Blu-ray Quality Will One Day Be Better The Hd-dvd Movies

[HDTV1080P]

It’s great to see several high quality movies now being released on BLU-RAY that beats the picture quality of the D-VHS format. To experience the best quality movies on BLU-RAY titles encoded with VC1 or MPEG-4 AVC on BD-50 discs have been getting the best reviews. The Prestigue is a 50GB MPEG-4 AVC release that the High-Def Digest rated as a 5 star for picture quality and is the best BLU-RAY disc Buena Vista has released so far.
http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/prestige.html

If studios would maximize the bit rate using 50GB discs on BLU-RAY with either VC-1 or MPEG-4 then BLU-RAY titles would always have a better picture quality then 30GB HD-DVD titles. It is cheaper for studios like Warner to use identical encodes for both BLU-RAY and HD-DVD when releasing titles in both formats. When and if the HD-DVD format dies then studios like Warner could maximize the bit rate of VC-1 on 50GB BLU-RAY discs to take advantage of increased room on the disc to offer even better picture and sound quality then what they are releasing now. If a movie has a lot of extra materials then placing the extras on a second BLU-RAY disc is the smart thing to do to keep the quality of movies and extra materials as good as possible. As this BLU-RAY format matures one day hopefully we will see Super Bit versions of HDTV movies that use up all the space of those 50GB discs to give the consumer the best quality possible for picture and sound.

[Jack Torrance]

Good post HDTV. It's a bit mad to see the HD-DUD fanbois always posting that HD-DUD and Blu-Ray are "technically the same" in terms of picture presentation and sound. I don't see how that is so when it seems to me that Warner, for instance, puts out the same bitrate transfer for The Departed on both HD-DUD and Blu-Ray. The Blu-Ray specs are better than HD-DUD and a proper blu-ray transfer on a 50gb disc should provide a noticable difference. Seems that blu-ray always has to have one arm tied behind it's back on the head-to-head fight on titles released on both formats.

[BTBuck1]

How does perfect get better though? If a transfer is transparent to it's master at say 14.5mbps vc-1 inside of 30 gb's is it really going to get better cranking it up to 25-30 mbps? I mean, i'm all for it...don't get me wrong, but don't assume that more bits=better pq every time. If the source material sucks (See 5th element) than no ammount of BR can cure that. crap in=crap out.

[Polyh3dron]

Originally Posted by HDTV1080P

It’s great to see several high quality movies now being released on BLU-RAY that beats the picture quality of the D-VHS format. To experience the best quality movies on BLU-RAY titles encoded with VC1 or MPEG-4 AVC on BD-50 discs have been getting the best reviews. The Prestigue is a 50GB MPEG-4 AVC release that the High-Def Digest rated as a 5 star for picture quality and is the best BLU-RAY disc Buena Vista has released so far.
http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/prestige.html

If studios would maximize the bit rate using 50GB discs on BLU-RAY with either VC-1 or MPEG-4 then BLU-RAY titles would always have a better picture quality then 30GB HD-DVD titles. It is cheaper for studios like Warner to use identical encodes for both BLU-RAY and HD-DVD when releasing titles in both formats. When and if the HD-DVD format dies then studios like Warner could maximize the bit rate of VC-1 on 50GB BLU-RAY discs to take advantage of increased room on the disc to offer even better picture and sound quality then what they are releasing now. If a movie has a lot of extra materials then placing the extras on a second BLU-RAY disc is the smart thing to do to keep the quality of movies and extra materials as good as possible. As this BLU-RAY format matures one day hopefully we will see Super Bit versions of HDTV movies that use up all the space of those 50GB discs to give the consumer the best quality possible for picture and sound.

Properly encoded MPEG2 movies on 50GB discs are better than ANYTHING on HD-DUD. BD quality is already better than HD-DUD.

[Polyh3dron]

Originally Posted by BTBuck1

How does perfect get better though? If a transfer is transparent to it's master at say 14.5mbps vc-1 inside of 30 gb's is it really going to get better cranking it up to 25-30 mbps? I mean, i'm all for it...don't get me wrong, but don't assume that more bits=better pq every time. If the source material sucks (See 5th element) than no ammount of BR can cure that. crap in=crap out.

A lot of the HD-DVDs I have with the VC-1 encodes look kind of weird to me, like there was a lot of post processing to get rid of the grain which has an adverse effect on the transfer. It just doesn't look film-like to me. I'll take the PQ in Black Hawk Down over King Kong any day.

Smoothing to get rid of grain is the new EE.

[LembasBread]

I agree. MPEG-2 is just peachy for high definition. On the High Def Digest site, 2 of the four BD's with 5 star reviews were encoded with it (M:I III, The Covenant).

On the subject of Superbit, the Pirates movies being released this summer are going to be two disc sets. The reason for this is either pure marketing (2 disc for the price of one concept) or Disney is maxing out the bandwidth of the discs requiring a lot of the 50 gigs on the BD-50. I expect to see nothing less than AVC @ 30Mbps average with at least 5.1 24-bit/48kHz PCM audio.

[Jonalan34]

Whatever. Things alway get better as everyday goes by. Yes, it will improve over years. That how technology is.

Jack,
You are correct that both formats have different techically of picture quality.

[HDTV1080P]

Yes MPEG-2 looks good on 50GB discs but VC-1 and MPEG-4 looks better on 50GB discs. Studios are moving away from the over 10 year old MPEG-2 technology and using VC-1 and MPEG-4. I know in the past most people use VC-1 and MPEG-4 at a reduced bit rate to make a movie as small as possible. Satellite and Cable are interested in MPEG-4/AVC since they can offer around the same quality programming using less bandwidth then MPEG-2. Sometimes both VC-1 and MPEG-4/AVC looks bad at too low of bit rates just like MPEG-2 looks bad at too low of bit rates.
Here is my main point. VC-1 and MPEG-4 is always better quality then MPEG-2 when the exact same bit rate is used. For Example a 25MB per second MPEG-4/AVC or VC-1 movie is always going to look better then a 25MB per second MPEG-2 movie. It’s great to see studios releasing more and more movies with either VC-1 or MPEG-4/AVC on 50GB discs. People with 70 inch and above screens will be able to tell the difference in quality when a movie is at 25MB-30MB per second with MPEG-4/AVC or VC-1. As time goes on I think some studios are going to give us Super Bit editions of HDTV films using up all or most the space of 50GB discs. Perhaps even people with 50 and 60 inch displays will be able to see the difference if the source material is excellent quality.

[Heresy]

Yes MPEG-2 looks good on 50GB discs but VC-1 and MPEG-4 looks better on 50GB discs.

Sorry, but that is just not true (and sounds like HD-DVD/MS FUD); VC-1 and MPEG-4 cannot look better than perfect which MPEG-2 is clearly capable of given enough space for high bit rates.

[blitz6speed]

At best performance, VC-1/AVC can MATCH mpeg2. They cannot surpass it if they all have enough bitrate. So the saying that VC-1 looks better is absurd. What you do get with those advanced codecs, is less space used, so you can fit HD extras and of course, HD PCM Lossess sound. That is where BD is going to shine. Theres around 7 or 8 hd-dvd movies (correct me if i am wrong) with lossless audio, i'd venture a guess that around HALF of the Blu-Ray titles have lossless audio. Big difference.

[ProvenFlipper]

Originally Posted by blitz6speed

At best performance, VC-1/AVC can MATCH mpeg2. They cannot surpass it if they all have enough bitrate. So the saying that VC-1 looks better is absurd. What you do get with those advanced codecs, is less space used, so you can fit HD extras and of course, HD PCM Lossess sound. That is where BD is going to shine. Theres around 7 or 8 hd-dvd movies (correct me if i am wrong) with lossless audio, i'd venture a guess that around HALF of the Blu-Ray titles have lossless audio. Big difference.

I would say more than half... Easily. ALL of Buena Vista, Sony, and FOX's titles have it, two concerts, two of Lionsgates, and two of Warner's. That's alot more than half of the discs out there.

Warner, Paramount, and Lionsgate are the only ones using lossy audio, and hopefully we'll start to see Warner get away from it and Lionsgate as well.

Using my own collection as a subset, half of my titles have Lossless audio, but there are alot of FOX titles that I haven't purchased because of the price, and a few Disney titles as well. There are lot more of these titles that I don't own than Warner titles.

[LembasBread]

Originally Posted by HDTV1080P

Yes MPEG-2 looks good on 50GB discs but VC-1 and MPEG-4 looks better on 50GB discs. Studios are moving away from the over 10 year old MPEG-2 technology and using VC-1 and MPEG-4. I know in the past most people use VC-1 and MPEG-4 at a reduced bit rate to make a movie as small as possible. Satellite and Cable are interested in MPEG-4/AVC since they can offer around the same quality programming using less bandwidth then MPEG-2. Sometimes both VC-1 and MPEG-4/AVC looks bad at too low of bit rates just like MPEG-2 looks bad at too low of bit rates.
Here is my main point. VC-1 and MPEG-4 is always better quality then MPEG-2 when the exact same bit rate is used. For Example a 25MB per second MPEG-4/AVC or VC-1 movie is always going to look better then a 25MB per second MPEG-2 movie. It’s great to see studios releasing more and more movies with either VC-1 or MPEG-4/AVC on 50GB discs. People with 70 inch and above screens will be able to tell the difference in quality when a movie is at 25MB-30MB per second with MPEG-4/AVC or VC-1. As time goes on I think some studios are going to give us Super Bit editions of HDTV films using up all or most the space of 50GB discs. Perhaps even people with 50 and 60 inch displays will be able to see the difference if the source material is excellent quality.

I agree that MPEG-2 is not space efficient. I disagree, however, that it needs a BD-50 to really shine. M:I III, Tears of the Sun, Phone Booth, The Covenant, Men of Honor are just a few MPEG-2 BD-25's that have recieved high marks in reviews.

[HDTV1080P]

The quality of VC-1 and MPEG-4/AVC is always going to look better then MPEG-2 when the exact same bit rate is used. The compression technology for MPEG-2 is not as good when the exact same bit rate is used. VC-1, MPEG-4/AVC, and MPEG-2 can all be encoded at the exact same bit rate to compare the quality. If all 3 were encoded at 10MB per second then MPEG-2 will be lower quality then VC-1 or MPEG-4/AVC. If all 3 were encoded at 25MB per second MPEG-2 would still be lower quality.
The cool thing is most all the new releases are using either MPEG-4/AVC or VC-1. In the future all releases on BLU-RAY and HD-DVD will use either VC-1 or MPEG-4/AVC. Say goodbye to MPEG-2 titles they will disappear one day.

P.S.

Yes there is some good quality MPEG-2 movies on D-VHS and a few on BLU-RAY. The 50GB space of D-VHS and 50GB space of BLU-RAY format is a great feature.

[DaveFi]

It could already be superior.

Ben Williams on HTF gave The Prestige a 5 for picture quality and 5 for audio quality, and that bunch is much harder to please than some of the other forums/reviewers.

Hurah! to Disney and AVC encoding!

[Heresy]

The quality of VC-1 and MPEG-4/AVC is always going to look better then MPEG-2 when the exact same bit rate is used.

Again, not true. There is a point when higher bit rates do not matter any more; increasing the bit rate beyond that point does not increase the quality. If the bit rate is forced to be low then VC-1/AVC will probably look better but if the bit rate can be high (as it can on 50GB discs) they cannot surpass MPEG-2 in quality, only match. Again, VC-1/AVC cannot look better than perfect which MPEG-2 can do at high bit rates.

[HDTV1080P]

Originally Posted by Heresy

Again, not true. There is a point when higher bit rates do not matter any more; increasing the bit rate beyond that point does not increase the quality. If the bit rate is forced to be low then VC-1/AVC will probably look better but if the bit rate can be high (as it can on 50GB discs) they cannot surpass MPEG-2 in quality, only match. Again, VC-1/AVC cannot look better than perfect which MPEG-2 can do at high bit rates.

The studio masters use much higher bit rates. VC-1, MPEG-4/AVC, and MPEG-2 all use lossy data compression methods. Some people might have the opinion that the quality is close enough from the uncompressed source material and higher bit rates would not make a difference. We already know that MPEG-2 has poor quality at lower bit rates compared to VC-1 and MPEG-4/AVC. One would need to make 3 different demo BLU-RAY 50GB discs using the exact same source material to see if VC-1, MPEG-4/AVC, or MPEG-2 offers the better quality at the max bit rate. I would love to see someone make 3 separate test disc with VC-1, MPEG-4/AVC, and MPEG-2 at the maximum bit rate to see which would win. I think on a 70 inch 1080P display MPEG-2 would be the loser in the contest and one would see a difference in quality.

[Heresy]

I don't believe there will be a noticible difference once the bitrate hits ~20-25mbps.

Corpse Bride is about as perfect as you can get and it is VC1 at ~20mbps and BHD and Crank are equally perfect with MPEG-2 at ~23mbps; the only AVC title I have (beside 8 below which I don't really remember much about) is The Descent which is ~21mbps and is, imo, lesser quality than these other three.

If VC-1/AVC can produce anything at any bitrate that is better than BHD I would like to see it, but so far I haven't and I've seen no indication that a higher bitrate would produce that kind of PQ.

[Deciazulado]

many of you keep saying, there's a point enough is enough and nothing can improve. Or tranparent to the master. mmmm. On one side we're praising uncompressed LPCM as the sweetest, on the other we're saying compressed video after a certain point is not different from uncompressed video. Well not so. There's a difference. And the better your system, and the bigger your screen, the more you notice it. From what I see most people have a 720 monitor and/or are watching from viewing distances of 4 picture heights or more (that's 2 picture widths or more for 1.78) I tell you, from that distance almost anything can look good, even if it's a litlle soft or noisy. I just watched Blazing Saddles (VC-1 at about 23 or 25 Mb/s), a 30 year old movie in Scope on a 1080p LCD, at a viewing distance of 1.5 picture heights (from the Scope 800 pixel tall image, not the 1080 1.78, about o.63 picture widths, and it looked great, amazing, incredible, better than the Scope print projection. Probably better than a 70mm blow up. 30 year old grain. Well, while Superman R at about 13 or 15 Mb/s, doesn't look like that. Sony is introducing 70" SXBRs and Panasonic 103" plasmas. And of course there's front projectors that do 300". We've grown from 20" VHS to 40" DVD when DVD was just 2 or 3 times the resolution of VHS . Blu-ray is 6 to 8 times DVD. But, only if it's minimally compressed. Then we can show it on 80" or much more screens. Like 2000 pixel wide cinema does show it now. Blu-ray can have up to 40 Mb/s 1080p x 1920 video. Shrinking it to 10 to 15 Mb/s cus that's "good enough", I hope that shouldn't be the goal of the video enthusiast. Same as we want unpcompressed or lossless LPCM or DTS MA audio, we should want videos with the maximum quality possible.You don't know how happy I am that I can watch about the best version of Blazing Saddles and know that if you watch it on a true Cinema sized screen it looks good. Nay, excellent.

[jorg]

Originally Posted by HDTV1080P

Yes MPEG-2 looks good on 50GB discs but VC-1 and MPEG-4 looks better on 50GB discs. Studios are moving away from the over 10 year old MPEG-2 technology and using VC-1 and MPEG-4. I know in the past most people use VC-1 and MPEG-4 at a reduced bit rate to make a movie as small as possible. Satellite and Cable are interested in MPEG-4/AVC since they can offer around the same quality programming using less bandwidth then MPEG-2. Sometimes both VC-1 and MPEG-4/AVC looks bad at too low of bit rates just like MPEG-2 looks bad at too low of bit rates.
Here is my main point. VC-1 and MPEG-4 is always better quality then MPEG-2 when the exact same bit rate is used. For Example a 25MB per second MPEG-4/AVC or VC-1 movie is always going to look better then a 25MB per second MPEG-2 movie. It’s great to see studios releasing more and more movies with either VC-1 or MPEG-4/AVC on 50GB discs. People with 70 inch and above screens will be able to tell the difference in quality when a movie is at 25MB-30MB per second with MPEG-4/AVC or VC-1. As time goes on I think some studios are going to give us Super Bit editions of HDTV films using up all or most the space of 50GB discs. Perhaps even people with 50 and 60 inch displays will be able to see the difference if the source material is excellent quality.

i think the codec if all prosesosed to the max(most importent for mpeg-2) will look diffent maby not better or worse but diffrent i personaly like h,256 or what it is called i am inlove with the codec lol i think VC-1 look to prosesosed to fake i like a movied that is sharp this is what mpeg-2 gives u from my experence while VC-1 gives u a smother picture(probly is better for movies with animation) so for me i would pic an mpeg-4 encoded title over anything els becuase from my point of view if offer great efenciency with the sexy sharpness and althought mpeg-4 and such are technicly suprior they need to mature yes cars are better then houses but what about hthe fist 5 diffrent cares compared to horses lol (i wish i could jump ahead 5 or 10 year when mpeg-4 is mature and watch a movie on a 100 or 200 gig disc lol)

[HDTV1080P]

Since the maximum data transfer rate for BLU-RAY is higher then HD-DVD then the quality of the movies in theory can be mastered to higher quality then HD-DVD movies. HD-DVD max data transfer is 36.55Mbit/s with 29.4Mbit/s max allowed for video. BLU-RAY has a maximum transfer rate of 54Mbit/s with 40Mbit/s max allowed for video. I would love to see someone make 3 separate demo 50GB BLU-RAY discs in the future using the exact same source material with all 3 Video codec approaching 40Mbits per second. In such a contest I think VC-1 and MPEG-4/AVC would be the clear winner over MPEG-2.
Another 3 separate 50GB test disc should be made for PCM, TRUE HD, and DTS HD at maximum bit rates to see which audio formats are the best using the same source material.
Such information would be useful to studios and consumers. The studios most likely already have their internal test discs. Having an entire short movie that is the same movie on 3 different discs at max bit rates would be neat. Of course 1 test disc with several short video and audio clips would be neat also. I think some consumers would be interested in studio quality test disc for BLU-RAY to see how good things can get if pushed to the maximum. When 100GB and 200GB discs become available movies with data transfer rates of 54 Mbit/s a second could become a reality. MPEG-4/AVC would look awesome at 40 Mbit/s. Super-Bit BLU-RAY movies one day will come when the format matures.