, but not competely thwart the efforts of those who have the desire and the ability to break it. The second ANY software is available to play it back, that software has to be distributed. It can always be disassembled and rebuilt from the assembly level. It will take a LONG time, but if someone wants it badly enough.....
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
That's all we need. Star Wars: Episode III HD-DVD, now with 12 hours of behind-the-scenes footage, 2 hours of additional footage, and Episode II, just for kicks. All for the low price of 179.99$.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
... Hollywoods biggest fear is that Britney Spears will try to make another movie.
Piracy is a close second.
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?
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.
- 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.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
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.
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)...
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.