v1.0 of HD-DVD Physical Specs Approved

Repran writes "The DVD Forum this week approved HD-DVD 1.0, a specification that will compete with Blu-Ray which is not yet approved for the future of the DVD disc format. This effectively gives manufacturers a green light to begin producing devices. In related news Microsoft's VC-9 codec has been included in the official HD-DVD specs."

Comments

For those not aware

[Tuvai]

HD-DVD format uses a 405nm-wavelength blue-violet laser technology, in contrast to the 650nm-wavelength red laser technology used in traditional DVD formats. The rewritable Blu-ray disc, with a data transfer rate of 36Mbps, can hold up to 27GB of data on a single-sided single layer disc (compared to the traditional DVD's 4.7GB capacity), which amounts to about 12 hours of standard video or more than 2 hours of high-definition video.
AOD is pretty much the same, except it has a storage capacity of 20GB on a single-layer disc

Re:Microsoft creating open standards?

[jared_hanson]

Well, it is an open standard, but that doesn't mean that it is royalty free. It's similar to MPEG in that the specification is known, but if you implement and sell it you are required to pay a royalty (to Microsoft in the case of Windows Media).

Essentially, with the mandate of this requirement for HD-DVD certification, it ensures that Microsoft will get a small fee from every HD-DVD certified player that is sold.

Re:Microsoft creating open standards?

[name773]

here's a link provided by Malc a few posts up.
on the left side, second to last paragraph of black text you see a notice for users to upgrade their drm software in order to play films marked with an asterisk. so open it hurts

Re:Compatibility

[cens0r]

Part of the problem is with widescreen movies. You can either sacrifice part of the image (pan&scan) or you can letterbox them. If you do that, you can get as few as 300 vertical scan lines actualy playing the image, which is very poor resolution. If you have a very large TV, you'll notice the jaggies; if you have a small or mid-size TV, you simply won't see much detail.

This isn't really true anymore. Almost any recent TV (last 4 years) of any quality has support for anamorphic DVD's. It uses all the scan lines to display the letterboxed image, and the dark parts are really just off. Any HD monitor will do this, and most recent SD monitors will as well.

Media reliability

[coolsva]

One of the key things to consider would be the media reliability

Magnetic media (like tape) are extremely reliable in the sense that I can slip a bit here, scratch a bit there but still hear or view the content with minimal distortion. They can also be 'overburned' by recording and playing at lower speeds.
Low density optical media (like CD) are also reasonable fault tolerant (with the built-in 8/13 and error checking) to the extent that radial scratches do not effect the content. There is also sufficient 'extra' space to permit overburning.
Medium density optical media (like DVD-R) are more stringent in terms of error checking. There is very little ECC and other error handling mechanisms and small scratches or smudges can really mess up the content. Also, there is no space for any overburning, the disks are 'maxed'

Now with these 25GB/110cm^2 disks, the disks are very error prone and I for one would be very careful of scratches or marks.

This plus the format of the data (MPEG-4) means that one small piece of data loss, I cannot view any frame till the next I frame (FYI, MPEG frames are I-full, P-delta and B-reverse delta. P and B depend on the prior/next frames and a typical sequence is IPBPBPBPBPBPBI and many videos have about 10 seconds or so between the I frames)

Dude...

[Ayanami Rei]

just download it to your harddrive, recode it to MPEG4 (or MPEG2) and burn it on a DVD.

Get one of those set top player deals from the Asian market that can play MPEG4 and read DVDs. No problem!