Please forgive me for asking

[brian lawson]

I see a lot of hd-dvd bashing here and blu-ray promoting which is obviously to be expected. but what i am not sure of, and have spent some time trying to figure out is what exactly makes blu-ray better than hd-dvd from a purely technical standpoint. keeping the studio and hardware backing out of the argument, what exactly makes blu-ray a superior format from a purely technological standpoint.

i dont know much about the technologies compared to the average person here...all i know is the following: please tell me what i'm missing

both are capable of 1920x1080p
both have interactive features
both have the enough room to fit very long movies
hd-dvd has a higher yield rate and is cheaper to manufacture

what else is there that makes blu-ray superior? i own a ps3 and am very disappointed with the lack of game support and though i know everyone says more are coming, i am worried about the latest trends in the industry. i am not a bluray fanatic and really dont care about sony or toshiba enough to be a fanatic fan of either format. i would like to know what the superiority is that every one boasts about before dolling out more money on a format to me looks to be in legitimate jeopardy of at least not winning outright.

[Terjyn]

both have the enough room to fit very long movies

This is not enough. The picture quality on a Blu-Ray is higher because it has more space and faster streaming.

You could put 6 hours of data on a VHS tape too, but it looked like complete crap, even compared to a 2 hour VHS recording.

Same concept.

[Robmx]

If HD DVD is the exact same as BLU then wheres the lossless audio for Transformers, Harry Potter and others ? If they both are the exact same then why is BLU better quality time and time again.....

People don't mind paying more when they get quality.....

[Blue]

The math is quite simple to prove the better format.
HD-DVD max bandwidth is 30Mb/s (video & audio)

That means allowing for nothing else including menu's, extras etc the max length film is 130min (assuming 30Mb/s constant which is most probably not going to the case, but add menu's and extras on and HD-DVD runs out of steam at the 110- 120 min mark, where as Blu is still going strong at over 200 minutes.

This means for movies over 2hrs (which there are plenty) picture quality has to be compromised. There are not many movies that go well over 3hrs.

Blu-ray can also handle much higher bandwidths 48Mb/s.
Basically the higher the bandwidth the better the picture quality.

The audio is much the same, the Blu-ray specs allow for much higher bandwidths = higher quality. The easiest experiment is get a CD and rip it to MP3.

Do this twice once at the lowest bandwidth (128Kb/s then at 320Kb/s for example), listen to the difference. Although much higher bit rates are used it provides a good example. Video suffers even more from limited bandwidth.

This is excluding all the other non quality related factors such as industry support

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray

[MacHaggis]

As far as the PS3 is concerned, keep in mind that it's been out for less than half the time that the XBOX 360 has. There are plenty of games slated to come out soon enough.

It just took a long time for the PS3 software industry to build momentum.

Now, if the games take full advantage of the 50GB storage per BD media, there should be a lot of potential for those games.

Too bad I can't stand most video games and anime...

[Mikeesracing]

Hey everyone nice posts. I even learned a couple of things.

[ToonyLoons]

Originally Posted by MacHaggis

As far as the PS3 is concerned, keep in mind that it's been out for less than half the time that the XBOX 360 has. There are plenty of games slated to come out soon enough.

It just took a long time for the PS3 software industry to build momentum.

Now, if the games take full advantage of the 50GB storage per BD media, there should be a lot of potential for those games.

Too bad I can't stand most video games and anime...

What people fail to remember is that game support for the first year of the 360 was not too great. There also was not a real blockbuster game out for the system which almost took a year to come out.

The higher storage space on BD is starting to show. Probably the Bigest 360 game due out, Halo 3, is going to be a two disc game. One disc for multiplayer and one for single player. Games like Unreal Tournament will have more content on the PS3 version while the one for 360 will be a smaller compressed version.

Yes the 360 has the most and probably best games out right now, but the PS3 will come around. Developers need to become more comfortable with the hardware also. The year head start did help MS, but they have a higher hardware failure rate that probably could have been fixed if they had waited 6 months or a year. Also if you ask me, the PS3 has more hardware Potential.

[reiella]

Originally Posted by ToonyLoons

What people fail to remember is that game support for the first year of the 360 was not too great. There also was not a real blockbuster game out for the system which almost took a year to come out.

The higher storage space on BD is starting to show. Probably the Bigest 360 game due out, Halo 3, is going to be a two disc game. One disc for multiplayer and one for single player. Games like Unreal Tournament will have more content on the PS3 version while the one for 360 will be a smaller compressed version.

Yes the 360 has the most and probably best games out right now, but the PS3 will come around. Developers need to become more comfortable with the hardware also. The year head start did help MS, but they have a higher hardware failure rate that probably could have been fixed if they had waited 6 months or a year. Also if you ask me, the PS3 has more hardware Potential.

Hmm, where's your source on that for Halo 3? Last I understood, Bungie said Game Disc 2 was interactive bonus content authored as an 360 disc.

[Anthony P]

thanks for the replies...as i figured, there's a lot i have yet to learn. what is lossless audio for example.

audio starts off analog the audio waves then get digitized. At this step the audio tech decides the word length and the sampling frequency

word length can be thought of as precision think of a ruler that is 1'=12" if all it has on it are the inches demarcation you would say something 3 or 4 inches but you can't say if it is 3.5 or 3.7 or 3.2. If you add more demarcations you could say it is 3 and 5/16. The larger the word length the more fine-tuned audio you get, but there is a cost because it needs more bits (if we thought of it as a pic, it would be the number of colours that can be shown)

sampling frequency: sound has a wave structure (like a continuous line) because it needs to be quantified and you can't just have continuity in essence what you are doing is taking a picture of the wave form at given moments. The more frequently you take these "pics" the richer and complete the sound starts. If we were to compare it to video this would be how often the frame of each film is taken.

So digital audio will tend to have two characteristics, for example 16 bit/48khz, where 16 is the word length and 48 is the sampling (you can go to how stuff works and look up CD to get more info). that means that for each second you need 48,000*16 bits per channel or a bit over 4mbps (and DVD had a total of around 10mbps, so imagine what would happen if you wanted 3 languages like many DVDs have today)


When you listen to a DVD today the digital stream is compressed because 16/48 takes too much BW uncompressed. That is why you have DD and DTS on DVD. The compression messes up the original digital values. So when your player decodes the DD and DTS you no longer have the original values. This is called lossy. Movies on BD and HD DVD have 3 formats that they can use that are lossless

PCM: this is the original uncompressed sound exactly as it was digitized
DTS-HD MA and DTHD: these are compressed but lossless which means in theory once decoded they should play back the same digital as in the studio before they were encoded.

The problem is that PCM takes up a lot of BW and DTS-HD MA and DTHD take up much less but still more then their lossy counterparts.

The reason it is an issue with HD DVD and not BD is that BD has a max BW of 48 and a max video BW of 40, that means a studio can use 8mbps without even flinching for audio and other stuff on BD while HD DVD has a max BW of 30 and 29 respectively. That means that except if the studio goes with two DD tracks and nothing else audio will take away BW from video.

[Anthony P]

hopefully people will be able to see and hear this difference enough to want to pay more for it.

yoiu can, and there is nothing to pay more for. In truth assuming everything else is equal it would cost less to a studio to put PCM then anything else, no need to pay DTS or Dolby, no need to have an encoder or a tech to encode it. But even then the difference is minimal.

[Copywriter]

Lots of excellent replies. I'd run away from anything/anyone touting the "length" of a movie/show.

The VHS comparison was great. You had SP,LP and EP. EP could feature longer "lengths." But, it compressed more than the 2hr SP and thus the quality was poor.

Compression is the enemy. The more you have to compress, the worse it is.

Take a picture. You could open a 16 meg RAW shot and it will look great. Compress it to a 50k JPEG and see what happens. Sure, you could hold 100 JPEGs in the same space as that 1 RAW, but the RAW picture is superior in every way.

[bootman]

Am I the only one that shakes their head when I read the title of this post?

[Patranus]

I would like to take a moment to touch on the interactive features of both formats. I would like to start out by saying that I am not a fan of extras to begin with. I would rather both HD mediums be more like Superbit was on DVD and focuses on maximum picture quality and audio quality.

Almost every HD-DVD supporter bashed Blu-Rays low level interface for interactive features - BDJ. They state that development is harder and more complex. Anyone who states this has probably never written a program in either format.

HDi Interactive Format
HDi was originally developed by Microsoft and Toshiba. HDi implements a run time engine that controls all playback function and menus. HDi is essential a overblown scripting language and consists mainly of Java Script (ECMAScript) and XML. ECMAScript is essentially libraries of Java Script code that provides functions to control playback, manipulate on screen images, buttons, fonts, colors...ect (anything you can do via CSS)

Some current examples of HDi functionality
-Persistent User Defined Bookmarks
-Menus During Playback
-Picture in Picture
-Storyboard and Production Photos
-Technical Statistics

BD-J (Blu-Ray Java)
BD-J was originally developed by the BDA (Blu-Ray Disc Association) which consists of computer industry leaders such as Sun, Apple, HP, and Dell. BDJ can be developed via IDE (integrated development environment), non-programming environments such as Adobe director, or via rendering engines that parse XML and other data standards. BD-J does not inherently provide functionality for low level features such as a built in HTTP client or XML parser though there is built in HTTP functionality and XML functionality.

Some current examples of HDi functionality
-Picture in Picture
-Menus During Playback
-Java Based Games

While BD-J does not inherently come with high level tools for development when compared with HDi, it does allow the developer much more flexibility when planning for and developing an HD release. While BD-J does not come with built in class libraries for XML parsing or an HTTP client (for example) once the class libraries are written they can be used on every subsequent project. BD-J is also based on a package of the GEM platform which makes up the majority of the world digital television application standards. This allows for a high level of application portability between devices, not only Blu-Ray players but the majority of Java applications.

As the vice president of technology of a software company I feel that I have a understanding of programming languages and the software development process.

When I read about HDi it makes me think of the kid that walks into the interview and his entire web portfolio was done in Dreamweaver. Sure, you can do some nifty stuff in Dreamweaver but it is not a pro tool. To develop a real web application one needs to get down and dirty with a real programming language may it be PHP, PERL, RUBY, Java, or ASP.

In the grand scheme of things "more complex" language is better. Just like everything thing in life, BD-J might take a little more work but in the long run, that extra work will pay off.

[Merlins]

Pure technological aspects:

* More space per layer (15GB for HD-DVD and 25GB for Blu-ray)

* Higher bitrate (Total 36Mbps (29.4Mbps for video) for HD-DVD and Total 54Mbps (40Mbps for video) for Blu-ray).

* Easier technology to produce burners for. This makes Blu-ray to the new standard high capacity storage medium. Toshiba has yet to release a burner that can handle even 30GB. Blu-ray have many that handles 50GB and with much higher speed.

* Possible to have more layer per disc. This increase the storage on the discs to 200GB while HD-DVD stops at 51GB (which they yet have to produce while prototypes of 200GB already exists).

[haushausman]

Can someone put tis thread's URL on the AVS boards... I get a headache from all the FUD there.

Would they just delete this thread if it was posted? I hear their admins are ruthless anti-blu-ray people.

[Scorxpion]

Originally Posted by haushausman

Can someone put tis thread's URL on the AVS boards... I get a headache from all the FUD there.

Would they just delete this thread if it was posted? I hear their admins are ruthless anti-blu-ray people.

It Doesnt Matter BD will win at the end ,believe me what you do there cannot deserve a cent or even a pennies.AVS is a place where you can market FUD,Troll,lies,unrespect and Illusion.

for a simple reason cannot accept why BD is better than HD-DVD

[supersix4]

Originally Posted by Terjyn

This is not enough. The picture quality on a Blu-Ray is higher because it has more space and faster streaming.

You could put 6 hours of data on a VHS tape too, but it looked like complete crap, even compared to a 2 hour VHS recording.

Same concept.

just re-read that lol

[Musashi]

Originally Posted by brian lawson

hd-dvd has a higher yield rate and is cheaper to manufacture

Not true.
Blu-ray's yield rates are definitely higher than anything Amir might've told you. While I don't know the exact yield rates on HDDVD30s or BD50s, I do know that BD50 has a much higher yield than (HD)DVD flipper discs, which has resulted in Blu-ray being on the average, cheaper to press and have lower street prices. Proof: Look for almost any Warner Bros hi-def film on amazon and compare; Blu-ray version will be less.

[Iceman_II]

Another thing no one has touched on is the bandwidth, BD has higher bandwidth than HD-DVD

[Anthony P]

both have the enough room to fit very long movies

DVD also has enough space for long movies. There is a reason the new HP with the same content will be 2 disks for HD DVD and one for BD. 30GB is enough if all you want is crap. Just look at the movies, why do you think the BDs have higher PQ, why do you think most BDs have lossles sound while HD DVDs have DD?

You also miss that BD has a much higher BW wich means they don't need to bitstarve the video and limit audio even more then the capacity issue

hd-dvd has a higher yield rate and is cheaper to manufacture

not at all. Obviously none of us have exact numbers, but if yioeld was an issue then why are BDs and HD DVD priced the same from replicators? As for cheaper to manufacture, how do you know? It is an illusion based on Toshiba willing to subsedize their player while BD manufacturers maintaining healthy margins.