[Sean4000]

Star TRek is still stuck on HD-DUd for the time being and I'm afraid it is as biased as they come.

I am a regular on Trekmovie.com and my friend Matt wrote this interesting article on how the formats are more simmilar that different. I don't necesarily agree with him 100% on the VC-1 issue.

Quote: Matthew Wright of TrekMovie.com:

"""" Hmm that article is slightly dubious. Also his basic premise is essentially a subjective/esthetic one. VC-1 in fact preserves grain better then H.264 (MPEG4-AVC), so he may be confusing “pleasing” with “grain blurred out”, many people do. He also accounted for the drop in HD DVD scores, which was that Universal was hurrying some catalog titles out and didn’t seem to do a good job with them (which studios on both sides are guilty of, Universial is the worst offender though). Further the number of titles released on each format isn’t totally equal, but getting close [HD DVD 338 titles vs Blu-ray 365 titles]. Now whether this is statisically significant between the two I’m not certain, the differences in numbers are probably close enough to be compared properly, but the overall sample size of both formats is far too small to really get any kind of solid conclusion from. Which really sums up the whole format war, there just isn’t enough of anything, players, movie titles, etc. sold yet to call anyone a victor, we have short term information that can swing wildly from week to week depending on what is released on any given Tuesday.

Further his “BR has superior encodes thanks to disc size” doesn’t quite carry the weight he thinks it does, Warner publishes to both formats and uses the same VC-1 encode on both. Many Warner films have had high ratings. So if Warner has a good transfer on BR it does on HD DVD as well, and vice versa.

Also he is arguing different things all mixed in, one of his arguements is about codec choice, not optical disc format. He likes the compression effect of AVC over VC-1. Both HD DVD and Blu-ray titles may use VC-1, AVC, or MPEG2 if they choose. It is up to the studio/production house to pick a codec they feel is best. Sony and Fox eventually chose AVC, Warner has been behind VC-1 since day one, so has Universal, Paramount experimented with all the codecs at different times, eventually choosing AVC. So perhaps AVC is the way to go, but that isn’t about the format per say. The format with the most AVC titles is Blu-ray, yes. But that is a false logic to conclude that the HD DVD platform is somehow poor. That is the choice of the studios releasing titles, not an inherent technical deficiency in one platform or another.

Of course I would argue that that guy doesn’t really know what he’s talking about. VC-1 actually does much better at the subsample level and can use a finer and a more adpative matrix of video blocks then AVC can (which is how it can preserve grain better). The predominant VC-1 encoder application is being refined on an ongoing basis, this is one reason why when Nine Inch Nails went to produce a concert in high definition, for both Blu-ray and HD DVD, they used VC-1. It turns out Microsoft worked closely with the producers to optimize their VC-1 encoder product to deal with the complexities of a live rock show that had fast light changes, etc. The results are stunning and you won’t find reviews complaning about image quality (as it pertains to the codec). Likewise, Shrek the 3rd is near reference quality, again thanks to the VC-1 encoder being tweaked and refined for the best quality in animation as well as live action film, and video sources (such as concerts). Another example of a more recent title is the BBC Video release of Planet Earth which uses VC-1 (it gets high marks). Sadly the US version of Planet Earth seems to have been done poorly and it was done in AVC. So it isn’t so cut and dry, production houses can definitely screw things up, and different masters can make differences as well.""""