Standard Definition content on DVD vs Blu-ray

[Jar Jar Stinks]

Is there any "real" difference between SD content on a DVD vs a BD? I'm guessing there's maybe a higher bitrate on BD. Would that make a big difference? For example, is the SD content on my Alien Quadrilogy DVD set any different than the same material on the Alien Anthology BD set?

[steve_dave]

Originally Posted by Jar Jar Stinks

Is there any "real" difference between SD content on a DVD vs a BD? I'm guessing there's maybe a higher bitrate on BD. Would that make a big difference? For example, is the SD content on my Alien Quadrilogy DVD set any different than the same material on the Alien Anthology BD set?

Encoding and audio format might be different... what was once MPEG2 is now AVC or VC-1 or instead of DD 2.0 192 kbs, DTS audio.

[Kriztoffer Swank]

For whatever reason, the same SD special features on BD usually look worse than my DVD on the same setup, prompting me to question whether BD players generally upscale SD content on BDs. I think my TV states such extras are coming out as 480p.

[Jar Jar Stinks]

Originally Posted by Kriztoffer Swank

For whatever reason, the same SD special features on BD usually look worse than my DVD on the same setup, prompting me to question whether BD players generally upscale SD content on BDs. I think my TV states such extras are coming out as 480p.

That's interesting. I remember someone else mentioning that too.

[blonde_devil]

Originally Posted by Kriztoffer Swank

For whatever reason, the same SD special features on BD usually look worse than my DVD on the same setup, prompting me to question whether BD players generally upscale SD content on BDs. I think my TV states such extras are coming out as 480p.

I see the same thing which is strange as you think the compression would be better since they have more room to work with - more room means better picture quality. But yeah, other than the encoding due to the format, I can't think of anything that would be different unless the studio did something different for the release.

[David M]

The BD spec does not allow 23.98fps as a frame rate for SD. (Neither does DVD, but it's achievable with repeat field flags and some players can ignore those to produce 23.98 output). Bizarrely, it DOES allow it for the secondary video decoder (remember the few discs that used that?)

As Kriztoffer Swank posted above, SD content on BD looks pretty bad on most players. I don't know what the exact reason for this is, but it's why I prefer to scale any SD content here during authoring.