Well, I got a new HD Pioneer plasma a couple months ago, so I am rewatching BDs, and now it is easy to tell the Warner BDs are clearly inferior.
My Panasonic Plasma, being a few years old (2004) just did not have the processing capability of a Pioneer Kuro. I now see all sorts of things that I did not see before.
My eyes were really opened watching High School Musical 2. It has a bit rate varying from 30-40 Mbit/sec AVC encoded (most the time around 33). Then I watched a Warner disc and it was VC-1 10-19mbit/sec (average around 12). Wow what a difference. So, I started to go through more, the high bit rate AVC discs really show a lot more detail. Michael Bay's comments seem more accurate now.
If BD really wants to blow away downloads all the discs need to be high bit rate AVC (perhaps VC-1 but the MS VC-1 guys kept claiming more bits would not help VC-1). Quite frankly upconverted DVDs are close in quality to the VC-1 low bit rate recordings.
BD is now cursed with a bunch of titles from WB that are low bit rate compromises to support both formats. I doubt that WB will remaster released titles. I hope that the delay in Transformers is Michael Bay insisting that it be reencoded in high bit rate AVC.
My Panasonic Plasma, being a few years old (2004) just did not have the processing capability of a Pioneer Kuro. I now see all sorts of things that I did not see before.
My eyes were really opened watching High School Musical 2. It has a bit rate varying from 30-40 Mbit/sec AVC encoded (most the time around 33). Then I watched a Warner disc and it was VC-1 10-19mbit/sec (average around 12). Wow what a difference. So, I started to go through more, the high bit rate AVC discs really show a lot more detail. Michael Bay's comments seem more accurate now.
If BD really wants to blow away downloads all the discs need to be high bit rate AVC (perhaps VC-1 but the MS VC-1 guys kept claiming more bits would not help VC-1). Quite frankly upconverted DVDs are close in quality to the VC-1 low bit rate recordings.
BD is now cursed with a bunch of titles from WB that are low bit rate compromises to support both formats. I doubt that WB will remaster released titles. I hope that the delay in Transformers is Michael Bay insisting that it be reencoded in high bit rate AVC.