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Sony Completes First Full-Length Blu-ray Disc
john writes "Sony Pictures Home Entertainment announced that authoring has been completed on the first Blu-ray Disc (BD) to contain a full-length, high-definition feature film. Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle was compressed and authored in MPEG 2 full high-definition (1920 x 1080) and is now being shipped to BD hardware companies for player testing."
I wonder how long it took for Sony to transcode the AVI torrent they downloaded off of The Pirate Bay into the format needed for a BD-ROM.
Had I known they were releasing this awesome movie in Hi-Def format, I'd probably have just skipped the download and just let them do the work.
No annoying dialogs just seamless integration
Just kidding...
...the companies the discs were shipped to asked sony to confirm in writing that the disks infact did not contain any rootkit that would damage their systems.
At first I was horrified that such an absurdly bad movie was chosen for this "honor." But then I thought about the current market for this stuff: geeky guys. I suppose it makes sense, but they probably could do better with porn.
With all the films they had to choose from the one they pick to show Charlie's Angels 2? Nice way to kill the format.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
of all the films they could have chosen, they chose the one with the most boobs.....Good choice!
Monstar L
...that they would have been able to get this out sooner but had to overcome a lack of space caused by the oversized rootkit included.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
...will be brave/stupid enough to put the first Sony blue-ray DVD in his (not yet existing) blue-ray-DVD-drive?
i would have thought that we would have moved onto MPEG4-- This is a cutting edge media ;-) They could fit much more data with a better compression method.
The rest of the news story, which slashdot didn't report: However, upon attempting to show the disc in public, Sony found that entire meeting rooms were vacated almost instantly. It seems no one wants anything to do with Blu-Ray, or even wants to be in the same room to see the disc play. Sony execs are still trying to figure out why.
I can think of a few:
Adaptation
Ali
Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' On Heaven's Door
Dilbert: The Complete Animated Series
Dogtown and Z-Boys
Steamboy
Triplets of Belleville
Those are just the Sony Tri-Star Home Entertainment DVDs I have in my collection. None of them were purchased new. All of them I personally like. All of them would beat the stupid Charlie's Angels movie.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Is the movie being produced in 1080i or 1080p format? What format will most movies be released in?
Does God treat us as servants or friends? Check my homepage.
If Sony misses out on the Christmas rush perhaps they, and the rest of the E! industry, will figure out that their customers don't like to be harrassed.
Columbia Records, Epic Records, Legacy Recordings, Sony Classical, Sony Nashville, Sony Wonder, Sony Ericsson, Sony Music, Sony Pictures, Sony Electronics & PlayStation.
The GP said GOOD movies! With the exception of Dilbert, I would say your list doesn't qualify...
B.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
Didn't Microsoft and its colleagues say that the Blue Ray technology from SONY is more than a year away, and that it's not viable? Sony here disproves that. My problem with Sony is that I see Microsoft tendencies in it as well.
First of all it's one of those spectacular blockbuster type movies with lots of explosions. So it'll be a good test for what the format is capable of. Second, and this is key, they won't have to worry about anybody trying to pirate the first Blu Ray disc because nobody will want it :)
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Dilbert: The Complete Animated Series [..] Those are just the Sony Tri-Star Home Entertainment DVDs I have in my collection. None of them were purchased new. All of them I personally like. All of them would beat the stupid Charlie's Angels movie.
Except that being faithful to its source strip, Dilbert is a relatively simply-drawn animation with little detail (*) and regardless of its merits would be a *lousy* choice for demonstrating the capability of a hi-res disc format.
(*) Not that this is necessarily a criticism. I haven't seen much of the animated series, but the flat and simple style of drawing in the original strip suited the banality of the subject matter perfectly.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
While Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle is not a great movie, it is filled with effects, explosions, and enough over-saturated colors to burn your retinas. If I had to guess, that's probably why they chose it, because it is flashy and looks good in Hi-Def.
The reason they chose this movie is obvious. It's so bad, no-one would want to copy it.
That's the _last_ thing anyone wants in hi-def. Trust me - you _really_ don't want to see those people accurately.
Why is Blu-ray using MPEG-2? Wouldn't they get higher def or longer movies if they standardized around XVID or some other variant of MPEG-4? It seems like a terrible waste.
Wow, Blu-Ray has existed for how many months now? They must have used one of those Intel CPUs with HyperThreading enabled if it took them that long to encode it...
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Will this look any better than a movie broadcast in 1080i and played back on an HDTV with 3:2 pulldown detection? I was under the impression that the pull-up done to convert 24fps film into interlaced video is completely reversible, and so 1080 progressive quality is already available through 1080i broadcasts.
It will be nice to have discs of HD content eventually, but I don't see what is so impressive that makes this worthy of coverage.
this way no one will try to spend the time it may take to rip it (assuming players are commercially available)
no one would waste that much time ripping a movie this bad
-- lol pwned
My boycott of Sony will include BlueRay and anything else that has Sony branded on it... In my opinion, Sony's DRM techniques have settled the battle between BlueRay and HD-DVD... Just say no to Bluer-ay
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
With all the buzz around H.264 (possibly due to me having a Mac), I would have thought they would have used something different....
Sony is probably using different Columbia/Tristar films to test different codecs (MPEG-2, H.264, and WMV9) to be included in each player's firmware. This makes error reporting easier: "Charlie's Angels screwed up" means a problem with one codec, and "Stealth screwed up" means a problem with another.
I don't care what anyone says I will gladly watch Drew Barrymore in 1920x1080.
It's amazing that the mainstream media don't cover the coming era of DRM more. A true failure of the press in my opinion. Their responsibility would be to cover this topic in laymen's terms to make it understandable to the masses. This should make the nightly news instead of a review of your latest and greatest toothpaste. As it is, the public doesn't know about this and lawmakers don't understand it, so the content companies have a relatively easy time pushing their legislative agendas.
Personally, I can't wait for DRM to become widely used so that consumers are faced with a limitation of their rights.
Content companies need to learn that people like to consume. DRM is a barrier to consumption and thus doesn't make business sense. A great early example of this was Circuit City's Divx system which flopped very quickly.
Once consumers realize what's happening, DRM as we know it today will hopefully go the way of the Dodo.
--
http://www.gloryhoundz.com/
"Second, and this is key, they won't have to worry about anybody trying to pirate the first Blu Ray disc because nobody will want it :)"
Yes, because just everybody has the abilitiy to read bluray and burn it, chortle-chortle.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Except the only device that plays HD media that people actually look forward to is the Playstation 3.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
The Blu Ray video format specifies the maximum read capability of 36 megabits/second. The encoding codec used will allow content creators to compress nearly any resolution as long as it won't surpass 36 megabits/second.
Actually it's inaccurate.
The transfer rate for BD-ROM video application is 54Mbps (1.5x speed) according to the official BD-ROM physical format whitepaper:
3: Data rate
For high-definition movies a much higher data rate is needed than for standard definition.
With the BD format's choices for both NA and wavelength we have been able to realize a
format with 5X higher data rate while only doubling the rotation rate of DVD-ROM discs.
The following numbers offer a comparison:
Data bit length: 111.75 nm (25GB) (267 nm for DVD)
Linear velocity: 7.367 m/s (Movie application) (3.49 m/s for DVD).
User data transfer rate: 53.948 Mbit/s (Movie application) (10.08 Mbps for DVD)
The BD system has the potential for future higher speed drives.
They chose it because it's one of those movies that's better seen then heard.
My wife's deaf, but she still likes to go the the theater every once in a while. Just goes to show how important plot is in today's movies.
Funny thing, she liked Starwars EP1 better BEFORE she saw it captioned.
"Is the caption messed up, or is Jar-Jar retarded?"
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
You can't expect these hard working executives to put in the work that brings you this entertainment without a certain level of compensation. Only terrorists hold their firstborn from their corporate overlords.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
<p>Is there ANY Blu-Ray device that people look forward to?</p>
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Authoring has been completed on the very first full length HD I don't give a shit ever
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Make that "hot off the press releases" department.
Or the "paid adverstory"
Please help metamoderate.
...they didn't even need to put a rootkit on it. I guess that's Sony's new strategy - make recordings so bad they don't need to DRM it.
Get a library card.
Not as yet ratified by the SMPTE.
This is a common misconception about DVDs. In actuality, all video DVDs contain interlaced fields, with no exceptions (I remember an old Usenet posting by Chad Fogg that explained why the MPEG 2's progressive-video flag was not supported). Thus, movies are stored as 480i @ 48 fields per second, and, for "normal" TVs, are translated into into 480i @ 60 fields per second for display. A progressive DVD player has to unify the fields for display, and while this is trivial to do for film, the resulting video does not have quite as high of a vertical resolution as true 480p video is capable of because the 480i video was filtered for interlaced display (this removes twitter on interlaced TVs -- e.g. a bright dot on a single line would flicker at 30 updates/sec, so that is not allowed to happen).
So, the difference between 480p@24 and 480i@48 is just a slight loss of vertical resolution (not to be confused with lines), but the difference is there.
..wayne..
"It was hard... but we managed to DRM every byte!"
*hmm everyone seems to be making the same joke. What can I do to comment it in a way that makes me seem witty AND clever?*
*PROCCESSING*
*PROCCESSING*
*PROCCESSING*
*PROCCESSING*
*PROCCESSING COMPLETE. DISPENSE WIT*
I bet SONY put a ROOTKIT on there!!! I am so witty and clever in making this totally unique joke!
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Disc is for hardware testing and validation for manufacturers, not for demo purposes. That's in the summary - no need to RTFA.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Just leads me to wonder what exactly is being tested here.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Sony Entertainment needs to clean house. Sell off the movie studios and record company. Fire the bean counter CEO and replace him with an engineer and go back to making the very best electronic devices in the world.
Follow up the rootkit with Charlie's Angels. F'ing brilliant.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
They've only JUST NOW finished the first completed disc? Crazy
m g.torrent?1C6B407CD6671B2BB03F55C49D67CEB584A74D90
I was bored this summer, and made a feature-length HD DVD using MPEG-2 and Apple's DVD Studio Pro 4. In a weekend. Targeting DVD-9 media. Looked pretty good, and would have looked great if DVDSP4 supported using H.264 for 1080 content, or VC-1 at all.
I can't share that disc image unfortunately, but I can, once again, share this link to a HD DVD disc image I made before I tried the feature. A mix of MPEG-2 and H.264, 720 and 1080, i and p. Plays back perfectly in DVD Player 4.6 on a G5 Mac, and probably in other software players as well.
http://216.99.212.233:6969/torrents/HD_DVD_TEST.d
My video compression blog
They just said they cut a blu-ray disk and they're sending out copies to be tested. They didn't say they achieved the entire 40g or dual layer functionality. They didn't say that the video plays perfectly and that they would be on time to deliver or compete.
As others have said this appears to be a stunt to say they did it rather then prove the technology over.
Sony execs are still trying to figure out why. Tough call there. I mean, I wouldn't be able to figure it out either.
1) Rootkit?
2) Blu-Ray blows?
3) Charlie's Angels II?
They just aren't feature films. Sony released a personal blu-ray recorder a loooooooooong time ago for people to record hd-tv, and anyone interested in watching a demo disc can go to the Sony Building in Tokyo. When I went it was a nature documentary, but it was still pretty impressive.
Sendou Wave Kick!!
Most of the codec work in the past few years has been optimizing low file-size, high-processor algorithms. They are optimized to make something low rez look not-as-crappy. MPEG2 was designed for pristine, high-rez data, which is why it breaks down so much in low-rez situations.
C
And the high-processor is a kicker. A lot won't run without at least a P3 800 or a p4. Sure, Mpeg4 has better motion estimation, etc, but it is very processor intensive.
http://www.aussievideosearch.com/svcdhelp.htm
Maybe they want the Blu-Ray standard to replace the VHS, at which point they need real-time encoding speed. MPEG-4 is basically impossible to do real-time encoding at good quality even with a more modern PC. You can do it, but the processor maxes out and just doesn't bother with some of the encoding tricks.
http://edibletv.1go.dk/comments.php?id=350_0_1_0_
I don't know if those are the reasons for the decision necesarily, but it would seem that if they are looking to reach the point of sub-100 dollar blu-ray players soon, they would need to keep the processing power requirements down.
The ______ Agenda
I'm not sure what you mean but I think you misread "HD media" (which I used to refer to both BRD and HDDVD) as "HDDVD". Means there is only one device playing either of those that people want and it happens to play Blu-Ray.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
"I wonder why they didn't use MPEG-4. H.264 (AVC) is expected to be the standard encoding for next-gen formats, so maybe they did MPEG-2 because this is only a test disc, but still. MPEG-4 saves so much space, you could put an HD movie on a DVD of today if you wanted to."
I wonder if MPEG-2 is friendlier for TV output than MPEG-4... eh I dunno. As for your question I think that they're not just making a movie format here, they're also making a data disc. The PS3, for example, will benefit from having 50 or so gigs to play with for the games. So with this much data, they probably feel that movies should fill the disc. It's also possible that that MPEG-2 decoding hardware is cheaper than MPEG-4, so players would end up being a little cheaper. (Although that point seems moot compared to the cost of the new drives...) Heck, maybe they chose MPEG-2 because of the availability of authoring software for it.
Okay, I don't have the strongest reasoning in the world. I agree, I don't know why they aren't using MPEG-4 at this point. Most DVDs today come with 2 discs. If they used MPEG-4 instead of MPEG-2, they could easily ship all the content on 1 disc and save some buckage. Whatever happens with the next-gen disc format, I hope they keep this in mind. I'd rather have 1 disc than 2.
"Derp de derp."
Arista Records, BMG Classics, BMG Heritage, BMG International Companies, J Records, Jive Records, LaFace Records, Provident Music Group, RCA Records, RCA Victor Group, RLG - Nashville, Sony Urban Music, So So Def Records, and Verity Records (courtesy of http://sonybmg.com/).
Does it contain a new release of the rootkit?
-- 29A the number of the Beast
Indeed, that wrong shortcut was completely stupid of me (especially since sony is a backer of Blu-Ray)
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Hardware costs. MPEG-2 decoder chips are relatively cheap. It takes a very beefy PC to decode 1080i MPEG-4 AVC (in software).
With all the films they had to choose from the one they pick to show Charlie's Angels 2? Nice way to kill the format.
This was a necessary test of the format:
there was concern whether something that awful would stick to a Blu-Ray DVD.
Also MPEG4+H.264 is highly compressed (thus the high CPU usage) and suitable for low bandwidth mediums such as the internet -- i.e. the advent of internet TV.
So HD DVD players high bandwidth local medium so MPEG2 is fine.
Shame they didn't use a better movie. I really feel for all of those engineers being forced to watch that dreck.
Bibo Ergo Sum.
People dont watch test movies to see if the story, they use them to see quality of special effects, dialogue scenes etc. This is actually a good movie for this purpose since even though its a god awful film with wretched directing, acting and story line it has a great deal of special effects, explosions and action as well as a great deal of different types of camera effects as well as many scenes with normal looking people. Science ficiton movies or animation are right out, since they lack normal looking scenes that this movie has. All these disks are for is to test visual quality. I know this only because my ex-girlfriend forced me to watch this crap movie...its like watching a 1:30 minute long music video, but as a test vehicle for a new technology its probably not to bad, as long as your paying attention to artifacting in the background and not the dialogue, plot or any type of of the standard things people usually watch movies for.
H264 was only integrated as mpeg4 AVC very recently.
When looking at the specs and encoding techniques, it becomes VERY obvious that it shares little with basic ASP/Main mpeg4 profiles but the name.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Nahh, sony wants to still make a $900 HDDVD player, that costs them $18 to make in china
After all, HDDVD is just the same as current DVD, but high res/speed processors and more ram ($2 more)
with current usual DVI out again, barely any cost.
Bluray readers.... well, bugger all I suspect, but they will just talley up the last 7 years
of research dollars and divide it by the next 12 months shipping units = $1b/2m = $500 min wholesale.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Can you assure me that this fancy new console (touted as a "media center" in some circles) won't try to rootkit my computer through my home network? Because, y'know, they have to "protect their property" any unnecessarily aggressive way they can, through any system that might be used to "steal" it.
If you can't make that guarantee (and I'm pretty sure you can't), then trust me: I'm not looking forward to it. In fact, that controller on the Nintendo Revolution is starting to look better and better.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
Ms. Barrymore's co-star Cameron Diaz seems to make every top ten list of stars that look "worse" in high definition, due to her teenage acne scars. For all you shallow arseholes ;-), here's an example of one such list:
The actress has had a terrible acne problem since high school; her cheeks and forehead are littered with unfortunate pockmarks. Ms. Diaz seems like a different person in HDTV; she looks more like a Charlie than an Angel.
The actor was once considered a Hollywood sex symbol. But now, in HDTV, he looks more like Kirk Douglas than Michael Douglas. Being married to Catherine Zeta-Jones doesn't help, either. He appears even older when he's standing next to her. The Wall Street star looks like eight miles of bad road.
The pop tart is still in her early 20s, but she looks about 10 years older in high-def. Her face is puffy and she's starting to show wrinkle marks around her lips, reportedly from a two pack-a-day cigarette habit.
Like Ms. Diaz, Pitt had a terrible skin problem in his younger years. The impact is clear in high-def. He's still a good-looking guy, but he doesn't look like one of People Magazine's "Most Beautiful."
The singer looks great in still photos and music videos, but she looks terrible in high-def. And someone should help her with make-up; it looks like it was done by Ringling Bros.
Ms. Zellweger is a cutie, but her cheeks look like she's had a Rosacea problem; very visible in high-def.
The veteran actor plays Secretary of State James Heller in Fox's 24, but he looks like hell in high-def. Devane, who once played John F. Kennedy in a docudrama about the Cuban Missile Crisis, should duck and cover the next time they ask him to star in a HDTV program.
The comedian/political commentator is scary in high-def. And I mean, scary. His skin is pasty and white, making him look like an Albino. Make that an Albino who doesn't get much sleep. It's a good thing that HBO doesn't air his weekly talkfest in HDTV.
Oh, my God. With her short-cropped graying hair and crow's feet, she looks like a guy in high-def. What happened to her? Christopher Guest, be my guest. Buy your wife some Botox! And, a wig!
Someone should pull the rug over this red carpet host! In HDTV, you can almost count the stitch marks from her various facial surgeries. Do you remember that song, "Old Man River"? Well, how about, "Old Woman Rivers"?
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
Perhaps compression doesn't NEED to be lossy, but with XviD it is.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
MPEG2 requires very high bit rates to look decent. Even at 25 megabits, a 1920x1080 stream (even interlaced) will look blocky and messy in fast motion scenes - even when a camera moves quickly in any direction. 25Mbit is commonly used for OTA broadcasts. Sometimes you'll see 30Mbit.
At 25Mbit, you can only fit 2.3 hours of video on a single layer Blu-Ray disc. Dual layer will grant the ability to do 50Mbit for the same length, or 25Mbit for over 4.5 hours.
So, while you can transfer the data off the disc quickly, you have a finite amount of space on the disc. MPEG-4/H264 isn't just for low bandwidth applictions - it allows for much higher quality video in the same space.
I'm sure the Blu-Ray discs with MPEG-2 will provide good video quality but it still won't reach the potential of HDTV.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
I wouldn't say most DVD's today come with 2 discs unless you count bonus features or some such; which even they they usually fit it all on one disc.
But I do agree - I think they should be using MPEG4 or H.264. We'd get a lot more quality out of it - probably approaching what would be possible with no compression.
My guess is that most HD hardware in existance today utilizes MPEG-2; broadcasters, OTA stuff, cable, etc.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
A division of Sony, Sony BMG Music Entertainment has already demonstrated that Sony doesn't care about its customers. Don't trust any of their products.
http://www.sonysuit.com/
-- Mark Lyon http://www.marklyon.org
...after putting the disc in your player, it will instantly burst into flames, make all of your appliances cease to function, and sleep with your hot wife.
Why not just put porn on it and get it over with?
Former US House candidate, TN-5
... when you don't have enough CPU power for playback.
I store my video sources using XVID @ max quality. Final encoding bitrate is 8.7MB/s and it looks visual indistinguishable from the original MPEG2 video sources copied off DV at 1/3rd the file size.
Then after editing, I encode the final product back to MPEG2 for burning to DVD and even at bitrates like 6.5MB/s (~90mins of video for a 4.4GB DVD), the quality is clearly worse. I can see mosaic & dithering effects when playing back the DVD on the computer. (On a regular TV, you can't tell the difference though.)
Yeah, the last guy already confirmed I had a boner post...
The saddest part is I know exactly what 3:2 pulldown is and wow did I not say it in the post. Oh well. I have been since corrected.
I've read that at high bit rates, MPEG 2 looks just as good as H.264. You can find examples at http://www.shapeofdays.com/
There's so much fear of a repeat of decss, the average blu-ray implementation is being delegated in very very small segments to programmers who are given no idea what they're working on. No-one below management will probably see this footage on a blu ray player.
The blue-ray format is Sonys attmept to lockup the market and remove the ability to record out of the hands of the comsumer and small musician/studio. they tried it with the DVD format and was partially sucessful. Now with the fully encrypted blue-ray cd and the fact that it deliberately difficult to record data to, the consumer will suffer. It is designed in such a way that only very expensive (licensed) equipment can write to the disc. This is a very consumer unfriendly format and I for one will not give Sony the Draconians any more of my money in any way shape or form. Remember If you buy Sony products you are a criminal. At least Sony thinks so.
What the hell HD content have *you* been watching? First of all, it's *35MM* not "30" millimeter. Secondly, the majority of widescreen broadcast content on HD channels, is HD resolution (or better) originated. Channels like HDHBO also broadcast a lot of DV originated HBO series.. but i would say around 75%+ of feature films they broadcast in widescreen format are *NOT* sampled from a SD source. Digibeta telecined material looks very good upsampled to HD, but you would have to be insane to confuse it with true 1k or 2k material.
DVD resolution (for all intents and purposes) is actually equivalent to broadcast television, not higher. It is simply a better sampling rate that what you get from your cable provider or sattelite network.
Lastly, you are correct when you say this is the first HD sourced blockbuster movie published on "disc," but it's actually NOT the first publically sold blockbuster HD movie. You're forgetting DVHS..
"(June 3, 2002) - DreamWorks SKG, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal Studios and Artisan Entertainment announced today the first wave of feature films releasing on the new high-definition D-VHS platform, featuring JVC's D-Theater copy protection system. DreamWorks' The Peacemaker, Fox's X-Men, Universal's U-571 and Artisan's Terminator 2: Judgment Day will be the first four D-Theater films available to consumers nationwide on June 10, and will retail for $35.00-$45.00. This marks the first time in entertainment history that Hi-Definition movies will be available in a pre-recorded format."
It's possible that they wanted to show off just how much data they could fit on a disk.
A clever strategy to prevent piracy. Nobody would want to copy this disc!
Cameron Simpson, DoD#743 cs@cskk.id.au http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/
Maybe Sony wants to sell Cell chips? If they take advantage of the modular nature and move enough to take advantage of scale it pushes their agenda right along.
It looks like I could have been clearer in describing what I was trying to say. So, let me attempt to clarify for those that didn't get my point (or perhaps didn't even realize that this distinction existed).
Let's first be clear that I'm not saying that progressive content is not encoded on DVDs, for indeed movies provide plenty of progressive source material (i.e. an entire frame comes from a single moment in time) and it's easy for players to re-extract the original progressive film frames for display. My point is that the result is something that is not quite as good as it could be if DVDs had actually designed with 480p displays in mind.
I called the end result 480i for two reasons. The first is that DVDs do contain each frame of progressive content separated into 2 fields (in the encoding this is called a progressive interlaced sequence, and having the frames separated into fields is required for the 3:2 pull-down flags to be used in MPEG 2 encoding because the flags just indicate "repeat this field"). The second is because there is vertical filtering applied to the image that reduces the quality down to one that won't flicker when displayed on an interlaced TV. For progressive source material, the first reason could be totally ignored if not for the second, so let's not get too bogged down in the encoding details. In other words, if the vertical resolution were not filtered to remove twitter, the two fields of a progressive frame could be reassembled into a full-resolution frame (at a frame rate 1/2 that of the field rate) and we could consider the result to be the same as 480p.
So, the problem is that DVDs were designed in an era before progressive scan was popular, so the images stored on them are pre-filtered for interlaced display. If the DVD player had been tasked with this vertical filtering for interlaced TVs, we would have a full 480p format. Indeed, someone could use the DVD Video format with full 480p resolution source material if they wanted to encode a disc that way (it just would twitter if it were displayed on an interlaced TV at standard refresh rates).
Finally, a discussion of twitter for those that might not know what it is: imagine a frame that has a single white dot on a single line in a 480i image which is being updated at 60 fields per second. That dot would be re-displayed only 30 times a second, so it would appear to blink to the human eye. Because of this, the highest frequencies in the vertical resolution must be filtered so that the alternating fields can support each other in displaying highly-contrasting light levels (such as white on black).
Here's one DVD FAQ page that discusses the storing of progressive content as interlaced fields.
..wayne..