BD25 becoming the standard at Warner

[Grubert]

Yes, it seems that BD50 is being used less and less at Warner. That's the conclusion after looking at what they have released this year so far, summarised in the following chart.

BD50s are in green, BD25s in red. I have also added the running time to put the disc size in context (eg Amusement probably didn't need a dual-layer disc).

Jan.27
Any Given Sunday (156 minutes)
Pride and Glory (130 minutes)
RockNRolla (114 minutes)

Jan.20
Amusement (85 minutes)
Domino (127 minutes)
The Notebook (123 minutes)
Poison Ivy: The Secret Society (95 minutes)

Jan.13
Appaloosa (115 minutes)

[Afrobean]

Size of disc isn't important if they can get the entire film on there without introducing compression artifacts.

This is the same as when people complain about bitrates. It doesn't matter; disc capacity or bitrate is not absolutely needed to ensure quality of the encode or the overall watchability of the film.

If you want to complain about something, say "hey, these encodes look terrible", not "hey, this should be on a dual layer".

[Grubert]

Originally Posted by Afrobean

Size of disc isn't important if they can get the entire film on there without introducing compression artifacts.

This is the same as when people complain about bitrates. It doesn't matter; disc capacity or bitrate is not absolutely needed to ensure quality of the encode or the overall watchability of the film.

If you want to complain about something, say "hey, these encodes look terrible", not "hey, this should be on a dual layer".

Warner's encodes don't look terrible, but they are rarely among the best around. And they get away with low bitrates because they prefilter the image - a soft picture compresses more smoothly than a very detailed one.

Why are other studios going to the extra expense of BD50?

[lgans316]

Originally Posted by Grubert

Warner's encodes don't look terrible, but they are rarely among the best around. And they get away with low bitrates because they prefilter the image - a soft picture compresses more smoothly than a very detailed one.

Why are other studios going to the extra expense of BD50?

I agree. WB has a long way to go to pacify the customers who fell prey to their double dips, bit starved VC-1 experimental encodes and lo(*u)ssy audio.

Heavy Filtering on BD means You have been Warner'd.

Complaining about Blunder Brothers = = = =

[micks_address]

i dont care about disc size, as long as the picture is good and we get lossless audio.... a lot has been made of warners last years releases that didnt have losssless how they would have been in the can before they got the message that customers want losseless.. hopefully we wont see any releases in 2009 without a losseless track (unless they are really old where the surround mix doesnt exist) even then.. they could remix for 5.1 and give the choice

[chewbacca511]

for appaloosa having a 25 gig disc, it looks excellent, sounds great, and has a nice amount of extras, so as long as they can all look that good, i am fine with wb using 25 gig if they can.

[AikonEnt]

Sometimes you have to wonder why Warner sided with Blu instead of DUD? They put films (not all) on 25gb discs, don't have high bitrate encodes and use lossy sound. All those sound perfect for DUD's limitations. The reason we champion Blu is higher capacity, high bitrate encodes and lossless sound for the true home cinema experience.

Can you actually achieve high bitrates with VC-1 (the only one Warner ever use that I've noticed)? Even Dark Knight (as good as it is) I never noticed the bitrate any higher than mid 20's.

[krylonman]

Originally Posted by AikonEnt

Can you actually achieve high bitrates with VC-1 (the only one Warner ever use that I've noticed)? Even Dark Knight (as good as it is) I never noticed the bitrate any higher than mid 20's.

Sure you can, you just don't need to—that's kind of the whole selling point of VC-1.

[ibeetle]

Oh, Sweet Jesus! This 25 -vs- 50 topic is about as annoying (and becoming as frequent) as the monthly "When is Star Wars Coming" threads.

The admins need to build two scripts. As soon as someone mentions Star Wars, or 25 -vs- 50 disc the entire thread is, without review completely eliminated; and the person who started the topic is forced to watch 25 HD DVD movies.

[Seretur]

Funny you should say that about Grubert; he's one of the most respected BD enthusiasts on the web.

And he's making a valid, relevant point. WB, the studio which ended the format war a full year ago, still seems to be restricted to the compromises of HD DVD encodes (overcompressed video, lossy audio) and fitting their releases on BD-25 discs -- long after both Universal and Paramount have begun fully utilizing the potential of BD-50.

Grubert has a nice statistic to prove this point, too. How is this similar to fanboy griping?

[Grubert]

Gigi has an average bitrate of 33.77 Mbps with peaks above 40, per DVD Beaver.

As Stacey Spears said (paraphrasing), there's always something to use bitrate on.

For another example of how good VC-1 can look, just look at Kill Bill (Disney).

[Grubert]

Originally Posted by ibeetle

Oh, Sweet Jesus! This 25 -vs- 50 topic is about as annoying (and becoming as frequent) as the monthly "When is Star Wars Coming" threads.

The admins need to build two scripts. As soon as someone mentions Star Wars, or 25 -vs- 50 disc the entire thread is, without review completely eliminated; and the person who started the topic is forced to watch 25 HD DVD movies.

Any other time you'd be a hundred percent right. But this time you're a hundred percent wrong.

[micks_address]

of course you could argue that warner are looking at the download market with their encodes... hoping that in future they can just offer them as downloads and not having to re encode for that market... when it comes to downloading films, then the size does make a difference..

i'm all for maximising quality though.. regardless of disc size..

[AikonEnt]

Originally Posted by Grubert

For another example of how good VC-1 can look, just look at Kill Bill (Disney).

I never even noticed that Kill Bill was VC-1 and I watched both of them just a couple of weeks ago Both films do look preety damn good

[Mr. Cinema]

Unless I'm mistaken, aren't all of their announced 2009 releases featuring TrueHD audio? At least they're getting something right now.

[NoQuestion]

It was brought up in the the digitalbits thread that studios who release their titles in multiple countries at once tend to use the bd-25 because there is a bigger surplus of those lying around compared to fighting over the bd-50 discs that are available. Here's my thoughts on the whole thing. So long as the studio in question is capable of giving us a quality PQ and HD audio then I am fine, I really do not care what size the disc is.

[HeavyHitter]

I can honestly say that as a whole, Warner has the least impressive titles on Blu-ray from a PQ perspective. I mean the new Universal and Paramount titles I've watched are just blowing Warner away. Fox, Disney, and Sony have been doing so since the beginning.

I'm not exactly sure, but it seems you have people at Warner who just never really embraced Blu-ray from a technical perspective.

[Seretur]

Originally Posted by Mr. Cinema

Unless I'm mistaken, aren't all of their announced 2009 releases featuring TrueHD audio? At least they're getting something right now.

An American in Paris was just announced with vanilla Dolby Digital Mono.

[NutsAboutPS3]

Originally Posted by AikonEnt

Sometimes you have to wonder why Warner sided with Blu instead of DUD? They put films (not all) on 25gb discs, don't have high bitrate encodes and use lossy sound. All those sound perfect for DUD's limitations.

Last time I saw some figures, I believe they showed a BD-25 is actually cheaper to replicate than a HD-30, so BD is actually giving them better profits than DUD would have.

[robertc88]

I don't know about it becoming the standard. Guess we'll see.

http://www.blu-raystats.com/Stats/St...OrderBy=Studio