Universal to make DTS-HD MA the standard for Blu-ray

[Bobby Henderson]

Originally Posted by Amel

I am not sure when you cought up with bluray, but a year ago when we were discussing warner, most of their bluray titles were DD and poor video quality...I have some of the titles, I've seen and heard it.

I got into Blu-ray fairly recently -right after Warner Bros. announced they were going Blu-ray exclusive.

I know many previous Warner Bros. Blu-ray titles were limited to only lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 audio and had some video quality problems due to the lower bit rates tuned for HD-DVD.

My point is some folks in this thread are gushing over Universal Studios as if the company is somehow in better standing than Warner Bros. just because of some unconfirmed report the company may be supporting DTS-HD Master Audio on its upcoming Blu-ray releases.

I don't think their perspective is very clear on the matter and certain critical points are being ignored in the Warner bashing and Universal Studios butt kissing.

Point #1: Universal Studios has never released anything on Blu-ray before. Instead Universal supported the arch rival of Blu-ray and rooted for the demise of Blu-ray Disc.

Point #2: Warner Bros. has been a long time supporter of Blu-ray. Although many of their previous discs had compromises made, Warner Bros. tried harder than just about any other movie studio to figure out how to get the general public to adopt high definition movies. They supported both HD-DVD and Blu-ray. They even single handedly promoted the TotalHD format. When they figured out supporting both formats wasn't going to get customers off the fences they acted aggressively again in the favor of Blu-ray. For crying out loud, where is the freaking gratitude?

Point #3: It has not yet been fully confirmed Universal Studios will indeed be using DTS-HD Master Audio on their releases. Everyone is going by what some other guy wrote. It makes sense for Universal to use DTS-HD because of their long standing association with DTS. However, many of their DVDs were released only with Dolby Digital. AFAIK, their HD-DVD titles were mostly Dolby Digital Plus and not DTS. So until I see an official press release from Universal Studios or at least some detailed specs on their upcoming Blu-ray releases, I'm not going to get my hopes up completely for the DTS-HD thing to come to pass.

Point #4: Lately Warner Bros. has been increasingly using Dolby TrueHD on new Blu-ray releases. Soon Warner Bros. will be done with their cycle of lower bit rate movies that accommodate HD-DVD. Warner Bros. will be more free to create high bit rate video encodings and use lossless or uncompressed audio on all releases, not just the high profile ones like they're doing right now.

Point #5: While complaints run wild about Warner's low bit rate, HD-DVD friendly "smoothie" video encodings, the fact remains their cycle of HD-DVD friendly fare is coming to an end. OTOH, Universal Studios still has a large backlog of previous "red" releases. While people are kissing Universal's butt, where's the guarantee they're not just going to port a previous, low bit rate HD-DVD encoding onto Blu-ray?