Sony Decides Against Blu-Ray Downsampling

Paul Slocum writes "According to Ars Technica, Sony is now saying they will not use the Image Constraint Token and so movies will play on analog HDTV sets at full resolution. If HD-DVD does implement the analog downsampling, it's going to give Blu-ray a nice market advantage." From the article: "Sony's decision to not use the Image Constraint Token for the time being is meant to encourage the adoption of Blu-ray players. Launching a new product that would leave the thousands of analog HDTV owners out in the standard-definition cold could have proven to be a nightmare for Sony and the Blu-ray spec in general. Reports that 'Blu-ray discs don't look right on my HDTV' could result in consumers' switching allegiances to the competing HD DVD standard or postponing purchases of next-generation optical players altogether."

Comments

This only affects their movies, not players

[pjcreath]

According to the article, use of the "Image Constraint Token" is up to the studios. This announcement is only that Sony movies won't force down-sampling "for the foreseeable future". Other studios' movies could, since the players will still support it.

Welcome to consumer confusion.

Re:This only affects their movies, not players

[westlake]

Welcome to consumer confusion.

There were two bits of news this past week on the HD front:

Disney will release on HD-DVD. The worst possible news for the Blu-Ray camp. The Disney logo pretty much guarantees you'll make the top 10 in video sales and rentals.

Warner seems the only hold-out on downsampling. You won't see the token invoked on HD releases from Disney, For, Paramount or Sony. Whatever the media.

Re:But for how long?

[KarmaMB84]

The thing is it's only Sony that's not going to use the flag. Other studios are free to do as they wish.

Re:Yeah right

[Castar]

As far as your request goes, the Parents' Television Council has thoughtfully provided a clip of the scene in question! (A teenage orgy). How nice of them ;-)

http://www.parentstv.org/ptc/action/withoutatrace/ content.htm

I haven't watched it, since I'm at work, so I don't know how long it is or if it's censored. Enjoy!

OT: Fined Without a Trace episode info

[MojoStan]

BTW offtopic, but can anyone point me to the Without a Trace episode that got fined by the FCC? December 31, 2004, I believe. I want to see what CBS got fined for and supposedly won't broadcast ever again.

The episode is titled "Our Sons and Daughters" and originally aired on November 6, 2003 (Season 2, Episode 6).

A great plot summary and video preview of the "offensive" part (wmv) is available from (I'm not kidding) the Parents Television Council:

Parents Television Council Presents: Worst TV Show of the Week

Don't miss PTC's "explicit" and "EXTREMELY offensive" description of each controversial scene from that episode:

Content from the December 31, 2004 Episode of CBS's "Without a Trace"

For more laughs, check out their online FTC Complaint Form which probably contributed to the fine and ban.

Sony, Disney, Fox, and Paramount are together

[tepples]

it's only Sony that's not going to use the flag. Other studios are free to do as they wish.

Disney, Fox, and Paramount are apparently going along with Sony in not using the downsampling flag on BD-Video launch titles. Among MPAA member studios, this leaves Warner and Universal.

Regions on Blu-Ray plus a roundup of news

[The-Bus]

The proposed Blu-Ray region codes are as follows:

Region 1: North America, South America, Japan and East Asia (excluding China)
Region 2: Europe and Africa
Region 3: India, China, Russia, and all other countries.

Note how they put China and Russia, two countries with lax copyright controls, in the same region.

This means that PS3s, at least as Blu-Ray players, will be the same in Japan as they are in the US, making them much more inviting as imports if they were to launch earlier in Japan as opposed to everywhere else.

Ultimate AV magazine also got to see a preview of Blu-Ray. Here are the important points:

• All first titles are expected to be limited to a single layer.
• There are two Blu-ray modes: Movie Mode (used for high definition films) and BD-J Mode (a fully programmable mode that includes interactive features, like games and Internet connectivity). Both modes can be used on the same disc.
• Sony and MGM titles will be encoded on the discs at 1080/24p. The user will set the player to convert this native resolution as required to match the capability of his or her display.
• At this time Sony has no immediate plans to implement the Image Constraint Token (ICT). (
  That is, they can always turn it on in the future on a per-title basis.)
• All of the Sony and MGM titles will initially be encoded using MPEG-2, at a variable bit rate, but up to a maximum of 30Mb/sec.
• When other codecs exceed MPEG-2 at all data rates, Sony will begin using them.
• On the audio side, all Sony and MGM titles will include both conventional Dolby Digital and DTS soundtracks. Dolby data rate is still unconfirmed. DTS data rate will be 1.5Mb/sec. Additionally all Sony/MGM releases will include a 5.1 uncompressed PCM audio track. (To make sense of these audio formats, Todd B. has written a nice summary here).
• The first Sony and MGM titles will each have a hidden Easter Egg containing several setup test patterns-- a sweep, a standard SMPTE pattern including, among other things, a PLUGE, color bars, and a resolution monoscope.

The Blu-Ray group also summarized what they announced at CeBit in this PDF.

Highlights:

• Two types of Blu-ray Disc video players will be available: a "BD Player" type and an Internet connected player. The most fundamental feature difference is that one supports Internet connections and the other does not. Either player type can be produced and marketed from day one. The internet connections may be used for firmware upgrades. Toshiba has said in their HD-DVD players you can simply burn an image onto a CD-ROM to do the same thing.
• From the beginning, all models of either player type support playback of interactive BD-Java
  content. (This had been something that was supposed to be delayed in the hardware).

A source at a studio has said that current "Special Edition" content for Blu-Ray discs is being ported over to a High Def signal. It won't be only the movies that are in HD.

Netflix will be carrying both Blu-Ray and Hd-DVD discs at launch.

If you have a video card that says it will support HDCP, you may be disappointed. It looks like no current video cards on the market will really support HDCP. From Ars: "With regards to shipping cards, they are correct: no matter what a box's feature list may say, no video card supports HDCP fully at this time. Why? They have not been completely programmed. Until the specifications for the access control system are completely finished, implementing pro

Because...

[Kittie Rose]

Higher resolutions do not immediately mean a massive increase in quality.

Most people think of resolutions in terms of 3D Polygonal games, where higher resolutions means less "jaggies" or blurry anti-aliased edges.

Everything on DVD is "Pre-blended" as such in a much more efficent way than polygons ever will be. I don't know if you've ever notived how even analog television can pull off much more convincing "edges" than any pre-render has done.

Higher resolutions mean it will be a little less blurred. But in practice, DVD is already high quality. There is a point for which resolutions become difficult for an untrained eye to distinguish. HD lies within that spectrum, but at the end of it.

On most TVs, it will be difficult to tell the resolution. On very large screen TVs, it most certainly is a benefit. But for most of us, it's a small performance increase as opposed to the relatively large one DVDs offered, and even that had it's critics.