At 6:23 PM -0500 1/19/08, Kevin Stebleton wrote: >On a related side note: I have not yet bought a BluRay DVD player - but I >understand the data rate on that is about 36Mbps, or nearly equal to >satellite backhaul data rates. I imagine images from BluRay are stellar - >even the pickiest person at home is pretty darn satisfied. Anyone out there >disagree??
All your observations were good and accurate, Kevin. I just trimmed to the above paragraph as it is all I wanted to respond to at the moment. And it too is accurate. I have both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, and both are indeed stellar (viewed on a very demanding system, with a 10' screen and a Sony G90 projector). Both produce extremely high quality images, with excellent resolution and few compression artifacts (if any). There's no discernible difference, on any of the discs I've viewed, between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, though I haven't done a strict head-to-head comparison on the same movie. But the data rates suggest they should be comparable. Blu-Ray discs are typically encoded at 36 to 48 Mbps, though they have a theoretical limit of 54 Mbps. HD-DVD seems to be fixed at 36 Mbps. Most discs are probably encoded at 36 Mbps today regardless of which format is being used, so then it comes down to the choice of codec, and while there could be some issues there (H.264 and VC1 are generally superior to MPEG-2 and even MPEG-4, producing better image quality for the same data rate or equivalent image quality for a lower data rate), both systems produce truly outstanding video. Compare that to the 19.2 Mbps data rate of broadcast TV (even if they don't split the bandwidth to provide a bunch of alternate signals). It's interesting to hear that satellite backhaul rates for HD are up around 36 Mbps. I didn't know that. That's really amazing, and now has me thinking about one of those HD DVB receivers you mentioned! Football would be astonishing at that rate. (HD football is entirely different and stunningly better than SD football, but cameras panning rapidly to follow the ball during a kick do show off the macro-blocking compression artifacts present in even the best broadcast HD signals.) Oh, there are also capacity issues for the HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray debate, with Blu-Ray having higher practical and theoretical limits. But, then, ethernet is optional on Blu-Ray players, while it is required, along with the ability to download firmware updates via ethernet, for HD-DVD players. Regardless, with Warner recently announcing they were switching to exclusively Blu-Ray, even though the HD-DVD camp hasn't officially given up yet, it probably is all over but the shouting, and it certainly looks like Blu-Ray has won. Still wouldn't want to put a whole lot of money on it, though. Thanks for the info. - larryy
