hd duds in the clearance pile at my CC

[skrill]

Originally Posted by owa

As far as PQ, I think a lot of the blu-ray titles look sharper than HD DVD but it's probably more about what they did during the encoding. It's also not a direct comparison so it doesn't really prove anything. The problem with comparing titles on both is that they've been encoded with HD DVD in mind so you won't see the titles taking advantage of blu-rays better specs. I was really looking forward to comparing New Line's blu-ray optimized titles versus the HD DVD version but things happend so quickly, all that went out the window.

Anyway, as far as SQ, there's a pretty good example of the improvements possible.

From the blu-ray Beowulf import review where Warner used lossless instead of Dolby Digital Plus....

Actually there are a few instances where the same studio put out the same titles on BR and HD in different video codecs. The differences are mild to non-existent. The early Paramount movies are good examples:

Shooter was MPEG2 on BR and VC1 on HD
MI:III was the same way.

The PQ differences were negligible. However, both of those titles contained DD+ audio tracks with 1.5mbs bitrate on HD than the 640k DD on the BR. So the HD in those cases is generally considered the better disk. In the case of Shooter, this is due to the studio's decision to pack the movie onto a single layer BD25 for BR and a dual layer HD30 for HD version. Since MI:III was a two-disc set -- I don't know what Paramount was thinking there.

Again -- I have see brilliant PQ on both, and horrid PQ on both. But I don't think HD DVD has inherently lower PQ. For example, on the Beowulf import disk -- the PQ was the same (or possibly slightly lower -- due to banding) than the HD DVD version. Regardless -- they are probably about the same.