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A Statistical Comparison of HD DVD & Blu-Ray Reviews
An anonymous reader writes "Gizmodo today posted a statistical comparison of over 300 HD DVD and Blu-ray reviews published at High-Def Digest since the start of the high-def format wars last Spring. Their findings? Overall video quality between the two formats is nearly identical, however Blu-ray titles were slightly, but definitely superior in audio playback, while HD DVD titles had far superior standard def features and moderately superior high-def features."
because i've seen it advertised by bestbuy as opposed to circuit city. Bestbuy does much better business and will try to get more people to use blue ray
Both formats have gone beyond the resolution of my eyes (and ears).
You mean, people actually still buy movies on physical media?
The article is a total crock of @#$#. Just looking at the charts shows you that the audio "difference" is so incredibly tiny that the actual players probably have far more to do with it than the format.
Quality will not decide this format war - the PS3 will.
Betamax was superior to VHS...and the MacOS was superior to Windows (at least for some time...let's avoid the flame war on the current state of affairs). They were both beaten by superior positioning of technically inferior competitors...and the PS3 has been a huge success for Sony in one regard - it got a lot of BluRay players in the hands of consumers...and the sales of BluRay titles are dwarfing those of HD DVD correspondingly.
Will the trend continue? Who knows, but I'd rather have momentum than not have it...so I'm not betting against Sony yet. The posted article may be interesting for some, but I am disinterested in any discussion of quality or features until the market settles. I do not have the discretionary income to buy an expensive player that will be obsolete before it is useful...regardless of any perceived quality difference. Early adopters may disagree, but Joe Sixpack and I are sticking with our standard DVD players and HD over cable/satellite until we see who wins this war.
Your mileage may vary.
What I got was that the audio in Blu-ray was "better" because of the availability of higher quality audio content, not performance of the particular technology. A little misleading I think, when HD-DVD can simply add higher quality audio content and be equal to Blu-ray in terms of audio performance.
Or is there something else?
Why are so many posts with factual errors modded up?
It's not even funny.
Actually I was looking at a few titles (just the box) I did not get a player for myself yet.
And I was surprised to see that HD-DVD does not list DTS audio, but something else.
Someone may want to enlighten me on this.
I watch everything on DTS and I am satisfied with the sound on DVD, whenevere it is something else I am unhappy by default.
Can it be the cause of the difference ?
HD-DVD: Has more "bonus features" because HDi authoring environment is a mandatory part of the HD-DVD specs.
BluRay: Has better audio, probably because of the larger capacity and better support for advanced codecs. Bonus features should catch up once more BD-Java tools are developed.
Conclusion: Nobody's looking out for the consumers.
My conclusion: Wah. BD seems like the way to go if you're looking for top of the line. If not, why bother with HD anything? Extras are for sissys.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
We're supposed to be boycotting these weasels, and besides, UltraSuperHiDef means nothing on my 5 inch black & white. How many BITS will these things hold? How long will the disks last before they rot? Can you spin them any faster on the dremel before they explode? Do they fly better than a CD? Do they taste like chicken?
What?
When the market actually will sell top of the line flat panel 1080p HDTV sets with more than 40 inches that just work, and you can buy the winner.
It probably won't be Sony, cause they're in a world of hurt, though. But whatever you get, make sure it isn't region-encoded.
The content will be there at that point, the price will be reasonable, and whatever you buy will work for the next 5 years before they decide we have to use something else.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Blu-ray titles were slightly, but definitely superior
This post is only slightly, but definitely sarcastic.
Now if you were called 'Ray', then maybe you'd be OK... but a pr0n site called 'Blue Ray' kind of conjures up a more male orientated kinda site, at least in my mind! :-P
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
... the single-disc version of LOTR (all 3 films, plus extras) arrives. I don't think it's going to fit on HD-DVD. Also the potential of putting entire seasons of TV shows on a single disc.
This is about as statistical as statistics is mathematical!
Also, just cause you add the word "Theory" to something doesn't make it mathematics!
Which format looks best once converted to Xvid? :)
All the DVDs I own and watch more than once a month get squished down onto a 4.7G backup disc or ripped right into the hard drive. (The pangs of only having one optical drive in the computer.) If iTunes or Xbox Live videos were seriously available in my country, I'd be buying those.
HD gear is for people with too much time and money on their hands. And when I become one I'm sure it'll be great!
I meant, in less than a year rather than in a given year
Not if standalone player costs more than a console. I bought PS3 solely to watch Blu-Ray. A standalone 1080p player is slower, more expensive and can't play games. Not that I'm interested in games much, but I do play a round of Ridge Racer every now and then.
Not really. Although an average is a statistic, it only shows central tendancy of a distribution and indicates nothing about the variance of the distribution. A statistical comparison implies that the averages were compared using some defined distribution to test some null hypothesis. I'm not seeing that here.
Ah... I love watching pixels... I used to watch movies, but nowadays they are all crap, so I ended up watching pixels... So much easier on my brain...
More like extras are for filling up the DVD ... or, these days, to give them an excuse to add a second DVD to the package and jack up the price. Seriously, how many times can you watch a 10-minute documentary on how they used a computer to create a certain effect? Or interviews at press junkets where the actors explain how great it was to work with the director? The so-called extras they cram onto most discs are obvious filler. Even the deleted scenes are usually just slapped on there, not even formatted anamorphic, sometimes with time codes still onscreen.
There are very few DVDs in my collection that have made an effort to provide good extras. The Lord of the Rings movies are one example -- in fact, their extras include more information than I'd ever want about any movie. "Taxi Driver" is another -- it has a button that you can press at any point in the film that takes you to the corresponding page of the script. But otherwise I'm usually ecstatic to see DVDs packed full of extras...because I know the main feature will look that much better once I run it through DVDShrink.
Breakfast served all day!
I'll just get an HD-Ray player/recorder when it comes out, after all, there are CD/DVD +/- ones. go! cheap players that play all formats! yay!
Any differences that actually do exist are more likely attributable to the player or the mastering software than the disc it came from.
Ill buy which ever one can fix the problem that current dvd players have of sound effects being 50% louder than voice.
So, basically, this is a review of a review? When are the reviews of reviews of reviews coming out?
Joshua J. Kugler
Being the Asshole that I am, I decided to check on Piratebay. HD-DVD's winning. and porn, too. Porn Always wins.
"No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms." -- Thomas Jefferson
The fact that they now own Columbia Pictures (now Sony) and their movie library can't hurt. I wouldn't put it beyond them to start making such content exclusive to their own format. The Betamax story might have been a little different if Sony had owned their own production studio and movie library.
Not saying that makes them better, but Sony shouldn't be discounted in how they'll play the market.
As more and more people get multiple devices, the push-back against DRM will increase, and move from the small population of early adopter tech-savvy consumers, to the larger population "normal" consumers- once they find that they can't move their legally bought content between their devices they will tell their friends not to buy it. My prediction is that the format with the most easily "cracked" DRM will also be the most popular format & will win.
d -viewing-distance-to-screen-size/
Also, having just been through the deep-dive purchasing decision process for a new plasma TV, it was interesting to see that at a normal viewing distance, on a 50" display, HD or good progressive scan DVD produced a similar picture quality to my eyes (HD picture was subjectively about 5% better... this is comapred to 576p upscaled by the TV to 768 lines).
http://www.engadgethd.com/2006/12/09/1080p-charte
Summary- at more than 10 foot viewing distance with a 50" plasma screen there is no benefit to more than 576 lines (us PAL types are in luck here). About 13 foot for NTSC 480P. So for 42" HD is probably a waste of time everywhere. For 50" it is more useful in NTSC territory as long as you sit fairly close up, and marginal for PAL territory.
Also, I saw one HD feed split into similar sets from the same manufacturer, one set was 1080 line the other 768 line. At normal viewing distances no noticable difference.
As usual, most people comment without reading the article.
The summary is quoting the article, but not the explanation.
The audio advantage seen in the blu-ray is about more audio tracks with better formats (or even uncompressed audio), not any encoding/decoding difference.
BD is using its additional space to offer more audio tracks.
On the other hand, the interactivity feature is mandatory on HDDVD and still developing on BD, so the HDDVD gets the edge there. So, those are not so much qualitative judgements as more of a snapshot of the current state of affair. BD leads with better storage (expected) and lags with their BD-java that is not quite understood by the studios yet. As time go, BD should retain the audio advantage while negating any interactivity advantage of HDDVD (provided that both tech should be about equal).
Nothing really surprising here so far. The bigger sale number of BD *is* surprising though, as the player that sold the most *IS* the PS3. Those numbers are showing that people use it as a video player, as Sony had planned.
Only the futur will tell us if this will give them the dominance in video players at the cost of video games and especially if that sacrifice was indeed a paying strategy.
I thought the whole gizmondo thing was dead in the water.
That's one of the key reasons to support HD-DVD -- it doesn't have region coding, whereas Blu-Ray does. To make things better, lots of the titles that are Blu-Ray exclusive in the States are being released on HD-DVD out of the States. For example, Sin City will be released on HD-DVD in Canada. Terminator 2 is released on HD-DVD in England already I believe. Underworld: Evolution is also released overseas, as is Harry Potter: Goblet of Fire. There's plenty of other examples. Sure, you'll pay $5-$10 more for the movie, but it'll take buying a LOT of movies to make up for a $600 BD player IMHO. Plus, you won't have to worry about the extra BD+ encryption that Sony could bring out at any time.
In addition, as others have said, the article is crap. HD-DVD is "0.09 points" higher than BD in the video category, and that's called "almost the same, but BD being 0.15 points higher in audio means that it's much better? Huh??? Even if you take the potential reviewer biases out, I'd say those values are pretty much the same.
I know I'm late with this one, but at this point are we even sure that EITHER of them will "win".
/. might even notice.
I'm thinking along the lines of DVD-A, which offered no real benefit to the consumer other than quality, and they consumer said, "No thanks." CD's caught fire largely because of things like the "instant song change" vs. tape. DVD's offer similar benefits over VHS.
I know absolutely no one who owns a player of either flavor. Therefore, I know no one who has purchased a disk of either flavor. Most people I know don't even own a TV yet that could really use either flavor of player. AND I WORK FOR A TV STATION!!! I am surrounded by people who LOVE television and movies.
I ask in all seriousness. . . are the geeks really just debating which of two future failed technologies is better? Do we really think the PS3 and expensive players are going to push HDTV sales when HD content has been somewhat scarce for years?
Before you answer, remember the discussion on how many folks were going to need converter boxes just to receive digital signals when we pull the analog plug. Enough that talk of subsidizing those boxes always arises.
Personally, I think this debate is seriously muted until 1080p HDTV pricing drops enough that "everybody has one". The funny part is that I'm sure it will have already been decided by then. Some people outside of
This sig was generated randomly by one million monkeys with Speak 'n Spells. . .
In teh final analysis, The only thing that counts is how many Senators the format owns
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I live in Europe and recently bought a new high-end Denon DVD player (not-HD), but most of my DVD collection is region encoded for the United States. I asked if they could remove the region encoding check, and the salesperson called the Denon rep to ask and they sent a DVD that upgraded the ROM so now I can play any region encoding I want. I wonder if the same can be done with the Blu-ray players? Or if the manufacturers will be willing to do it.
A quick scan through amazon.co.uk shows...
Classical Music - Search "DVD Audio" - 199 hits
Pop Music - Search "DVD Audio" - 564 hits (not all of these are DVD Audio, some are SACD + a DVD)
Classical Music - Search SACD - 1536 hits
Pop Music - Search SACD - 1450 hits
Now, I haven't actually attempted to validate all the results beyond clicking on few to see if they really were/are SACD or DVD Audio.
So it looks like SACD has "won", or at least is winning. However it's largely made irrelevant as Amazon actually stock hundreds of thousands of titles making either SACD or DVD-A niche at best.
Maybe this will happen to BR vs HDDVD e.g. they'll both succeed but only in a niche market. Sky, telewest etc (uk) all offer film on demand and integrate this with broadband net. Sky offer HD too. I suspect this is going to be HD's biggest long term competitor.
Maybe the companies involved should start supplying rental stores with boxen e.g. rent a HD disk and borrow a player from us to see how great it is.
Everyone would like HD in much the same way they'd like a crystal slop bucket, the old steel one still does the job though.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
They're storage media. Neither is inherently going to give you more or less quality on playback; It's all in the compression used. Geez. I hate articles like this.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
The format war continues, and the consumer (me) pays the price. Basically, what I am reading is that one or the other will one up the other when is comes to certain features. If you want great audio, you need the Blu-Ray, if you want a great disc with lots of cool stuff, you gotta get HD-DVD. As soon as that equals out I am sure one or the other will make something else to give the edge. I wish someone would win already so we can move on. In the end, the stalemate will block consumers from jumping over and who knows, maybe they will both self-destruct with a new technology that rises from the ashes.
The future is really PCM audio over HDMI for transport. Taking the raw compressed bitstream out of the player doesn't really work anymore, because there can be multiple audio tracks (main soundtrack, commantary, button feedback) getting mixed together at the same time.
In the same way video has always been decoded and composited in-player, that's how it'll be done with audio going forward.
The nice thing about that is anyone with a HDMI 1.1 or higher reciever doesn't need to worry about getting built-in support for the new Dolby Digital Pllus/TrueHD or DTS Master Audio codecs.
As an added bonus, having video and audio going over the same pipe means keeping sync will be easier; if the display wants to add a frame or two of latency for processing, audio can be slowed down to match.
My video compression blog
Both formats have gone beyond the resolution of my eyes (and ears).
I'm not writing off Blu-Ray for SD content just yet. Some brilliant marketeer is going to realize he can sell you an entire season of 24 on a single Blu-Ray. If he has the balls to sell it for $24, nobody is going to be able to keep them in stock.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Googling for "HD DVD sucks" returns about 1,270,000 results.
Googling for "Blu-Ray sucks" returns about 789,000 results.
Therefore Blu-Ray is clearly the superior technical solution!
...it's slow as fuck. Suddenly my computer that can play HDTV scene-encoded AVIs, and has been for years, can't handle some files. (The CPU upgrade let me do 720p *AVI's* anyway.) (It's fun running 1700mHz on a motherboard that only takes a "maximum" cpu of 1200mHz because that was all that existed back then.)
-Clio
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