Latest Warner titles showing weakness of HDDVD spec.

[BTBuck1]

http://www.hometheaterspot.com/fusio...hp?tid/137411/

VIDEO:
I had very high expectations going into this move for a number of reasons. First, I had waited to watch it for so long in HD, I expected an “A” list title to receive the “A” list treatment. Second, with a “newer” release I expected an upgrade over the mostly catalog titles that I have been reviewing lately. Unfortunately, I was let down in a big way.
The encode is done in a VC-1 1080p presentation, that is extremely starved in the bitrate department, and boy does it show. From the opening scene, compression issues arise in the backgrounds as well as the foreground. At first, I thought it might possible be grain, until I got up from my seat to get about 2 feet away from the screen and I was greeted with what looked to be “mini-macroblocks”, which from my normal seating distance shows up as video noise. I then popped up the bitrate meter on the PS3 and was astounded to see a bitrate of 7.9 Mbps! That is damn low for HD content, and frankly, I’m not surprised that it didn’t look worse! From this point on, I was on the lookout for this type of phenomenon, and it appeared again quite frequently in the presentation in low light situations. In one such case, DiCaprio and Connelly are speaking on the porch of an orphanage, and the camera pans back and forth between the two of them, out of about 5 sequences of each character, the video noise only showed up in one of them! Why were the other 9 OK and the other one it was present? Hard to tell, but I wasn’t that impressed.
Unfortunately, that isn’t the only thing that is wrong in the video department. Banding is quite evident in a lot of scenes, specifically in the skyline and in the setting sun. Fine detail is lacking at times, especially in the backgrounds of the forest on the longer shots where instead of seeing individual leaves, you are left with a more DVD like picture of the leaves blending into a green blob.
The highlights of the presentation though are the exterior shots, which have a tendency to be very lifelike, especially when there are close-ups of our main characters. Overall, I’m sure that many will enjoy this presentation on smaller displays, but on my 88-inch screen, there was more to dislike than like in this one. There was plenty of space made available on this disc for content since it is a BD50, but I have to wonder if having an uncompressed PCM track and a low bitrate VC-1 encode was the best choice on this one?

Thread at AVS which is creating a lot of anomasity against HD30/VC-1:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=856938

[BTBuck1]

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...6#post10708006

[MrBogey]

Originally Posted by BTBuck1

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...6#post10708006

It's interesting in that the usual HD DVD zealots have nothing to really defend so they just fall back to faith that Warner did the best they could and blu-ray owners need to either shut up or give up Warner completely.

Josh Z is doing a good job of hedging his bets by attacking the bitrate meter and how everyone else can't read it right even though it's not accurate anyways.

[LeoneFan]

I'm so sick of Warner, I absolutely dispise them. They used to be one of my top 3 studios on DVD. I'm not sure if I should pick up Rio Bravo and The Cowboys this week. It says a lot about a studio which caters toward a crap format like HDDVD.

[ra1024]

I've been sick of them for some time. I just can't understand how a company can be so oblivious to the HD formats. The worst thing about all of this is they have so many great titles. I stopped buying Warner titles a while back and won't start until they do separate encodes AND deliver great PQ on BR.

[Spankey]

GOOD BOY TAKING ONE FOR THE TEAM



GO GRUBERT!

[LeoneFan]

Josh Z got totally oWned in that thread. I love it. The HDDVD tool got smacked so hard he ran crying with his tail between his legs. I can't believe this guy is even allowed to reivew Blu-ray titles on DVDTalk.com!

[The Don]

Blood Diamond is the last Warner title I will be purchasing until they rectify this problem..

[The Don]

it's funny how the HD DVD fools over there try to do fancy wordplay with the sentences to angle the argument into their favor....it's kinda cute actually

the BD fans come with facts and they act like everything on BD is VC-1....

this doesn't negate the fact that BD in most cases is flat out superior...in every part of this argument except for the fact that FOX and WB seem to be screwing the pooch..........

.....thank god we still have Disney and Sony leading the way.....

their treasure is our trash..

[WickyWoo]

How much IME is there in the title on the HD-DVD version, as in minutes? Since IME on HD DVD is only 480p, it's not going to take a lot of bandwidth, and are all the extras HD?

I'm just trying to figure out what could have possibly caused them to encode at such a low bitrate, even for HD-DVD. If it really averages 7.9mbps, that could almost fit on a DVD-9(before soundtracks).

I get the feeling this was done by a rookie encoder using his DVD bag of tricks, just like the problems Sony had with their MPEG-2 encodes. DVD tricks don't work for HD, you need a whole bag of new ones.

[desmond]

Warner did the same with DVD's when it released whole bunch of sub par transfers (Kubrik collection comes to mind) and then later reissued some of the titles as special editions.

[ussrelativity]

Warner will get things right full-scale by next year, hopefully. I trust in them to crank out top-notch Blu-Ray titles.

[coolmilo]

I had this title pre-ordered at Amazon and just caught it before it shipped. I am too spoiled now thanks to the quality products from Sony and Disney to accept crap. It's unfortunate too because I really enjoyed Blood Diamond.

[Spankey]

Are there really any "rookie" encoders at Warner, when the concensus has been that MS is holding the encoders hands through the process? Would Warner really use a rookie encoder for a disc that uses IME, and a host of extras for an A list title? Would Warner really experiment with low VC-1 bit rates unless MS was involved? Highly Unlikely. Please don't bring in a 1 year old Sony criticism into this. Warner has been at this for over a year. They are getting worse. Sony is light years ahead.

Amir has been going on and on how MS is now able to encode with less than 10mbps. I guess that isn't as transparent as he thinks.

Warner is lazy when it comes to producing titles for Blu-ray. They copy and paste the encodes for HD-DVD to Blu-ray.

[baccusboy]

Originally Posted by The Don

Blood Diamond is the last Warner title I will be purchasing until they rectify this problem..

Huhuhuhuhhhh... he said rectify!

[gandley]

Huhuhuhuhhhh, yeah, kick his ass.

I stated the same thing about blood diamond on the AVForum and the HD-DVD fans went nuts.
they just would not accept HD-DVD was limiting the BD encode. it had to be the master, no wait it was a cock up. no wait the PS3 replays VC-1 at a lower quality etc etc. So when there HD-DVD version turns up looking the same, well. PWNED

[ra1024]

Originally Posted by baccusboy

Huhuhuhuhhhh... he said rectify!

lol, good one.

[MrBogey]

They state reasonably and accurately that VC-1 is great if given enough bandwidth. Then you point out a failing, rather than state it was low bandwidth they blame everything but.

MS hacks...all of them.