Oh noes teh sky is falling!

[Anthony P]

You must not use 576 vertical lines for VHS. This information is wrong for VHS! It always expected an interlaced image, so you must not show more than 288 (for NTSC 240) vertical lines at the same time! Due to the pretty significant noise ratio it is hopeless to reconstruct the full resolution! A progressive DVD image is a totally different matter.

it is interlaced, but there are two fields in a frame, not to count 1/2 the image is just dumb. And yes like NTSC there are unused lines in VHS but I was not mentioning them for NTSC, that is why I was using 480.

PS DVD is interlaced as well, why don’t you use 240 there as well?

(there are much moire people that need glasses than people that have a better than 20/20 eyesight).

come on man are you serious, if someone has eye problems and does not buy glasses or contacts because he is too cool we have to pretend the information is not there? I am sure we can find some totally blind guy that can't see the difference between BD, DVD and, VHS and a radio for image quality, should we use him as a reference?

[KarstenSch]

Originally Posted by Anthony P

If we compare the two VHS has 480 scan lines and 240 HLoR (assuming that is what your link means by lines) on the other hand DVD has 480 rows and the equivalent of 405 HLoR

As I already said: There is simply no sensible way to use the 480 horizontal lines of VHS. In fact ALL progressive displays that I know simply drop every second interlaced image from a composite input.The risk is simply to high that you loose even more information if you try to recover an hypothetical progressive image. The noise ratio prevents this.

[Sponge-worthy]

Originally Posted by jpthomas27

You can not discuss the significance of upgrading from DVD to Blu and then immidiately put PQ and AQ aside. You just can't!! The PQ and AQ of Blu-ray is at the heart of it's apeal

I certainly understand your points made about convinience, but you have to consider the entire package as a whole, not in piece.

So let me pose this situation: The average person that likes sports cars would love to drive a Corvette or equivilent sports car. But given the choice to drive a Ferrari they would absolutely consider that to be an upgrade despite the fact that a Ferrari would be much less convenient when you consider insurance, storage, repair and maintenance etc... My point is you have to consider the entire package. You can't say that owning a Ferrari over a Corvette isn't a significant upgrade simply becasue there are SOME downsides to it.

I find your metaphor somewhat dishonest, intellectually. While sports car enthusiasts might follow your rationale, the home video market is more of a mass market, akin to people who buy cars, generally, rather than sports car aficionados, specifically (nearly everyone watches movies, but is a much narrower group of people who purchase sports cars versus any other type of car). So yes, for the audio/videophiles out there, the 'Ferrari' of Bluray certainly holds a distinguishable advantage. However, for the mass home video market at large, the Corvette of DVD is oftentimes sufficient.

[Cevolution]

Originally Posted by Sponge-worthy

I find your metaphor somewhat dishonest, intellectually. While sports car enthusiasts might follow your rationale, the home video market is more of a mass market, akin to people who buy cars, generally, rather than sports car aficionados, specifically (nearly everyone watches movies, but is a much narrower group of people who purchase sports cars versus any other type of car). So yes, for the audio/videophiles out there, the 'Ferrari' of Bluray certainly holds a distinguishable advantage. However, for the mass home video market at large, the Corvette of DVD is oftentimes sufficient.

His point was a valid 1, he wasn't talking about the larger home video market or what most find sufficient, he was saying that it's just ridiculous for anyone to disregard the P/AQ quality differences between dvd and blu-ray whether they care or not, which is what u had said and were doing in an earlier post to support your argument and opinion about vhs-dvd being a much greater step forward than dvd-blu-ray.

I think mentioning the convenience going from a vhs tape to a smaller disc the size of a dvd is a poor reference to even make to try to support your view on why u think it was a bigger jump from vhs-dvd than it is from dvd-blu-ray. For 1, regardless of whether it was dvd which followed vhs as the next main stream home video format, any tech to be released after vhs, if released on a disc the size of a cd would have also had the same advantage of being smaller and more compact, and the convenience of not having to rewind a video tape when u finished with it. 2, It would be different if when dvd was created it was the 1st time anyone had ever seen anything on a disc that shape and size (I'm not referring to size of gb's), but it wasn't, cd's and vcd's had been around for years before dvd, so when it comes to size and convenience, all dvd did was copy the same concept of already existing formats, then just added a couple of it's own new features such as special features, scene selection etc. If dvd was the 1st ever tech made available with discs the size of cd's or had introduced a new shape and smaller sized disc (such as gamecube sized discs or umd sized discs), instead of just having the same diameter which already existed, then using convenience as a point for why u think vhs-dvd is a better leap than dvd-blu-ray would actually be much more valid, because only then could dvd tech take the credit for inventing and offering such convenience.

[KarstenSch]

Originally Posted by Anthony P

PS DVD is interlaced as well, why don’t you use 240 there as well?

DVDs have a marker flag that informs if the source is interlaced or progressive. In fact, it shall even inform the players which frames belong together! While this isn't true for many DVDs the existence of flags is normally a good indicator if the source was interlaced or not.
Even more important: You have discrete pixel values that you can use for pattern recognition. So scalers like Faroudjas and ABTs have a very good probability to lock the corresponding frames correctly even if flags are missing or wrong..

For VHS you always have to guess degradation and signal noise before you could even try to use pattern recognition algorithms. Add to this the even more limited number of informations per line and it gets pretty much hopeless.
Compare this with the simple fact that you don't have more than 220-240 real informations per line. if you simply drop every second frame you have a pretty clean image to interpolate from. It simplifies the whole procedure and the results tend to look better than the guesswork.

Originally Posted by Anthony P

come on man are you serious, if someone has eye problems and does not buy glasses or contacts because he is too cool we have to pretend the information is not there?

You miss the point. Glasses and contacts do not result in perfect vision. Normally there remains an an error that is not corrected. And it doesn't even matter what we think and do.If someone does not see a significant difference either due to limited eyesight, a small screen or if he simply sits too far away from the screen you might sell him a Blu-ray player but he would buy DVDs.
The Blu-ray was really no convenience upgrade. Blu-rays have better and more beautiful menus, but they normally load slower, and the feature that many Blu-rays do not automatically store where they were stopped the last time doesn't win points either. And I didn't even start with copy protection problems...

If we look at the complete picture I would say that the difference for the normal customer is much bigger between VHS and DVD, than between DVD and Blu-ray.

[Cevolution]

Originally Posted by KarstenSch

DVDs have a marker flag that informs if the source is interlaced or progressive. In fact, it shall even inform the players which frames belong together! While this isn't true for many DVDs the existence of flags is normally a good indicator if the source was interlaced or not.
Even more important: You have discrete pixel values that you can use for pattern recognition. So scalers like Faroudjas and ABTs have a very good probability to lock the corresponding frames correctly even if flags are missing or wrong..

For VHS you always have to guess degradation and signal noise before you could even try to use pattern recognition algorithms. Add to this the even more limited number of informations per line and it gets pretty much hopeless.
Compare this with the simple fact that you don't have more than 220-240 real informations per line. if you simply drop every second frame you have a pretty clean image to interpolate from. It simplifies the whole procedure and the results tend to look better than the guesswork.




You miss the point. Glasses and contacts do not result in perfect vision. Normally there remains an an error that is not corrected. And it doesn't even matter what we think and do.If someone does not see a significant difference either due to limited eyesight, a small screen or if he simply sits too far away from the screen you might sell him a Blu-ray player but he would buy DVDs.
The Blu-ray was really no convenience upgrade. Blu-rays have better and more beautiful menus, but they normally load slower, and the feature that many Blu-rays do not automatically store where they were stopped the last time doesn't win points either. And I didn't even start with copy protection problems...

If we look at the complete picture I would say that the difference for the normal customer is much bigger between VHS and DVD, than between DVD and Blu-ray.

Another person stating the obvious, of course convenience and the differences between vhs and dvd were a bigger upgrade to most consumers, because we went from tapes to discs. That would have been the same no matter what format followed vhs if discs were used. Those are exactly the kinds of points that shouldn't even be considered or mentioned when comparing dvd's-blu-ray's, as it adds an unfair comparison. It's not blu-rays fault that it happens to be the 2nd official main stream disc based format, where its had far more to contend with than dvd ever did, dvd was just lucky it had the things in it's favor that it did. Dvd tech shouldn't get brownie points for catching on the way it did, as it really had no other disc based format to contend or compete with, but blu-ray does, with a dvd, which has had like a 10 year head start.

Imagine if dvd wasn't a disc based format but used tapes similar to vhs, created to compete with vhs, then it would have had a lot to contend with being so similar, and probably would have failed as a result. It was always going to be easy for the 1st well thought out disc based format (dvd) to succeed, and it was always going to be a harder sell and a much bigger challenge for the next disc based format released after dvd.

Btw loading times are only about 15-20 seconds longer than dvd's, but if it means that u get much better P/AQ for it then it's a fair trade off imo.

[krazeyeyez]

Originally Posted by Cevolution

Another person stating the obvious, of course convenience and the differences between vhs and dvd were a bigger upgrade to most consumers, because we went from tapes to discs. That would have been the same no matter what format followed vhs if discs were used. Those are exactly the kinds of points that shouldn't even be considered or mentioned when comparing dvd's-blu-ray's, as it adds an unfair comparison, as it's not blu-rays fault that it happens to be the 2nd official main stream disc based format, dvd was just lucky that it had that in it's favor when it was released. Dvd tech shouldn't get brownie points for catching on the way it did, as it really had no other disc based format to contend or compete with, but blu-ray does, with a dvd, which has had like a 10 year head start.

How is it unfair to discuss what drove consumers to double up on titles they already owned on a format, when discussing the future success of blu-ray along with j6p's eventual reception of the format. I don't follow because these were all reasons that helped push dvd, and blu-ray does not have a lot of these advantages in its favor along with a lot going against it, market saturation, economy, reliance on a number of technology and environmental conditions etc...

If this was reversed and it was blu-ray with the advantages and convenience factors would it still be unfair to state the "obvious" as you put it.

[Cevolution]

Originally Posted by krazeyeyez

How is it unfair to discuss what drove consumers to double up on titles they already owned on a format, when discussing the future success of blu-ray along with j6p's eventual reception of the format. I don't follow because these were all reasons that helped push dvd, and blu-ray does not have a lot of these advantages in its favor along with a lot going against it, market saturation, economy, reliance on a number of technology and environmental conditions etc...

If this was reversed and it was blu-ray with the advantages and convenience factors would it still be unfair to state the "obvious" as you put it.

Where did I say that it was unfair to discuss movies owned or bought on another format where u might or might not want to buy it again on a new format? I think u misunderstood what I meant, because I was defending blu-ray against some of the hard things it's had to go through that dvd didn't, where dvd had a greater advantage as a result.

My last comment has got nothing at all to do with which format I favor or prefer, but rather about how too many people use examples to support their opinion, that just shouldn't be used in all fairness.

If blu-ray come out 1st and was released when dvd was, and dvd come 2nd released in 2006 when blu-ray was, then I would be saying exactly the same thing about comparing vhs to the other, because any format released after vhs which was disc based, would have offered the same convenience factors as what dvd did over vhs. Imo, its ridiculous for people to say that dvd's were a bigger jump from vhs than it is from dvd-blu-ray, if they are using the convenience of physical size and appearance as a point. Because that is an unfair comparison, as of course there are major differences between vhs tapes and discs where discs are going to be more convenient. With blu-ray and dvd, u are comparing a disc to a disc, not a vhs tape to disc. The fact the vhs tapes were bigger bulkier and harder to store where dvd's are smaller and more convenient, shouldn't even come into a discussion when comparing dvd's-blu-rays, it's just simply not relevant.

It's like comparing original nintendo cartridges to playstation games, playstation games are going to be more convenient because they are on a disc, are smaller and easier to store. It would be really stupid of someone to say that 'ps1 games gave us more benefits than what ps3 games do because there was a greater jump in convenience as it was the first time console games were put on discs instead of a cartridges', but that's pretty much exactly what people are saying when they make references about dvd being better than blu-ray because of the convenience factor it had over vhs.

How can someone use an example when the 2 products are not being put through the same test, because blu-ray offers no convenience over dvd in regards to physical size (I'm not refering to gb's, I'm referring to appearance), (except for maybe the fact that blu-ray cases are smaller than dvd cases and can save storage space in that way) but dvd obviously offered a greater advantage in size and convenience over vhs which gave it appeal and help sell it. The same thing doesn't help sell blu-rays, because they are the same sizes as dvd's physically. Comparing the convenience based on the physical appearance of vhs-dvd is like comparing apples to oranges, but comparing the convenience of the physical appearance between dvds-blu-rays is like comparing apples to apples.

[Uniquely]

Originally Posted by Cevolution

Imo, its ridiculous for people to say that dvd's were a bigger jump from vhs than it is from dvd-blu-ray, if they are using the convenience of physical size and appearance as a point. Because that is an unfair comparison, as of course there are major differences between vhs tapes and discs where discs are going to be more convenient. With blu-ray and dvd, u are comparing a disc to a disc, not a vhs tape to disc. The fact the vhs tapes were bigger bulkier and harder to store where dvd's are smaller and more convenient, shouldn't even come into a discussion when comparing dvd's-blu-rays, it's just simply not relevant.

It's like comparing nintendo cartridges to playstation games, playstation games are going to be more convenient because they are on a disc, smaller and easier to store. It would be really stupid of someone to say that 'ps1 games gave us more benefits than what ps3 games do because there was a greater jump in convenience as it was the first time console games were put on discs instead of a cartridges'.

How can someone use an example when the 2 products are not being put through the same test, because blu-ray offers no convenience over dvd in regards to physical size (I'm not refering to gb's, I'm referring to appearance), (except for maybe the fact that blu-ray cases are smaller than dvd cases and can save storage space in that way) but dvd obviously offered a greater advantage in size and convenience over vhs which gave it appeal and help sell it. The same thing doesn't help sell blu-rays, because they are the same sizes as dvd's physically. Comparing the convenience based on the physical appearance of vhs-dvd is like comparing apples to oranges, but comparing the convenience of the physical appearance between dvds-blu-rays is like comparing apples to apples.

If the topic is which one was a bigger improvement... DVD over VHS.... or Blu-Ray over DVD... of course it's fair to consider the technological and convenience factors DVD offered over VHS. It WAS a huge upgrade from that standpoint... and those are things that many consumers do place great value upon. I don't get the point of saying if blu-ray had been the next step up from VHS, it would have had most of the same improvements... because obviously it wasn't the next step up; DVD was, which is why IT is what's being compared to VHS.

Of course blu-ray had more improvement in AV/PQ over DVD than DVD had over VHS... and if those things are more important to you than the convenience factors DVD offered over VHS... then for you the winner of this rather odd comparison contest is clear. Everyone, however, can't be expected to discount the factors you consider unimportant; because everyone places different importance on these factors.

Anyone want to discuss which was the bigger jump.... DVD over VHS.... or VHS over reel to reel?

[Rob71]

Originally Posted by robinandtami

Anyone want to discuss which was the bigger jump.... DVD over VHS.... or VHS over reel to reel?

Back in the olden days(70's) a kid who lived a few streets over had a father that had a projector. Once a month or so all us kids would come over and he'd show Disney shorts, Merrie Melodies shorts and
Three Stooges films. Of course knowing what those projectors were really for, I'm sure he had more "adult" fare for when the kiddies went home.

[Cevolution]

Originally Posted by robinandtami

[B]If the topic is which one was a bigger improvement... DVD over VHS.... or Blu-Ray over DVD... of course it's fair to consider the technological and convenience factors DVD offered over VHS. It WAS a huge upgrade from that standpoint... and those are things that many consumers do place great value upon. I don't get the point of saying if blu-ray had been the next step up from VHS, it would have had most of the same improvements... because obviously it wasn't the next step up; DVD was, which is why IT is what's being compared to VHS.

Of course blu-ray had more improvement in AV/PQ over DVD than DVD had over VHS... and if those things are more important to you than the convenience factors DVD offered over VHS... then for you the winner of this rather odd comparison contest is clear. Everyone, however, can't be expected to discount the factors you consider unimportant; because everyone places different importance on these factors.

Anyone want to discuss which was the bigger jump.... DVD over VHS.... or VHS over reel to reel?

I'm not saying that comparing all features the different formats offer is wrong, only certain features, in cases where there cannot be a true comparison. For 1, blu-ray didn't go up against vhs, dvd did, think about it, a dvd disc compared to a vhs tape, gee I wonder which 1 was going to win and what consumers were going to pick for physical convenience, it's obvious and I feel that there is no need to have someone make reference to it on almost every single page in threads such as this, it's like telling us the sky is blue when we already know it's blue.

2, When buying, consumers certainly don't hold a blu-ray in 1 hand and a dvd in the other comparing their physical size differences because there is nothing to compare between the 2 in this area, unlike with vhs compared to dvd. So there in itself already shows an advantage that dvd had when it was released that blu-ray didn't, so with that being said it becomes moronic trying to use it against blu-ray in an argument to make a point to support an opinion of why u might think dvd is better than blu-ray.

3. Dvd tech didn't introduce anything new in regards to physical appearance, it just copied the same disc diameter that cd's and vcd's used already, so how can and why should dvd tech take the credit for the convenience factor when it didn't come up with the idea. Discs with the same physical size had already be available for 20 years before dvd, dvd's weren't even the 1st to use discs for home video either.

I've got no problem with people valuing the convenience factor that dvd's offered over vhs, what I have a problem with is when someones uses it as a reason (or excuse) why they don't really like blu-ray and why they think dvd is better, but the truth is vhs has no baring whatsoever on the important factors of comparing dvd's to blu-rays, especially since vhs is no longer a supported format.

[Anthony P]

Originally Posted by KarstenSch

As I already said: There is simply no sensible way to use the 480 horizontal lines of VHS. In fact ALL progressive displays that I know simply drop every second interlaced image from a composite input.The risk is simply to high that you loose even more information if you try to recover an hypothetical progressive image. The noise ratio prevents this.

In 1997 when DVD hit the US market how many progressive displays where there? Do you believe no one used DVD players with CRTs? If we are discussing the capabilities of the format we have to discuss what they can do, not what a badly design set-up might do, which was never in the discussion. If it is true, then it would be just as true for DVD or BD using that composite cable.

[Anthony P]

Originally Posted by KarstenSch

DVDs have a marker flag that informs if the source is interlaced or progressive. In fact, it shall even inform the players which frames belong together! While this isn't true for many DVDs the existence of flags is normally a good indicator if the source was interlaced or not.
Even more important: You have discrete pixel values that you can use for pattern recognition. So scalers like Faroudjas and ABTs have a very good probability to lock the corresponding frames correctly even if flags are missing or wrong..

For VHS you always have to guess degradation and signal noise before you could even try to use pattern recognition algorithms. Add to this the even more limited number of informations per line and it gets pretty much hopeless.
Compare this with the simple fact that you don't have more than 220-240 real informations per line. if you simply drop every second frame you have a pretty clean image to interpolate from. It simplifies the whole procedure and the results tend to look better than the guesswork.

but DVD does not have 720 discrete pixels per line. The disk cannot hold it, it is compressed. If you created the same thing as the test to determine Horizontal resolution for analogue and one column of black pixels followed by white..... all the way to the end once compressed in order to play back off of a disk you will not have 720 vertical lines, and if you did that same test horizontaly lines to get vertical data you will not get 480. The nature of DVD means you can't have 480x720 discrete data in a frame, and since mpeg 2 can only do pixels of 1 or blocks of 8x8 and not a row or a column, that means you won't have all the values, now luckily in movies you don't tend to have too many rows or colums and things tend to be blobs.

You miss the point. Glasses and contacts do not result in perfect vision. Normally there remains an an error that is not corrected. And it doesn't even matter what we think and do.

OK, but you desacribesd someone with legal blindness, not minor impairment. or not 100% corrected vision. Even if one was top take a BD and sacle it down to DVD that person would have a better image.

If someone does not see a significant difference either due to limited eyesight, a small screen or if he simply sits too far away from the screen you might sell him a Blu-ray player but he would buy DVDs.

I don't care what people buy, someone said that DVD was a big improvement over VHS which I pointed out was false, he also said that the difference was not there for BD. Now if the guy wernt blind between buying a DVD and a BD, how does that affect anything. Objectively speaking BD is a big improvement over DVD and DVD is a realy small improvement over VHS.

If I go to a young kid and in one hand I have three nickels (5 cent) and in the other a quarter (25 cents), the kid might pick the three nickels because there are more of them. Will that mean that a quarter is worth less, it is just that the kid has no idea of the value of money, so it is 3 shinny things vs one. Peruse this site, there are full of FG threads where idiots say "I like the DVD better because it is distracting", but in the end the BD captured a much better image and that is why the FG is there, if the guy likes it or not.

The Blu-ray was really no convenience upgrade. Blu-rays have better and more beautiful menus, but they normally load slower, and the feature that many Blu-rays do not automatically store where they were stopped the last time doesn't win points either. And I didn't even start with copy protection problems...

If we look at the complete picture I would say that the difference for the normal customer is much bigger between VHS and DVD, than between DVD and Blu-ray.

But we are not discussing convenience, the discussion was about PQ, not even AQ. You can't just change it mid discussion because you never had a leg to stand on to say that DVD PQ was a big improvement over VHS.

[Anthony P]

Originally Posted by robinandtami

If the topic is which one was a bigger improvement... DVD over VHS.... or Blu-Ray over DVD...

but then everything should be considered not just a few hand picked stuff. My sister to this day complains that she has to have two devices, one for recording and one for watching. DVD-VHS had a lot of negatives that BD-DVD does not. On the other hand does it really matter? VHS has been dead for years, is anyone going "should I switch from VHS to DVD or DVD to BD"?

[Canada]

Originally Posted by Anthony P

1) CDs are not obsolete, you can buy them all over the place (pretty much every place that used to sell CDs), every album is still released on CD and CD sales are still just smidgen beyond digital download

CD's are not dead and hell vinyl may have lost quite a few customers when CD first came out but there are a lot of people that will still buy records.

[steve1971]

The only thing that I see as a threat to Blu ray is Steaming. I have steamed quite a few movies since I got my BDP S570 and I have to say its alot better then renting a movie and to simply pick a movie at the click of a button is a nice thing. I also think the streaming quality is very very good with movies that I have seen so far. Now will it kill Blu ray? I say no but who knows down the line? Steaming movies in 1080p is starting to become a big thing these days and the only real threat to Blu ray.

[Rob71]

Originally Posted by steve1971

The only thing that I see as a threat to Blu ray is Steaming. I have steamed quite a few movies since I got my BDP S570 and I have to say its alot better then renting a movie and to simply pick a movie at the click of a button is a nice thing. I also think the streaming quality is very very good with movies that I have seen so far. Now will it kill Blu ray? I say no but who knows down the line? Steaming movies in 1080p is starting to become a big thing these days and the only real threat to Blu ray.

I think you called it right here.

[HyperRealist]

Originally Posted by steve1971

Steaming movies in 1080p is starting to become a big thing these days and the only real threat to Blu ray.

Amazon just announced free unlimited VOD streaming with Prime.
http://www.amazon.com/Video-On-Deman...&node=16261631

[Agent Bond]

The only thing that I see as a threat to Blu ray is Steaming

Hot stuff coming through!

[Dwayne]

Originally Posted by steve1971

The only thing that I see as a threat to Blu ray is Steaming. I have steamed quite a few movies since I got my BDP S570 and I have to say its alot better then renting a movie and to simply pick a movie at the click of a button is a nice thing. I also think the streaming quality is very very good with movies that I have seen so far. Now will it kill Blu ray? I say no but who knows down the line? Steaming movies in 1080p is starting to become a big thing these days and the only real threat to Blu ray.

You are right about streaming giving BD disc a run for the money but most people that are really into BD are in it for the audio as well. Streaming just does not provide that powerfull surround sound alot are looking for. This format may kill itself with bad firmware updates and other features that is causing people alot of problems "BD-LIVE, etc." Every day this website will have threads on people having problems with players doing things that they once did not do. Who knows but I hope not because in my mind Blu-ray is the best thing that has ever happened to home entertainment. Streaming is great though. Being still a new format I am sure that technology will continue to find ways to dazzle our eyes and ears.