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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."
No, HD-DVD will win because fewer people misspell it, so more people will be able to Google it properly.
I think I'm going to start a porn site and call it "blue ray." I could make millions!
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.
HD DVD supports both Dolby and DTS. Much like a normal DVD, whether or not it has DTS is entirely up to the studio mastering the disc. Dolby mandatory, and I believe DTS is optional (just as it is with standard def DVD's). HD DVD also supports both Dolby and DTS lossless formats, should the studio master the disc to use it. (Again, Dolby TrueHD decoding is mandatory, DTS-HD is optional)
The reason why Blu-ray is credited with 'sounding better' is because many Blu-ray discs use raw PCM encoding for audio, rather than any sort of compression (lossless or not). Some purists believe they can hear the difference between compressed, lossless and lossy compression.
While many HD DVD titles use lossless compression, not all of them do.
When an HD DVD title does have lossless compression, its audio is ranked as good as Blu-ray's (and it had better, given that the decoder should be seeing an identical bitstream).
To be honest, I'm a believer in lossy compression; at the bitrates used in HD DVD, I seriously doubt anybody could tell the difference between lossless and lossy in a double-blind test on identical equipment; the bitrate is well above the level of transparency.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Nope, that's not it.
On DVD, your 5.1 audio codecs are DTS or Dolby Digital up to 448 Kbps. HD DVD supports Dolby Digital Plus up to 1.5 Mbps. Even professional film mixers tell me they feel that DD+ north of 1.2 Mbps is pretty much transparent to them.
Note that Blu-ray doesn't make DD+ mandatory, nor does it require players to have built-in compression for TOSLink output, which is why the Sony discs use AC-3 @ 640 Kbps (the BD max) AND PCM 5.1 48 KHz 16-bit simultaneously. So it takes more than 5 Mbps to provide the audio experience that HD DVD does in 1.5 Mbps.
My video compression blog
I guess you haven't seen the 720p or 1080p x264 (H.264/AVC - same codec that many of the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray movies are using) rips on private bittorrent trackers or Usenet. A standard two hour movie will fit on a DVD5 at 720p with 6 channel AC3 audio and a bitrate of 4.5-6 mbit/sec. While this wouldn't look great using xvid, H.264/AVC High profile can create great quality. x264 using Sharktooth's HQ-Slowest profile is very impressive. A 2 hour movie can fit on a DVD9 at 1080p at 7-8 mbit/sec, again with very good quality.
Hell, I've seen some 2 CD sized x264 rips from 1080p sources that blow DVD out of the water. Forget about the MPEG-4 ASP codecs like Xvid and Divx. Now that we have H.264/AVC, we can achieve excellent results at 720p and 1080p down to DVD5/9 sizes.