And there's a big difference between downloading something for free that one didn't pay for, and making a personal backup of something that one did.
Fair Use is an important concept for use in commentary, news, and parody. I fear the common misuse of "Fair Use" as justifying rampant piracy will detract from the real value of the real concept.
24p is with us since that's what entertainment content has used since silent film was introduced, and will have to use until the existing installed base of film projectors is entirely replaced with digital projectors - many years from now.
Better storage is better for backup use, but it's not like we have any consumer video technologies on the near horizon that would need more than 30 GB for a long movie. Maybe in a decade with 4K projectors, and a meaningful enough number of movies availble with 4K masters.
And HVD is a HARDWARE technology. No one has even started definining anything about what movies-on-HVD would be like. We don't even know if the physical layer is even practical for real-world use. It's promising, but not something we'll see in homes for many years as well.
Bear in mind that's not a list of exclusive Blu-ray supporters. To take two prominant examples, HP is shipping HD DVD dirves in PCs today, and Apple has been shipping HD DVD authoring and (limited) playback for a year and a half.
Every player and every title you can buy today, or has been announced, and foreseeable future players and titles do NOT have region coding. The format as specified is NOT capable of region coding.
There's a working group working on a spec, which then would need to be ratified, which would then need to be implemented with a sunset period for players in the market, etcetera.
And if you're worried about it, buy a region-free HD DVD player today:).
There's no point in 1080p60 for most content - all movies and most TV shows are shot at 24p, and that won't change for a long time, if ever.
The key thing is resolution. 1920x1080 is 6x the pixels of DVD's 720x480. 6x is a massive improvement (more than VCD to DVD), and it's a huge visual upgrade. For most folks, once they get used to good HD, DVD seems distractingly soft and undetailed.
Yeah, I guess we'll all be getting locked out of different activities. I started getting bad osteoarthritis in my right shoulder about a year ago (at 35!), resulting in surgery a few months ago which I'm still rehabbing from. Every review of the Wii I read leaves me just *wincing* in imagined pain for swinging that remote around:). Hopefully I'll find it more intriguing in a few months...
But I was able to play Oblivion on the 360 just a few days after surgery, swimming on sea of Vicodin.
All that said, I hope the OP has tried Celebrex. Great stuff for days you need to get stuff done with the sore parts.
I was in the same boat last November, with both Microsoft and Google recruiting me to work on their various video efforts.
It wasn't a hard choice in my case, but I don't know how widely applicable these issues are.
First, Microsoft have tons of smart people who know lots about my field. Google's great on algorithms, but in talking to them I didn't get that they really understand what video and audio are really about, especially the importance of making it LOOK GOOD (e.g. Google Video). Microsoft exactly wanted me for my experience in making video look as good as possible in different areas.
Also, they would require a relocation to the Mountain View area. I have three kids. Google's salary offer looked good on the face of it, but once you factored in the cost of a 4-bedroom in an area with good schools in reasonable communiting range of the Googleplex? No way. Like many Bay Area companies, Google is going to have more luck hiring younger guys than experienced folks like myself in the wife-n-kids phase of life.
Microsoft lets me work from home in Portland, which was the simplest option. But the Redmond/Seattle area is much more affordable, and we're considering relocating.
The decision looks even better in retrospect. Microsoft has been a blast of a place to work, with lots of smart people who really care about doing a great job with the stuff I care about.
At Google, I imaigne I'd have a reputation as "that crank who keeps saying we should spend a much of money making the video look better."
Although it's generally HD DVD supports who have been bullish for hybrids, and Blu-ray supporters who have poo-pooed the idea.
HD DVD is much cheaper to replicate, and full-spec players are cheap to build (the first full spec HD DVD player is $499, while the only Blu-ray player on the market isn't full Blu-ray Live spec, and is $999). So in a world where hybrid players are available, HD DVD will tend to win on cost of replication, and on cost of players (adding HD DVD to a Blu-ray player should be a small cost differential, while adding Blu-ray to a HD DVD player could be a much bigger differential, yielding a market of hybrid players and HD DVD only players).
Actually, 15 GB is plenty for a lot of movies now. The VC-1 codec (I'm involved in that at Microsoft) has made some big improvements lately, with many movies now being able to encode at less than 10 Mbps at very high quality. You can get a lot of that in 15 GB! Certainly, movies under 2.5 hours without a lot of extras should be fine. LOTR:ROTK:EE with lossless audio should fit nicely on a 30 GB disc, as a counterexample.
If anything, the 4.7 GB DVD layer was more of a runtime restriction than the 15 GB HD layer. With DL DVD + SL HD DVD, you can have a no-compromises SD experience, and a great HD version of the movie for when consumers upgrade to an HD player.
Yes, absolutely, both formats can generate ploygons on the fly. Beyond HD, the rich and interactive media aspects of next gen formats are vastly better than SD. If you want a sense of what the HD DVD interactive layer can do, check out Peter Torr's blog:
It's a lot more like writing a modern XHTML web site than anything else. And it's a good thing - there's lots of great stuff coming out in titles that extend the movie experience.
If you feel the titles aren't user-friendly, go down to a CE store and try one of the HD DVD titles. They work great. You can bring up menus and navigation without having to stop the movie, for example. Definitely easier to use than DVD.
As for HBO HD, you're watching over cable or sat, right? So it's highly compressed, horizontally squeezed MPEG-2. HD DVD is a big quality jump from that - you get 6x the pixels of DVD, with higher average per-pixel quality. It's great stuff, and the first time a consumer can really fill a 1920x1080 displa y24 times a second with great video.
AFAIK, they're all working from D5 HD 1920x1080 23.976 fps 4:2:2 10-bit masters.
Most studio movies are available with HD masters, although the quality of the masters can vary. I don' think anyone's tried to use an upsampled SD source for an HD movie yet. It'd be pretty pointless to master a HD title from SD source, considering the players can upsample a DVD quite nicely.
There is a technology called ICT (Image Constraint Token) that content publishers could turn on (but haven't) that'd reduce your output resolution to 940x540 if using a non HDCP output. But given how many players and sets there are out there that don't support it, all the released HD DVD titles don't use this, and will allow you to use every pixel of your current display.
Well, many of us will mainly be watching the movie and main audio at any given time, but a vendor hardly would go to market with a player that didn't support big features of the disc (well, Blu-ray lets you do that by having a couple of different profiles, but not HD DVD). That'd be like having a DVD player that didn't support subtitles. To get a HD DVD logo for a player, you need to support the interactive features.
I gather you haven't seen any of the IME (In Movie Experience) titles. For example, on Bourne Supremacy, on the fly you can have a video commentary track, where the director or producer will pop up as a picture-in-picture to give a face to the narration. Lots of very cool things along these lines will be coming in later titles, and its stuff you'd want to be able to access. And we're talking real-world titles - there are clearly the bits available to do it.
Also, HD DVD absoutely mixes multiple audo sources in real-time, and this is used in real titles. They were required to be premixed on DVD, but not on HD DVD. This is a good thing, since you don't have to waste bits on doing the base audio when doing commentary tracks. This is also why audio decoding is moving out of recievers into the players, and the players output mixed PCM over HDMI as the optimum output mode.
You're dramatically underestimating the load of rich media playback, and overestimating the load of decryption. And I'm not aware of any software players that'll be doing any sort of reencryption in software, or why that would be needed.
I imagine free players like VLC will eventually support playback of non-AACS HD DVD discs. But they'll have similar decoder requirements. We're definitely talking about using GPU compositing, GPU codec decode assist, etcetera.
And we're not even talking about Blu-ray, which has higher max codec complexity, plus it has to run a Java VM and another encryption layer...
You actually don't need HDCP to play back any released HD DVD or Blu-ray title. Since the Xbox 360 and PS3 will have lots of component analog units out there, studios have agreeed not to use the ICT (Image Constraint Token - forces downrez to 960x540 out of analog outputs) flag.
That said, people are going to be buying new computers for the most part to do this, since you'll need a new blue laser drive anyway, which is a good chunk of the price of a machine for the time being.
A QuickTime trailer is typically H.264 Main Profile @ 10 Mbps CBR. HD DVD supports VC-1 or H.264 High Profile @ up to ~27 Mbps, plus picture-in-picture video overlay, plus subtitles and graphics, plus up to three 7.1 audio tracks mixed in realtime (main audio + commentary + UI effects).
Ther's a LOT more going on with these formats than just playing back a single moderate data rate file! Look at the above, and you can see why multiple threads + GPU decoder and rendering asssist are extremely helpful.
Yep, I work for Microsoft, and we have wide ability to download all kinds of internal software, releaess and unreleased, even some stuff that isn't announced. We're all being constantly encouraged to use Vista at home and at work as beta testers.
And we can even talk about it on Slashdot after:).
Apple makes some great products, but it doesn't sound like that fun place to work, honestly.
I assumed this was posted already, but it appears not. I guess I'll get to have the fun:).
FYI, I work on HD DVD at Microsoft.
The employee that was quoted in the article was mistaken. There are already shipping software players for Blu-ray and HD DVD that run on 32-bit XP, and they will continue to work on Windows Vista in 32-bit mode.
Also, we'll have a HD DVD playback accessory for the Xbox 360 available this year. Given how much more successful HD DVD has been compared to Blu-ray so far (many more titles, with much higher average video quality).
Given the price differential between PS3 and the 360, the consumer will have the choice between paying around the same for game consumer + HD playback, but those who just want to play games can ge the 360 without HD disc playback, with the option to upgrade later.
Well, if it's replication costs, it's already over, by a huge margin. Blu-ray is struggling to get yields to even half of that of HD DVD, with higher materials cost. And an HD DVD line can switch between DVD and HD DVD in minutes, meaning it's a much less risky capital investment.
Also, HD DVD has proven higher capacity (most released titles are 30 GB) while Blu-ray has only shipped 25 GB discs (they keep promising 50 GB discs, but nothing has been released to market).
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The Hardcoat is applicable to any disc media, even CD. It's just required for Blu-ray due to how close the optical media is to the surface.
HD DVD discs are much more readible with scratches, so the hardcoat hasn't been applied. But it certainly could be, especially for premium titles.
And there's a big difference between downloading something for free that one didn't pay for, and making a personal backup of something that one did.
Fair Use is an important concept for use in commentary, news, and parody. I fear the common misuse of "Fair Use" as justifying rampant piracy will detract from the real value of the real concept.
Unlimited download of copyrighted material for personal use is NOT part of Fair Use.
Fair Use is a good thing, and we should have it, but Fair Use has nothing at all to do with being able to watch movies by yourself for free.
24p is with us since that's what entertainment content has used since silent film was introduced, and will have to use until the existing installed base of film projectors is entirely replaced with digital projectors - many years from now.
Better storage is better for backup use, but it's not like we have any consumer video technologies on the near horizon that would need more than 30 GB for a long movie. Maybe in a decade with 4K projectors, and a meaningful enough number of movies availble with 4K masters.
And HVD is a HARDWARE technology. No one has even started definining anything about what movies-on-HVD would be like. We don't even know if the physical layer is even practical for real-world use. It's promising, but not something we'll see in homes for many years as well.
Bear in mind that's not a list of exclusive Blu-ray supporters. To take two prominant examples, HP is shipping HD DVD dirves in PCs today, and Apple has been shipping HD DVD authoring and (limited) playback for a year and a half.
Every player and every title you can buy today, or has been announced, and foreseeable future players and titles do NOT have region coding. The format as specified is NOT capable of region coding.
:).
There's a working group working on a spec, which then would need to be ratified, which would then need to be implemented with a sunset period for players in the market, etcetera.
And if you're worried about it, buy a region-free HD DVD player today
There's no point in 1080p60 for most content - all movies and most TV shows are shot at 24p, and that won't change for a long time, if ever.
The key thing is resolution. 1920x1080 is 6x the pixels of DVD's 720x480. 6x is a massive improvement (more than VCD to DVD), and it's a huge visual upgrade. For most folks, once they get used to good HD, DVD seems distractingly soft and undetailed.
Yeah, I guess we'll all be getting locked out of different activities. I started getting bad osteoarthritis in my right shoulder about a year ago (at 35!), resulting in surgery a few months ago which I'm still rehabbing from. Every review of the Wii I read leaves me just *wincing* in imagined pain for swinging that remote around :). Hopefully I'll find it more intriguing in a few months...
But I was able to play Oblivion on the 360 just a few days after surgery, swimming on sea of Vicodin.
All that said, I hope the OP has tried Celebrex. Great stuff for days you need to get stuff done with the sore parts.
I was in the same boat last November, with both Microsoft and Google recruiting me to work on their various video efforts.
It wasn't a hard choice in my case, but I don't know how widely applicable these issues are.
First, Microsoft have tons of smart people who know lots about my field. Google's great on algorithms, but in talking to them I didn't get that they really understand what video and audio are really about, especially the importance of making it LOOK GOOD (e.g. Google Video). Microsoft exactly wanted me for my experience in making video look as good as possible in different areas.
Also, they would require a relocation to the Mountain View area. I have three kids. Google's salary offer looked good on the face of it, but once you factored in the cost of a 4-bedroom in an area with good schools in reasonable communiting range of the Googleplex? No way. Like many Bay Area companies, Google is going to have more luck hiring younger guys than experienced folks like myself in the wife-n-kids phase of life.
Microsoft lets me work from home in Portland, which was the simplest option. But the Redmond/Seattle area is much more affordable, and we're considering relocating.
The decision looks even better in retrospect. Microsoft has been a blast of a place to work, with lots of smart people who really care about doing a great job with the stuff I care about.
At Google, I imaigne I'd have a reputation as "that crank who keeps saying we should spend a much of money making the video look better."
Although it's generally HD DVD supports who have been bullish for hybrids, and Blu-ray supporters who have poo-pooed the idea.
HD DVD is much cheaper to replicate, and full-spec players are cheap to build (the first full spec HD DVD player is $499, while the only Blu-ray player on the market isn't full Blu-ray Live spec, and is $999). So in a world where hybrid players are available, HD DVD will tend to win on cost of replication, and on cost of players (adding HD DVD to a Blu-ray player should be a small cost differential, while adding Blu-ray to a HD DVD player could be a much bigger differential, yielding a market of hybrid players and HD DVD only players).
Of course, then publishers are faced with:
A) Making a hybrid HD DVD that plays everywhere
B) Making a Blu-ray disc that only plays in Blu-ray players.
Is it more useful for Sony to claim "100% compatible players"*
Or discs to claim "100% compatibility"**
* Except you only get 1/6th of the pixels of Twin Discs
** Except you only get 1/6th of the pixels on Blu-ray only players
Actually, 15 GB is plenty for a lot of movies now. The VC-1 codec (I'm involved in that at Microsoft) has made some big improvements lately, with many movies now being able to encode at less than 10 Mbps at very high quality. You can get a lot of that in 15 GB! Certainly, movies under 2.5 hours without a lot of extras should be fine. LOTR:ROTK:EE with lossless audio should fit nicely on a 30 GB disc, as a counterexample.
If anything, the 4.7 GB DVD layer was more of a runtime restriction than the 15 GB HD layer. With DL DVD + SL HD DVD, you can have a no-compromises SD experience, and a great HD version of the movie for when consumers upgrade to an HD player.
Yes, absolutely, both formats can generate ploygons on the fly. Beyond HD, the rich and interactive media aspects of next gen formats are vastly better than SD. If you want a sense of what the HD DVD interactive layer can do, check out Peter Torr's blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ptorr/
It's a lot more like writing a modern XHTML web site than anything else. And it's a good thing - there's lots of great stuff coming out in titles that extend the movie experience.
If you feel the titles aren't user-friendly, go down to a CE store and try one of the HD DVD titles. They work great. You can bring up menus and navigation without having to stop the movie, for example. Definitely easier to use than DVD.
As for HBO HD, you're watching over cable or sat, right? So it's highly compressed, horizontally squeezed MPEG-2. HD DVD is a big quality jump from that - you get 6x the pixels of DVD, with higher average per-pixel quality. It's great stuff, and the first time a consumer can really fill a 1920x1080 displa y24 times a second with great video.
AFAIK, they're all working from D5 HD 1920x1080 23.976 fps 4:2:2 10-bit masters.
Most studio movies are available with HD masters, although the quality of the masters can vary. I don' think anyone's tried to use an upsampled SD source for an HD movie yet. It'd be pretty pointless to master a HD title from SD source, considering the players can upsample a DVD quite nicely.
It'll play HD movies just fine.
There is a technology called ICT (Image Constraint Token) that content publishers could turn on (but haven't) that'd reduce your output resolution to 940x540 if using a non HDCP output. But given how many players and sets there are out there that don't support it, all the released HD DVD titles don't use this, and will allow you to use every pixel of your current display.
Well, many of us will mainly be watching the movie and main audio at any given time, but a vendor hardly would go to market with a player that didn't support big features of the disc (well, Blu-ray lets you do that by having a couple of different profiles, but not HD DVD). That'd be like having a DVD player that didn't support subtitles. To get a HD DVD logo for a player, you need to support the interactive features.
I gather you haven't seen any of the IME (In Movie Experience) titles. For example, on Bourne Supremacy, on the fly you can have a video commentary track, where the director or producer will pop up as a picture-in-picture to give a face to the narration. Lots of very cool things along these lines will be coming in later titles, and its stuff you'd want to be able to access. And we're talking real-world titles - there are clearly the bits available to do it.
Also, HD DVD absoutely mixes multiple audo sources in real-time, and this is used in real titles. They were required to be premixed on DVD, but not on HD DVD. This is a good thing, since you don't have to waste bits on doing the base audio when doing commentary tracks. This is also why audio decoding is moving out of recievers into the players, and the players output mixed PCM over HDMI as the optimum output mode.
You're dramatically underestimating the load of rich media playback, and overestimating the load of decryption. And I'm not aware of any software players that'll be doing any sort of reencryption in software, or why that would be needed.
I imagine free players like VLC will eventually support playback of non-AACS HD DVD discs. But they'll have similar decoder requirements. We're definitely talking about using GPU compositing, GPU codec decode assist, etcetera.
And we're not even talking about Blu-ray, which has higher max codec complexity, plus it has to run a Java VM and another encryption layer...
?
6 5702
There are plenty of HD DVD titles, and a lot coming. Here's a distilled, updated release list
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=6
And there are plenty titles in production not yet on the release schedule.
You actually don't need HDCP to play back any released HD DVD or Blu-ray title. Since the Xbox 360 and PS3 will have lots of component analog units out there, studios have agreeed not to use the ICT (Image Constraint Token - forces downrez to 960x540 out of analog outputs) flag.
That said, people are going to be buying new computers for the most part to do this, since you'll need a new blue laser drive anyway, which is a good chunk of the price of a machine for the time being.
Plus a bunch of DSPs, including a hardware video decoder.
This is NOT something that's going to "just work" on a P4M computer!
A QuickTime trailer is typically H.264 Main Profile @ 10 Mbps CBR. HD DVD supports VC-1 or H.264 High Profile @ up to ~27 Mbps, plus picture-in-picture video overlay, plus subtitles and graphics, plus up to three 7.1 audio tracks mixed in realtime (main audio + commentary + UI effects).
Ther's a LOT more going on with these formats than just playing back a single moderate data rate file! Look at the above, and you can see why multiple threads + GPU decoder and rendering asssist are extremely helpful.
Yep, I work for Microsoft, and we have wide ability to download all kinds of internal software, releaess and unreleased, even some stuff that isn't announced. We're all being constantly encouraged to use Vista at home and at work as beta testers.
:).
And we can even talk about it on Slashdot after
Apple makes some great products, but it doesn't sound like that fun place to work, honestly.
I assumed this was posted already, but it appears not. I guess I'll get to have the fun :).
2 79993&&#post8279993
:).
FYI, I work on HD DVD at Microsoft.
The employee that was quoted in the article was mistaken. There are already shipping software players for Blu-ray and HD DVD that run on 32-bit XP, and they will continue to work on Windows Vista in 32-bit mode.
Here's our VP's reponse to this from AVSFourm:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=8
Sorry about the last 601 posts
Also, we'll have a HD DVD playback accessory for the Xbox 360 available this year. Given how much more successful HD DVD has been compared to Blu-ray so far (many more titles, with much higher average video quality).
Given the price differential between PS3 and the 360, the consumer will have the choice between paying around the same for game consumer + HD playback, but those who just want to play games can ge the 360 without HD disc playback, with the option to upgrade later.
Well, if it's replication costs, it's already over, by a huge margin. Blu-ray is struggling to get yields to even half of that of HD DVD, with higher materials cost. And an HD DVD line can switch between DVD and HD DVD in minutes, meaning it's a much less risky capital investment.
Also, HD DVD has proven higher capacity (most released titles are 30 GB) while Blu-ray has only shipped 25 GB discs (they keep promising 50 GB discs, but nothing has been released to market).
They can be 10-bit 4:4:4 pixels in fact. And he's assuming that he'll get 640x480 output, so he'll be getting 69% more pixels than he expects.