And Apple has been shipping HD DVD authroing and (very limited) playback for Macs for two years now, without having every shipped or announced anything related to Blu-ray.
Eh? 10 Mbps max? stereo only? The Xbox Live Marketplace video has been doing shows with peaks up to 12 Mbps and 5.1 audio (e.g. the CSI shows) since before this update. Users have been making their own files with much bigger specs for a long time.
Now 30 Mbps peaks in WMV files are fine with the new update. It's really an incredible piece of hardware.
Wavelets are a great technology for still images, but they're not as effecient as DCT + motion compensation techniques like all the mainstream video codecs work. It's really hard to get wavelets to efficiently take advantage of the similarities between adjoining frames.
It's hard to prove a negative - how can you prove a player will ever not work?
Clearly both the Toshiba player and our Xbox 360 accessory are strategic products for us, and so we'd be extremely focused on making sure those are products that will work well for many years to come.
All players require a user opt-in for a firmware upate.
Keys aren't revoked in a player anyway - it's that the keys in a compromised player are revoked for future titles. No hardware players have been compromised AFAIK, so that's theoretical at this point.
You're not required to connect the player to the network - the player is just required to provide a network port if you want to.
All the movies work just fine as discs even if the player has never been plugged in. You just don't get the option of downloading any content (which isn't yet supported on discs yet).
Lots of people have unconnected players that they just plug in when there's a firmware update.
Well, the big point behind the downloadable content is stuff that either wasn't available when the disc was mastered, like extra languages, subtitles, or creator interviews, or stuff that didn't fit on the disc and wasn't of interest to a big enough audeince to make it worth reencoding any other assets to make room for.
Having a network port is a mandatory feature for all HD DVD players, so updated keys and other updates can be easily delivered. It's mainly there for downloadable content (like adding subtitles in a new langauge for an existing disc).
Blu-ray, however, has networking optional, and most Blu-ray players don't have a port.
Yet another way in which the baseline functionality in HD DVD is much higher than Blu-ray.
Of course, the Zune plays back AAC files just fine, so it should have full interoperability with these files. Hence reducing the iTunes Music Store DRM issue for Zune adoption.
There's no real need for recievers to support the new codecs. Since HD DVD can have three simultaneous audio tracks going at once (e.g. Main audio, commentary audio, and menu GUI feedback), the player itself decodes all three streams to PCM, mixes them together, and either recompresses them to the selected output codec or leaves them as PCM for HDMI.
Also, there's an upgrade coming for the HD DVD player for the current Xbox allowing DTS audio instead of just Dolby. DTS is less compressed. There are other improvements in audio quality coming in that as well.
Presumably you won't see anything, unless the computer is doing on-the-fly transcoding to a supported codec. AppleTV appears to be a file-based system only.
This would only work if you had a 3rd party decoder on the Mac to parse the file and make the reference movie. The reference movie would only work on a machine that can handle those codecs, which presumbably the AppleTV wouldn't (for example, Apple's MPEG-4 pt 2 decdoer doesn't handle B-frames).
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.
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.
Broadcast "lines" are measure differently than in resolution - essentialy, it's the number of times you can tell black and white switching from each other. Due to Nyquist, that number is going to be half th resolution at best. So your "330" broadcast lines would require at least 660 pixels wide of resolution.
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Did people miss that Connor was just making a goofball joke back about the comment :)?
C'mon, the bit about the ethnicity of the plumber being a secret is just a dead giveaway.
And Apple has been shipping HD DVD authroing and (very limited) playback for Macs for two years now, without having every shipped or announced anything related to Blu-ray.
Eh? 10 Mbps max? stereo only? The Xbox Live Marketplace video has been doing shows with peaks up to 12 Mbps and 5.1 audio (e.g. the CSI shows) since before this update. Users have been making their own files with much bigger specs for a long time.
Now 30 Mbps peaks in WMV files are fine with the new update. It's really an incredible piece of hardware.
Wavelets are a great technology for still images, but they're not as effecient as DCT + motion compensation techniques like all the mainstream video codecs work. It's really hard to get wavelets to efficiently take advantage of the similarities between adjoining frames.
It's hard to prove a negative - how can you prove a player will ever not work?
Clearly both the Toshiba player and our Xbox 360 accessory are strategic products for us, and so we'd be extremely focused on making sure those are products that will work well for many years to come.
All players require a user opt-in for a firmware upate.
Keys aren't revoked in a player anyway - it's that the keys in a compromised player are revoked for future titles. No hardware players have been compromised AFAIK, so that's theoretical at this point.
The network port doesn't really apply to DRM. Discs don't phone home or anything during normal operation.
You're not required to connect the player to the network - the player is just required to provide a network port if you want to.
All the movies work just fine as discs even if the player has never been plugged in. You just don't get the option of downloading any content (which isn't yet supported on discs yet).
Lots of people have unconnected players that they just plug in when there's a firmware update.
Well, the big point behind the downloadable content is stuff that either wasn't available when the disc was mastered, like extra languages, subtitles, or creator interviews, or stuff that didn't fit on the disc and wasn't of interest to a big enough audeince to make it worth reencoding any other assets to make room for.
There will be a number of HD DVD titles released this year with extra downloadable content of user interest.
Having a network port is a mandatory feature for all HD DVD players, so updated keys and other updates can be easily delivered. It's mainly there for downloadable content (like adding subtitles in a new langauge for an existing disc).
Blu-ray, however, has networking optional, and most Blu-ray players don't have a port.
Yet another way in which the baseline functionality in HD DVD is much higher than Blu-ray.
Of course, the Zune plays back AAC files just fine, so it should have full interoperability with these files. Hence reducing the iTunes Music Store DRM issue for Zune adoption.
You can capture from HDMI just fine, if it's not HDCP, which games wouldn't be.
Check out the Blackmagic Design BHDINT Intensity board ($249).
A couple of notes about HD DVD audio:
There's no real need for recievers to support the new codecs. Since HD DVD can have three simultaneous audio tracks going at once (e.g. Main audio, commentary audio, and menu GUI feedback), the player itself decodes all three streams to PCM, mixes them together, and either recompresses them to the selected output codec or leaves them as PCM for HDMI.
Also, there's an upgrade coming for the HD DVD player for the current Xbox allowing DTS audio instead of just Dolby. DTS is less compressed. There are other improvements in audio quality coming in that as well.
The current Windows Media Video 9/ 9 Advanced Profile codec is 4-way threaded.
To get the current version, you need to install any of:
Windows Media Player 11
Windows Media Format SDK 11
Windows Vista
Presumably you won't see anything, unless the computer is doing on-the-fly transcoding to a supported codec. AppleTV appears to be a file-based system only.
This would only work if you had a 3rd party decoder on the Mac to parse the file and make the reference movie. The reference movie would only work on a machine that can handle those codecs, which presumbably the AppleTV wouldn't (for example, Apple's MPEG-4 pt 2 decdoer doesn't handle B-frames).
And presumably that's H.264 only in QuickTime-compatible wrappers - .mov or .mp4, Main Profile only.
I just Win-D to get to the desktop to take my shots.
Of course, working as I do in video, I've got a fully gray UI, with my desktop set to RGB=127.
AC-3 640 to DD+ 1.5 Mbps? Reasonably good speakers, yes, with some (but not all) content. DD+ 1.5 Mbps to uncompressed/lossless? Probably not.
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.
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.
Broadcast "lines" are measure differently than in resolution - essentialy, it's the number of times you can tell black and white switching from each other. Due to Nyquist, that number is going to be half th resolution at best. So your "330" broadcast lines would require at least 660 pixels wide of resolution.
Factually wrong.
There are multiple software players producing full-rez HD DVD and BD playback on XP today, via VGA, internal laptop screen, or HDCP connection.
What's the GPU in your notebook? Sounds way more like a problem with YUV hardware overlay on a secondary display to me.
Try turning off your internal display, and just go out to the external. I bet it'll work fine.