Home video formats taking "two steps forward, one step back"

[bajor27]

Why do formats always seem to take two steps forward, but one step back?


LaserDisc -> DVD
Smaller/fewer discs and better PQ, but from lossless to lossy audio.


DVD -> Blu-ray
Better PQ and back to lossless audio, but no more anamorphic video.


Why can't we continue moving forward in all areas when we advance technology? What's the point if we aren't?

This rant is really just more about the non-anamorphic video on Blu-ray. I didn't even realize it wasn't anamorphic for quite a while, but it just doesn't make any sense to me why it's not.

Yes, I realize not many people currently have a setup or may never have a setup to take advantage of something wider than 16:9, but wouldn't it still be better to offer anamorphic?

I would imagine that it doesn't cost the studio anything more to produce an anamorphic disc than it does a non-anamorphic one, and it shouldn't affect anyone watching on a 16:9 screen, so again, why not just do it.

If it does cost more, I understand why they wouldn't do it, but I can't imagine it costing anymore. It should just be a setting you mark off then creating the transfer, encode, or whatever.

Since it would benefit some, shouldn't affect others, and shouldn't cost more - it seems like a no-brainer to me. But I guess that's why I don't run any Hollywood studios - I have common sense.


Also, I apologize if I'm incorrect about Laserdiscs having lossless audio, but it was my understanding at least some did. I may be confusing something regarding PCM though, but I am quite certain I've heard people said the soundtracks on certain titles were better on Laserdisc over DVD

[BStecke]

I'm not basing this on any kind of expertise, but I wouldn't really expect the image quality to be better, maybe not even noticeable, with an anamorphic transfer vs. non-anamorphic. It's not like we're back in the day of non-anamorphic DVD's. Those sucked something fierce.

[UKTruBlu]

But i thought that anamorphic simply meant that the picture looks 'normal', i have some dvds that say anamorphic and they still have the black bars, but others, such as the first release of Top Gun on dvd, need to be zoomed in using the 'picture size' function on the tv screen.

Is this not correct, does anamorhic mean that the picture is zoomed in to 16.9? Coz that would mean that you couldn't have a movie that was 2.35.1 anamorphic wouldn't it.

[BStecke]

Anamorphic means the disc is made for display on a 16:9 television. Anamorphic does not have anything to do with the aspect ratio. An anamorphic DVD at less than approximately 1.85:1 will not show black bars. 2.35, 2.4:1 will still show black bars.

A non anamorphic disc @ any aspect ratio greater than 1.33:1 will have bars on the top and bottom. Normal rules apply, the wider the AR, the thicker the bars. BUT, on a 16x9 set, the non-anamorphic disc will also have pillar boxes, or boxes on the sides, because a non-anamorphic, widescreen disc is basically a widescreen presentation made for a 4x3 TV. You can, of course, zoom the image to fit the screen, but in order to make the image fit on the screen, you will have to crop some of the image and severely decrease image quality.

This explains everything.

[UKTruBlu]

OK, so I am corret that there will still be black bars on anamorphic discs - thats all i needed to know, i've been telling my brother for years that anamorphic won't get rid of black bars on certain ratio's but he never believed me.

*edit* Hang on..... you don't need blu to be anamorphic, do you? they are mastered to 1920 x 1080, so they are already in a 16 x 9 format, and you can only view HD content in widescreen. So a 4 x 3 screen would be null & void as you could view a blu on this type of screen, right?

[bwillcox]

As for laserdiscs having lossless audio, only for two channel stereo was it lossless. This was PCM, same as with CDs (44.1 sampling rate and 16 bit depth). Near the end of the Laserdisc period they began encoding the analog right channel (I believe it was the right) with an RF signal that was modulated with an AC-3 (later called Dolby Digital) signal that had a bit rate of 320KHz as I recall. Definitely NOT lossless. Of course DVDs have always been able to have two channel PCM audio and both Dolby Digital (480KHz or better) and DTS audio tracks. So I'd say that DVD has always had the capability of better audio quality.

For anamorphic vs. not, I have always understood that anamorphic was an optical trick used to squeeze a widescreen image (of various aspect ratios) into the 4:3 frame constraints of the DVD. They optically compress the image horizontally so it will fit into 4:3 and then your DVD player electronically expands it to fit a widescreen (16:9) TV. As I understand it, the HD format discs (both HD DVD and Blu-ray) can store a widescreen image without resorting to this horizontal compression trick, therefore there's no need to bother with it.

I'm sure folks can correct me wherever I may be wrong, but I do feel that this captures the essence of what you are talking about and why it simply isn't true.

[WickyWoo]

DVD -> Blu-ray
Better PQ and back to lossless audio, but no more anamorphic video.

We still have anamorphic video, "anamorphic" was used to describe the process to fit a 16:9 image into a 4:3 frame by horizontally squishing it.

Since all Blu-rays are 16:9 native, no one uses the term

The number of people with common height setups is so small that while it COULD be done (WB issued a handful of anamorphic laserdiscs), it's unlikely to be done. The investment is thousands of dollars, I think what, $6-7000 by the time you could the projector?

But i thought that anamorphic simply meant that the picture looks 'normal', i have some dvds that say anamorphic and they still have the black bars, but others, such as the first release of Top Gun on dvd, need to be zoomed in using the 'picture size' function on the tv screen.

Anamorphic means it's been formatted for 16:9 TVs. If the aspect ratio is wider than 16:9, you get the top and bottom bars. If it's a non-anamoprhic DVD, then you need to use the zoom function on it.

[WickyWoo]

This should answer all of your questions

http://www.thedigitalbits.com/articl...hic/index.html

[DavePS3]

Anamophic was the term used for the different ratio lenses fit onto movie cameras when television was introduced. Filmmakers wanted a way to draw people back into the theaters and widescreens were the answer. The ana morphic lens on the camera sqeezed the image in, then the opposite was used on the projector. On DVD, it also supposedly meant no lines of resolution were running in the black bars - all lines of rez' were running in the picture itself and it was already formatted for widescreen televisions. BUT... there are 17 different aspect ratios in all and anamorphic does NOT mean it's in 1.78:1 to perfectly fit your screen. Those black bars are giving you the entire picture from side to side as you'd see in the original screening of the film. You're not losing picture on top and bottom, you're gaining it at the sides but in order to see it, the picture has to be pulled back a bit for widescreen TV's. Your widescreen display was made thet size to fit true HD broadcasts - not movies because of the many different ratios filmmakers used with the anamorphic lenses. You're seeing the entire picture frame, not losing picture like many think.

[nycomet]

Everything will be fine when we finally get direct to brain implants. Ever see the movie Brainstorm?

[DavePS3]

Loved Brainstorm!

[JasonR]

That has been bothering you, but your grammar doesn't?

[cajmoyper]

Is it your bad grammar?

[JadedRaverLA]

Originally Posted by bajor27

Why do formats always seem to take two steps forward, but one step back?

LaserDisc -> DVD
Smaller/fewer discs and better PQ, but from lossless to lossy audio.

DVD -> Blu-ray
Better PQ and back to lossless audio, but no more anamorphic video.

DVD allowed PCM audio... but since all players could deal with Dolby Digital (and it required significantly less space) it was rarely utilized.

Similarly, Blu-ray is already 16:9 (and using square pixels finally), so there's no reason to store 16:9 information within a "squished" 4:3 frame. Now, there are a very few people who could benefit from being able to use the full 1920x1080 frame for a 2.39:1 film, but having to resize the frame in the player for the other 99% of the population makes the whole concept more of a negative than a positive.

Anyway, my point is we aren't taking technological steps backward, it's just that sometimes studios and "Joe 6 Pack" consumers see something as a benefit (ie. Dolby Digital over 2-channel PCM) that certain enthusiasts see as a detriment.

[Mr. Hanky]

My own theory behind no anamorphic-coded on hdm is as follows:

Getting the most detailed image is a balance between scaling to fit the screen in proper aspect vs. maximizing the available resolution of the medium. In the most general of terms, any kind of scaling stage will result in some loss of detail, while filling the numerical limits of a medium (740x480 or 1920x1080) with content instead of black bars, seeks to maximize detail performance.

The problem is we have to fit a variety of aspect ratios into a particular screen proportion, so utilizing the full capacity of the medium necessitates the use of some scaling to achieve the correct presentation (unless you are dealing with program content that already exactly fits the screen proportion). When it came to dvd, there is a big change between the shape of 4:3 to 16:9 (actually above even that for the "widescreen-plus" movie content which was already prevalent). So if you put the black bars into the encoding to obviate any scaling loss, you lose quite a bit of resolution in the black bar regions. So the better balance comes from using the the full 740x480 to pass as much detail as possible and simply take the hit on scaling loss. The result turns out to be quite satisfactory, hence became the desirability of "anamorphic" encodings.

Now, the situation is similar, but not identical, when it comes to putting program content in various super widescreen aspects on a 16x9 screen. The difference is that the change in proportion is not as drastic as it was for dvd trying to transform from 4:3 to 16:9. The now-standard 16x9 screen can accomodate the super widescreen programs with "thinner" black bars. So even though some resolution is lost in the thinner black bars, the amount is tolerable in comparison to what would occur with a scaling loss (i.e., the scenario of an "anamorphic" hd encoding that has to be scaled for proper aspect to a 16x9 screen). So in this case, the better balance is achieved by taking the resolution hit with the literal black bars in the encoding and avoiding the extra scaling step.

Now if we take this a step further into the hypothetical (I guess not really "hypothetical" if you take the most extreme real cases which do exist), if there were a lot of movies coming out that would push the 2:37:1 and above range, then perhaps, the anamorphic hd encoding would, again, become more desirable than the now-conventional, letterboxed 16:9. At that point, the black bars are becoming thick enough that considerable resolution is being wasted, that scaling a fully-filled 16:9 anamorphic encoding (with associated scaling loss) would be the better choice (with the critical assumption that it will be used on a display that is beyond 1920x1080, as well).

[Neo65]

I'm looking at the BDMV specs and thinking to myself that there doesn't really seem to be anything that would not allow an anamorphic bit other than the backwards compatibility issue with existing players.

Presumably if some future revision were to introduce a field in a picture header to indicate anamorphic (say 1080 lines in a 2.4:1 movie), then a new player can recognize this feature and scale the video output accordingly.

The tricky part is that we then need to make 2.4:1 TVs (narrower than the 16:9 HDTV formats today), that would be 2592x1080 and display 16:9 movies with black bars on left and right.

Alternately, we could also get 16:9 2560x1440 screens and get more pixels with 2.4:1 content.

[bajor27]

I apologize for the bad grammar. I wrote this up at work - while I was working. Just be happy I used some puncuation and paragraphs. Okay?

And if I'm misusing the term anamorphic, I apologize. I'm pretty certain the definition of anamorphic isn't "designed to fit a 16:9 screen", although that's what we've come to associate it with due to DVDs.

Anyway, perhaps it's not really Blu-ray's fault, but more the TVs fault. In any case, it's still my understanding that the black bars are hard coded right into the digital video file on the disc which I think isn't right.

My computer can play a file in any ratio and depending on the size of my screen, or the size I give the video window on my screen, I may or may not see black bars. What I'm trying to ask is why can't Blu-rays work in the same fashion? Why can't they simply put a file on there without the black bars and have your tv add them when and if necessary?

Yes, I understand that not many may ever be able to take advantage of this, but again, unless I'm missing something, the only change for the studio is what option is selected in the piece of software used when creating the encode for the disc.

Would it actually add extra cost to the production of the disc if the video was strictly the picture, and not the picture plus some black bars?


Mr. Hanky may have asnwered my overall question (to which I'm very appreciative). Just so I'm understanding, you're saying we'd lose less quality by always providing a 1920x1080 file (even if some of that file is just black), than by providing 2538x1080 file (which I think is what for 2.35:1 films) and scaling that down to fit.

I say 2538x1080 because I'm concerned with standard height as opposed to standard width. I guess to fit in a 1920x1080 screen though, it would have to be 1920x817 though (again for 2.35:1 film)

[Mr. Hanky]

We'll have to call this new standard "MD" for Mega-Definition, but then take that 1 step back with lossy audio, again.