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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."
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.
My blog
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?
No, HD-DVD will win because fewer people misspell it, so more people will be able to Google it properly.
What's sad is the parent is rather insightful. Not so much that HD-DVD is easier to spell than Blu-Ray but looking on the package it's painfully clear to your average joe with a HDTV set that the HD-DVD is for HD-TVs. The Blu-Ray disc doesn't in it self say "i'm for your HDTV".
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Neither format will win. Who won the DVD-A vs. SACD war?
bort.
Free, Anonymous surfing: Pagewash.com.
... 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.
Given the rather short time between the introduction of DVD and the introduction of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, I wouldn't be surprised if they do kindasorta fail in that they'll be replaced by a new format before either really gets a chance to take over the market.
Most of the reason DVD caught on quickly was that it offered a bazillion advantages over VHS. All that the HD formats really have to offer is that a small percentage of the consumers can view movies at a higher resolution than they could with DVD. The rest have to buy a new TV or computer for there to be any advantage, which is going to retard the adoption of both formats.
Audiophile: Somebody who listens to the equipment rather than the music.
Looks like this one is rapidly being translated into the video domain.
Don't tell me to get a life. I had one once. It sucked.
Or you'll get a DVD player that up converts, like a Futureshop in Toronto tried to sell me when I asked for an HD DVD player.
Oddly, I noticed distinct bias from the manager, who, when I asked again where the HD DVD players were, pointed to the Blu Ray (take THAT, Parent!!). When I insisted that I was looking for an HD DVD player, he eventually told me that the HD DVD player they had was not on display near the HDTV's in the store, like its Blu Ray cousin, but actually on a completely different floor.
Because of that bias (as well as my own bias in favour of HD DVD -- not a fanboy, just don't like the idea of closed formats dominating markets), I don't go to that store any longer.
But perhaps not so much as you might think. Fourth Quarter 2006 HDTV Sales Doubled Previous Year's Total
All that the HD formats really have to offer is that a small percentage of the consumers can view movies at a higher resolution than they could with DVD
50 GB disks now, 100-200 GB disks down the road.
9 hours of MPEG-4 HD video, 23 hours of MPEG-4 standard video. Blu-Ray Disc The boxed set shrinks to a single disk.
The Geek may fret. But features like "mandatory managed copy" will be marketable.
That's not stupid, that's commission.
When I worked at Philips, we had such a friendly relationship with a couple of stores that they let our marketing guys design their AV dept layouts.
Three more Blu-Ray players sold and that manager was probably gonna get a free weekend in a beach house or some shit.
OK, on paper, you'd be quite correct. They all allow for the same codecs, although there are differences about what codecs are mandatory, and what are optional.
In reality, there are quite a few differences, and good reasons.
1.) Blu-ray often has an uncompressed PCM track for audio. Whether you can actually hear it or not, there's at least the psychological thing saying that uncompressed is going to sound better than compressed. HD DVD can also do uncompressed PCM, but they choose not to; Dolby TrueHD is lossless (similar to FLAC), but takes less space on disc than uncompressed PCM. Even then, only a fraction of HD DVD's have lossless audio. Most HD DVD's use 1.5 Mb/s Dolby Digital, which is a number of times greater than the bitrate in movie theatres.
The sound argument is dubious in my head; just like there are people who still assert that vinyl records sound better than digital, there are people who claim that they can tell the difference between lossless and lossy audio. It's not a knock against Blu-ray; they have the room for uncompressed audio, so why not. I just don't buy into the arguments about compressed audio being undeniably worse; espescially at the bitrates that BD and HD DVD use for lossy audio.
2.) Early BD releases only had MPEG-2 compression available. It wasn't a hardware problem, but a problem with disc authoring software; you just couldn't make a BD disc that used VC-1 or MPEG-4, because the tools to make them didn't exist. The video took a lot more space on disc, due to the efficiencies of MPEG-2 vs VC-1 or MPEG-4, which coupled with uncompressed PCM audio and only having one layer to work with, the bitrate for the video had to go down for the whole thing to fit. And it showed.
3.) Now that they can produce dual-layer BD discs, and the authoring tools allow for VC-1 and MPEG-4, new BD releases have the video quality that HD DVD always had (HD DVD started out, and is still almost exclusively VC-1, although there are a few MPEG-4 releases). But that doesn't change the 'early' BD releases that relied on MPEG-2, single-layer discs, where quality suffered, and brought the average down.
There are subtle differences, but for the most part, there's hardly any functional difference. Hidefdigest (the source of TFA) had an article where Microsoft mentioned that they wrote a tool for Warner Brothers that would convert a VC-1 HD DVD to a BD release. This means that Warner makes the HD DVD version, then runs Microsoft's script to convert it to BD. This in turn means that when all is said and done, both formats have the exact same data on the discs, with the only difference being the menu system. So in the end, BD has more space, and costs more to produce. The thing is, few movies would require a full BD, so the advantage of the extra size is questionable.
And I'm left deciding which I dislike more: Sony or Microsoft. Tough call.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
That's true and false. Yes, if they were the same codecs, it would be the same information. However, its not the same codecs. BD for example offers audio codecs that aren't available on HD-DVD, such as lossless uncompressed full-bandwidth sound (which is better than your local theatre is probably using).
Also its how you use the codec; you can both use VC-1 but if I have 50GiB and you only have 35GiB to store the data on, I might encode with a higher bitrate and therefore it would look better.
This isn't rocket science.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)