When you've only got 1920x1080 pixels to fill 24 times a second, yes, the difference between 30 and 48 Mbps is peanuts. Both formats are capable of transparent compression with advanced codecs.
Shooting in massive dynamic range like that is great, since it gives wonderful flexibility in post production. Think of this as the filmmaking equivalent to shooting in RAW.
But like RAW, our eyes aren't going to be able to see anything close to that dynamic range - if you're looking a candle flame, you won't see the subtle details in the faces. In post-production, they'll decide which to emphasize at a particular time.
In the end 8 bits of luminance on a gamma curve is plenty for most content with our visual systems, and that's what the HD formats deliver.
Bear in mind that essentially no one has ever seen any digital video, or any video at all in the last decade or so, that wasn't sampled at 8-bit at one point in its life.
No, you're seeing motion blur because film cameras have a 1/48th of a second exposure time. That same blur on frames with high motion was seen in the theater, and on the negative.
Just a two-hour movie and a single track of audio, maybe (that's about 8 Mbps for video left over). But that would rule out multiple audio tracks, picture-in-picture, extra content on the disc, etcetera. So while you'd have a better picture than DVD, the experience wouldn't be as complete or interactive as DVD, let alone "real" HD DVD discs.
Ah, machines that shipped with 256 MB RAM certainly can certainly have performance issues with XP - I can't imagine the GPU is that powerful either, meaning the CPU has to do a bunch of processing for effects and such. But I think the bigger difference even in XP is about the effects in use, not the theme.
Vista is different, in the advanced graphical modes will offload to the GPU, actually using less CPU. But there needs to be DX9 hardware there.
Between Classic and Aero, I don't see it taking up different amounts of screen real estate. That said, all my Windows machines are 1920x1200, so I probably am not sweating them that much.
Under XP, I normally reduce my font size a couple of points anyway to get even more on the screen, even at 1920x1200.
Sure, just pick the "Windows Classic" Theme. It'll be much like you remember graphically. Start button reading "Start" and everything, all in gray.
That said, I don't know WHY you'd want to - I've never really understood the appeal of atavistic GUI except for those with really old GPUs. But it's in there.
Perceptually, I'd say using "Windows Classic" seems more clunky and perceptually slower, part of that because it looks slow, and probably in part because it means my CPU is busy doing work that my GPU should be doing instead.
Myself, working in video where color perception is critical, I just customized the default Vista appearance by turning the background color and window shading to R'G'B'=127. I get the performance (no trails!) of Aero Glass, the nice Segoe font, transparency, etcetera, but in a way that doesn't mess with my color perception.
I'm not sure why you put VC-1 on the list of things holding Blu-ray back. The big problems were 405nm diode manufacturing and BD disc replication (which remains a big problem, especially for dual-layer discs).
VC-1 and H.264 have different strengths, so one or the other can come out ahead depending on what is being tested for. And, of course, implementation quality makes a much bigger difference than anything else.
Anyway, I manned the VC-1 pod at NAB 2006, so I can definitely state it was far from the major story for our booth! Silverlight and MSTV (now MediaRoom) were the big pushes.
Working on the codec team, I certainly wish that Microsoft overall made VC-1 as high a prority as you think it is:). Being a stockholder, I understand that there are much bigger fish to fry.
An intriguingly spun confection of conspiracy theories, but you state as fact a lot of things that are conjecture on your part. And factually, the above is wrong at least 80% of the time.
Really, "greed on the part of MPEG-LA" - citation? Do you understand how MPEG-LA is structured, and why, and how very odd it is to ascribe motivations it as an entity? Citation for anything you said about MPEG-LA? Citation on these SMPTE press releases? Citation for H.264 negotations being done later than VC-1?
Lastly, you're missing the very important fact that VC-1 does have compelling technical advantages for HD optical disc. To whit, it can hit transparency to the source at lower bitrates than H.264 with content with film grain, and it has lower decode complexity (more pixels/MIPS). The later is important if you want decode inside a computer, a rather important scenario for us!
A much more pertinant fact is that in the initial DVD Forum tests for codecs for what became HD DVD, VC-1 came in first, MPEG-2 second, and H.264 last. Much of what followed came from that.
While Sony got an exclusive on HD standalone players from Target for this holiday, Target has had will continue to sell the Xbox 360 HD DVD accessory and HD DVD titles.
It's amazing how much Sony can spin out of buying some retail end-caps:).
I imagine many of the sites that existed in your golden age are still up, and are still ad free. If that was enough, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
I'm always impressed by the enthusaism of Slashdot that leads to people composing the lyrics to mocking songs before actually trying the stuff:). But for the rest of us nerds who like to try stuff, I've got a couple of Creative Commons licensed HD WMV clips I've made that play back nicely in Vista over VGA at full resolution. This should be a clear refutation of the FA.
Note that the 1080p clip was designed for Xbox 360 playback, so it'll need a pretty beefy PC for playback.
Also, note the current VLC release doesn't play these back correctly, alas (I think a problem with DQuant or B-frames). They're fully VC-1 spec compliant; maybe they can use these clips for debugging.
Well, Silverlight 1.0 is just XAML (XML markup) and JScript. Seems like there are plenty of XML editors and JScript authoring environments on platforms other than Windows.
That's good for HD DVD
on
Blue Blu-ray
·
· Score: 1
Based on your list, you should be supporting HD DVD then. All flavored of burned Blu-ray fails to play in at least one player, but both HD DVD-R and HD on DVD-R media both work fine with all HD DVD players.
Another downside for Blu-ray is replicated media requires AACS DRM, which is another $2500/title hit on top of already higher mastering and replication costs. For small runs like Adult often uses, that $2500 can be a big hit per disc.
Another good wireless sync case: The Living Room:).
It's pretty common for people to use a media player to power a stereo in a room other than where the computer they buy music with. Wireless syncing lets you just stick the player in a dock with audio and power without having to take it to another room whenever music is purchased/downloaded, or deal with drilling a hole to run a USB cable between rooms.
Laptops are great for a lot of stuff, and I can see them taking over for productivity.
But in my world, HD video, desktops are here to stay. We need multiple big monitors, 5.1 audio systems, and crazy amounts of storage. And our need for storage pretty much scales with improvements in drives. My desktop had 2.5 TB of RAID three years ago, and the best laptops are only up to ~500 GB today.
Also, video processing is "embarrassingly parallel" when done right, and give the different temperature ranges for desktops and laptops, I imagine we'll have many more cores available in a desktop than a laptop for a long time. The best desktops have long been 2-3x faster than the best laptops, and I expect that gap to stay relatively constant for the forseeable future.
Now, laptops can still do a lot - I've logged many hours doing HD work in After Effects in my Core 2 Duo laptop with dual drives and 1920x1200 display. But there's only so far you can go with the laptop form factor. And it's not like that's a laptop I can use in coach either:).
The PAL HD spec requires they accept NTSC-style 60i signaling.
In practice, all the mass-market HD DVD and BD discs I know of are either 24p or 60i. 25 Hz appears to have begun its long fade-out.
They only used 50 Hz in the first place because they use 50 Hz power - same as the USA with 60/60. Better power shielding has taken away the reason all this matters a long, long time ago:).
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When you've only got 1920x1080 pixels to fill 24 times a second, yes, the difference between 30 and 48 Mbps is peanuts. Both formats are capable of transparent compression with advanced codecs.
Xbox Live Markplace has a bunch of HD content (1280x wide). 6 Mbps for the video.
40 Mbps? MPEG-2 HD broadcast only goes up to 19.2 Mbps.
For downloads (and hence VBR encoding) we can do a darn good 1080p24 with VC-1 in the 8-10 Mbps range.
Shooting in massive dynamic range like that is great, since it gives wonderful flexibility in post production. Think of this as the filmmaking equivalent to shooting in RAW.
But like RAW, our eyes aren't going to be able to see anything close to that dynamic range - if you're looking a candle flame, you won't see the subtle details in the faces. In post-production, they'll decide which to emphasize at a particular time.
In the end 8 bits of luminance on a gamma curve is plenty for most content with our visual systems, and that's what the HD formats deliver.
Bear in mind that essentially no one has ever seen any digital video, or any video at all in the last decade or so, that wasn't sampled at 8-bit at one point in its life.
No, you're seeing motion blur because film cameras have a 1/48th of a second exposure time. That same blur on frames with high motion was seen in the theater, and on the negative.
Just a two-hour movie and a single track of audio, maybe (that's about 8 Mbps for video left over). But that would rule out multiple audio tracks, picture-in-picture, extra content on the disc, etcetera. So while you'd have a better picture than DVD, the experience wouldn't be as complete or interactive as DVD, let alone "real" HD DVD discs.
Ah, machines that shipped with 256 MB RAM certainly can certainly have performance issues with XP - I can't imagine the GPU is that powerful either, meaning the CPU has to do a bunch of processing for effects and such. But I think the bigger difference even in XP is about the effects in use, not the theme.
Vista is different, in the advanced graphical modes will offload to the GPU, actually using less CPU. But there needs to be DX9 hardware there.
Between Classic and Aero, I don't see it taking up different amounts of screen real estate. That said, all my Windows machines are 1920x1200, so I probably am not sweating them that much.
Under XP, I normally reduce my font size a couple of points anyway to get even more on the screen, even at 1920x1200.
Sure, just pick the "Windows Classic" Theme. It'll be much like you remember graphically. Start button reading "Start" and everything, all in gray.
That said, I don't know WHY you'd want to - I've never really understood the appeal of atavistic GUI except for those with really old GPUs. But it's in there.
Perceptually, I'd say using "Windows Classic" seems more clunky and perceptually slower, part of that because it looks slow, and probably in part because it means my CPU is busy doing work that my GPU should be doing instead.
Myself, working in video where color perception is critical, I just customized the default Vista appearance by turning the background color and window shading to R'G'B'=127. I get the performance (no trails!) of Aero Glass, the nice Segoe font, transparency, etcetera, but in a way that doesn't mess with my color perception.
Really, Vista is as themeable as XP was.
What versions of Windows don't include MP3? It's certainly been in Windows Media Player for many versions. Back to Win98?
I'm not sure why you put VC-1 on the list of things holding Blu-ray back. The big problems were 405nm diode manufacturing and BD disc replication (which remains a big problem, especially for dual-layer discs).
:). Being a stockholder, I understand that there are much bigger fish to fry.
VC-1 and H.264 have different strengths, so one or the other can come out ahead depending on what is being tested for. And, of course, implementation quality makes a much bigger difference than anything else.
Anyway, I manned the VC-1 pod at NAB 2006, so I can definitely state it was far from the major story for our booth! Silverlight and MSTV (now MediaRoom) were the big pushes.
Working on the codec team, I certainly wish that Microsoft overall made VC-1 as high a prority as you think it is
An intriguingly spun confection of conspiracy theories, but you state as fact a lot of things that are conjecture on your part. And factually, the above is wrong at least 80% of the time.
Really, "greed on the part of MPEG-LA" - citation? Do you understand how MPEG-LA is structured, and why, and how very odd it is to ascribe motivations it as an entity? Citation for anything you said about MPEG-LA? Citation on these SMPTE press releases? Citation for H.264 negotations being done later than VC-1?
Lastly, you're missing the very important fact that VC-1 does have compelling technical advantages for HD optical disc. To whit, it can hit transparency to the source at lower bitrates than H.264 with content with film grain, and it has lower decode complexity (more pixels/MIPS). The later is important if you want decode inside a computer, a rather important scenario for us!
A much more pertinant fact is that in the initial DVD Forum tests for codecs for what became HD DVD, VC-1 came in first, MPEG-2 second, and H.264 last. Much of what followed came from that.
Note that the Moonlight announcment covers both 1.0 (just announced) and 1.1 (next major version with CLR support).
"an irrational passion for dispassionate rationality"
:).
Ayn Rand and many others of her ilk try so hard to be right that they loop all the way back to profoundly wrong
While Sony got an exclusive on HD standalone players from Target for this holiday, Target has had will continue to sell the Xbox 360 HD DVD accessory and HD DVD titles.
:).
It's amazing how much Sony can spin out of buying some retail end-caps
Many orders of magnitude more content?
I imagine many of the sites that existed in your golden age are still up, and are still ad free. If that was enough, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
I'm always impressed by the enthusaism of Slashdot that leads to people composing the lyrics to mocking songs before actually trying the stuff :). But for the rest of us nerds who like to try stuff, I've got a couple of Creative Commons licensed HD WMV clips I've made that play back nicely in Vista over VGA at full resolution. This should be a clear refutation of the FA.
p --2-mbps/p le/
720p @ 2 Mbps: http://on10.net/Blogs/benwagg/elephants-dream-720
1080p @ 10 Mbps: http://on10.net/Blogs/benwagg/elephants-dream-sam
Note that the 1080p clip was designed for Xbox 360 playback, so it'll need a pretty beefy PC for playback.
Also, note the current VLC release doesn't play these back correctly, alas (I think a problem with DQuant or B-frames). They're fully VC-1 spec compliant; maybe they can use these clips for debugging.
Are you sure about Profile 1.1 being a trivial update? I've never seen any indication from Sony that they're planning this.
Heck, their latest stand-alone Blu-ray player is still 1.0, and can't even read BD-R movie discs.
Well, Silverlight 1.0 is just XAML (XML markup) and JScript. Seems like there are plenty of XML editors and JScript authoring environments on platforms other than Windows.
Based on your list, you should be supporting HD DVD then. All flavored of burned Blu-ray fails to play in at least one player, but both HD DVD-R and HD on DVD-R media both work fine with all HD DVD players.
Another downside for Blu-ray is replicated media requires AACS DRM, which is another $2500/title hit on top of already higher mastering and replication costs. For small runs like Adult often uses, that $2500 can be a big hit per disc.
AACS is optional on HD DVD
Another good wireless sync case: The Living Room :).
It's pretty common for people to use a media player to power a stereo in a room other than where the computer they buy music with. Wireless syncing lets you just stick the player in a dock with audio and power without having to take it to another room whenever music is purchased/downloaded, or deal with drilling a hole to run a USB cable between rooms.
I was thinking Tonks and Lupin.
Laptops are great for a lot of stuff, and I can see them taking over for productivity.
:).
But in my world, HD video, desktops are here to stay. We need multiple big monitors, 5.1 audio systems, and crazy amounts of storage. And our need for storage pretty much scales with improvements in drives. My desktop had 2.5 TB of RAID three years ago, and the best laptops are only up to ~500 GB today.
Also, video processing is "embarrassingly parallel" when done right, and give the different temperature ranges for desktops and laptops, I imagine we'll have many more cores available in a desktop than a laptop for a long time. The best desktops have long been 2-3x faster than the best laptops, and I expect that gap to stay relatively constant for the forseeable future.
Now, laptops can still do a lot - I've logged many hours doing HD work in After Effects in my Core 2 Duo laptop with dual drives and 1920x1200 display. But there's only so far you can go with the laptop form factor. And it's not like that's a laptop I can use in coach either
How do you think other Blu-ray companies feel about the PS3? It is simultaneously the only capable player, and heavily subsidized.
Both LG and Samsung have gone from being BD-only to announcing dual-format players...
For good or ill, it's been a term of art for over a decade now. Do you have an alternative you prefer?
The PAL HD spec requires they accept NTSC-style 60i signaling.
:).
In practice, all the mass-market HD DVD and BD discs I know of are either 24p or 60i. 25 Hz appears to have begun its long fade-out.
They only used 50 Hz in the first place because they use 50 Hz power - same as the USA with 60/60. Better power shielding has taken away the reason all this matters a long, long time ago