Read WSR issue 113 ASAP

[Jazar]

I didn't like the interview very much. It didn't give me much confidence that BR was going to wipe the floor with the competition. Basically I just felt that their answers were unclear. The 1080p over component issue, the lossless audio compression issue, to name a few sounded like they were just making up answers or excuses. I feel and have always felt that BR will emerge from this format war victorious but they need to get their PR heads straight and answer these questions with honesty, clarity and conviction.

It's interesting what they said about the VC-1 encodings taking a lot more mps then anticipated. I wonder if that's true or not. I'm sure Amir has already spoken about it on avs.

[Dave]

Plese mail me too. I`ve sent you my e-mail.


Also what is the WSR website url?

Exactly! Suddenly the Sammy works fine even without the firmware upgrade? I don't think so. Sammy is Sony's punching bag.

I dont like this. I think Sammy do not deserve this!

[Rob Tomlin]

[QUOTE=Ascended_Saiyan;19171]

Originally Posted by JTK

Quote:
Originally Posted by Rob Tomlin
In the article they say it is because it is a more "mature" codec (but they don't say what advantage that gives) and it is "faster" (which I don't understand).

I'm not sure about this, either.

Gang?

----------------
When you encode a movie, you have to decode it in the player. The smaller you make the movie, the more processing power it takes to put the movie back to the original size for viewing (just like a zip file). MPEG2 uses less compression which means it doesn't have to do a lot of processing to restore the full image. VC-1 may be more efficient for storing information, but it taxes the processor at the other end (the player). The more you take from one end, the more you have to put back on the other end. That's why it's faster. That's why the processor loads on the laptop during HD-DVD viewing are extremely high.

Excellent explanation. Thanks!

[JTK]

Originally Posted by Dave

Plese mail me too. I`ve sent you my e-mail.

Try it again.

[Jeff®]

Originally Posted by Dave

Also what is the WSR website url?

http://www.widescreenreview.com/

[Psiweaver]

I didn't feel that they were scapegoating the sammy just saying that yes it has its faults and everyones gotta admit that it does. My worry is that they don't have a clear plan of action to take towards getting high quality audio and video from the first gen players they are basicly saying oh they don't have the chipsets for them in their so your basicly out of luck. That too me is crap. Gotta do better than that and start getting a bit more specific the whole thing about the format war is that the BDA has been very unspecific with a lot of things and that isn't a good idea when consumers are trying to make their buying decisions.

[Dave]

When we are releasing titles in Europe, 50
GB is extremely important because the con
sumers over there are going to appreciate
lossless codecs—you need the disc capac
ity in order to be able to support multiple
languages with lossless codecs, and HD
DVD is already out of space. In terms of
doing one language, with a lossy codec,
they’re already consuming all of the space
just with the VC-1 in the title and the added
value, so I don’t know where they’re going
to go when they’re trying to release in
Europe, other than releasing a disc that’s
specific to each territory, which is very
expensive. In terms of the 25-GB discs,
we’re very happy with the picture quality
that we’re getting on our 25-GB titles. We
welcome journalists here all the time for
demonstrations to see what the master
looks like, what the compressed file looks
like, and what it looks like coming out of the
Samsung player, and no one has ever left
here saying, “You know what, your discs
really look inferior to the master,” or “HD
DVD looks so much better.” That’s never
happened.

Thats what i was talking to HD DVD fanboys all those months. No one payed attention to this! ...

[JTK]

Originally Posted by Psiweaver

I didn't feel that they were scapegoating the sammy just saying that yes it has its faults and everyones gotta admit that it does.

That's all I saw there. I don't feel like the Sammy was being singled out as THE reason for BD's shortcomings at all.

Just an additional wild card on top of crappy discs.

My worry is that they don't have a clear plan of action to take towards getting high quality audio and video from the first gen players they are basicly saying oh they don't have the chipsets for them in their so your basicly out of luck. That too me is crap.

Indeed, but keep in mind:

1.) This interview was done almost a month ago now, so it could be finished up and make it for press time and print.

2.) Do you really think this combined BDA (look at the names) is really going to be this stupid and inept? They know what's on the line and they know that they CAN start ending it all come 4th quarter of this very year if they play it right.

Gotta do better than that and start getting a bit more specific the whole thing about the format war is that the BDA has been very unspecific with a lot of things and that isn't a good idea when consumers are trying to make their buying decisions.

I agree. I want to see more concrete information across the boards real soon, and I fee like it's starting to trickle out.

We've seen the IFA reports and CEDIA reports, with lots of pretty pictures, on the hardware end of things.

We've seen talk that at least the Panny and the Elite will get away with a lot of mileage thanks to firmware upgrades.

We already have seen news about BD50 movies THIS year, like Black Hawk Down.

So it's slowly but surely starting to all take shape, at least from where I'm sitting.

[Psiweaver]

yeah i fully agree after reading my cedia show reports i'm feeling much better it may just be that I can't get exact dates from my vendors and that may be driving me up the all is all.

[phloyd]

I don't entirely agree with the assertion that MPEG2 is faster due to it not compressing as much.

The following I do believe to be true.

VC-1 and AVC are more complicated processes than MPEG2 and are therefore take more cycles to decode. This could be interpreted as the MPEG2 is faster.

However I have not seen a correlation between small file size and harder to decode in my experience. In fact quite the opposite.

When playing with WMVHD encoding a while back I found that they higher bitrate encodes had more trouble during playback. My assumption at the time was that there was more data to decode per second so the process had to turn more cycles to get images onto the screen. The lower bitrate stuff had to process less data.

In any case, I believe that the extra processing of the advanced codecs over MPEG2 is that they are advanced and more complex, not as a direct comparison of efficiency.

I am sure that bit starved MPEG2 would decode just as easily (if not more so) than full rate MPEG2.

Finally, I think that what they mean by faster... Since MPEG2 is mature, the encoding is relatively automated. I believe that the DVHS titles were encoded single pass for example. From what we hear from Amir, VC-1 requires quite some tweaking on the encodes resulting in significantly more time (and therefore money) needed in the encoding phase for titles. So I think that this is what they are referring to with respect to encoder speed.

As for broadcast rates, the network feeds of some HD channels is upwards of 40 Mbps. The ATSC is muxed at around 19.4. The video bitrate that we see at the OTA receiver is seldom if ever more than 18 Mbps due to other overhead (including audio) in the mux. Typically we see around 18 for channels with no multicasting and between 13-15 Mbps for channels that insist on having an SD channel in the mux also.

One test I hope to make some day is if network rate data plays cleanly off recorded bluray discs

Of course we are all hoping that they will get BD50 up and that this will allow them to run 30 Mbps MPEG2 video which should look pretty damned good. If they continue to use lame bitrates with BD50 it would seem to defeat the purpose....

[Psiweaver]

Yeah i can't seem the using low bit rates on the bd50 otherwise there wouldn't be much point for the bd50 other than an assload of extra features which most people aren't really super interested in.

[Rob Tomlin]

Here is a post by Darinp at AVS regarding this article that I thought made good points:

I don't have time to go through this whole thread or read the article, but just wanted to say that from what I have seen I hope the Sony guys aren't really this deluded for real.

As far as VC-1, I can understand Sony not believing in it in January. As I told somebody at CEDIA, it could have been considered a rookie then, but since then it has been put through some battles, gotten better and proved itself.

Now if Sony truely cares about image quality they should use it and/or AVC/MPEG4 or have a good reason not to other than their egos. If they make bad decisions that hurt image quality after having the information then they will deserve forgiveness a whole lot less than for bad decisions when they didn't know IMO.

As usual, Darin speaks the truth!

I belive and all of you should know that adding NR causes problems. I have the samsung with the supposed fix. I have watched many movies again and i will say this it looks better, Even Training Day did, if you remember people saying during the firstr part when the sun comes up people saw blocking its not there anymore. So i belive with my own eyes that they are correct in saying there is a diiference. Other titles have also looked better.

[ethan]

Originally Posted by Rob Tomlin

Here is a post by Darinp at AVS regarding this article that I thought made good points:
As usual, Darin speaks the truth!

With all due respect to darin (I always appreciate his posts on avs) The question of AVC vs MPEG2 at high bitrates (>28Mbits) is not as clear as many try to make it. And I dare to say it's overrated.

Just to illustrate my point, take a DVD from your collection that you consider a good transfer (RSDL if possible). That's Mpeg2 at high bitrate. In fact, it is exactly the same compression ration that can be used on a bd50 wiith mpeg2 (storage and bitrate are increased proportionally to the resolution increase). There are no reason to expect anything less from any studio.

With time, AVC should theorically give us even better than mpeg2 on bd50, but please let's wait and see a bd50 mpeg2 on the new Panny, Pioneer, Sony, and the updated Samsung firmware. After that we can blame the codec... no, actually we can blame the studios.

[Ascended_Saiyan]

No truer words have been spoken.

[Rob Tomlin]

Originally Posted by ethan

With all due respect to darin (I always appreciate his posts on avs) The question of AVC vs MPEG2 at high bitrates (>28Mbits) is not as clear as many try to make it. And I dare to say it's overrated.

Just to illustrate my point, take a DVD from your collection that you consider a good transfer (RSDL if possible). That's Mpeg2 at high bitrate. In fact, it is exactly the same compression ration that can be used on a bd50 wiith mpeg2 (storage and bitrate are increased proportionally to the resolution increase). There are no reason to expect anything less from any studio.

With time, AVC should theorically give us even better than mpeg2 on bd50, but please let's wait and see a bd50 mpeg2 on the new Panny, Pioneer, Sony, and the updated Samsung firmware. After that we can blame the codec... no, actually we can blame the studios.

You don't have to convince me that MPEG2 can look good (I have D-Theater), but I think that you are missing the point of Darin's post. The article contains an admission that the bitrates are only 18 mps.

[ethan]

oups sorry, that's right