Thread: The curse of HD-DVD still haunting BD

Originally Posted by mike123abc

These very bright people were also working for Microsoft which of course was pushing HD-DVD. I think the VC-1 encoder is an excellent encoder. But, I do not expect those at Microsoft to admit that using AVC with more bits produces a better picture. I do think that at a similar low bit rate (12-18 mbits/sec) VC-1 and AVC are hard to tell apart. VC-1 may very well have not benefited from a higher bit rate.

Stacey Spears is a very honest guy. It benefits folks that use the product and I wouldn't be a bit surprised that it has cost him career advancement on multiple occasions. He's commented on both if you do the searches.

If you haven't compared the 30 Mbits/second (ish) with a 20 Mbits/second (ish) how do you know that the PQ is attributable to the higher bit rate? It's a nice theory, but it isn't anything near a given.

Originally Posted by mike123abc

HSM2 was a poor choice for an example. It just had some very complex scenes like the end scene where you have 50+ people dancing around a pool and waterfall. Water tends to compress poorly

Depends on the content. Water can compress quite well depending on the properties of the rest of the scene. Then again, if you want a nearly pathological case, try a scene with strobing in it. Lacking that, use a scene with smoke / fog. It's very nearly a pathological case.

But, how about Pirates of the Caribean. I popped in #3 and observed AVC yet again running between 15 and 50 (yes some 50 peaks) Mbit/sec. The average looked around 20-22 Mbit/sec. Again this is significantly more bits allocated to video than what Warner was doing with VC-1.

50 Mbits/second is higher than the max Mux rate of 48 Mbits/second as defined by the Blu-ray spec; of which 40 Mbits/second is the maximum allowable video portion of the data rate.

I don't have the PoTC discs, I don't like the movies. That said, you have to subtract from the 48 Mbits all of the audio tracks to arrive at the video rate. You have a constant rate of nearly 9 Mbits/seconds (8.832 Mbits/second) so that leaves < 39 Mbits/second for the VC-1.

People keep complaining that HD media and upconverted DVDs are not too different. Perhaps Warner was keeping it that way.

Perhaps. Or perhaps these items are bigger factors:
1) Viewers don't know what to look for.
2) Viewers aren't close enough to resolve all the picture detail.

Originally Posted by diogen

Michael Bay can bless a piece of sh!t and br.com will hail it as a second coming...

BTW, one of the biggest recent improvements in movie encoding was done not in the codecs per-se,
but in proper conversion (dither) to 4:2:0/8bit. The best example of it is seen in Oscar winning Ratatouille.
Yes, it's Disney, Blu-Ray title. But the tool was created by Stacey Spears, the VC-1 creator...

Video pre-processing - AVS Forum

Diogen.

I hope to god he wrote that as his own IP and he patented the code

He deserves to do well financially!

Originally Posted by rockymtnhigh

Transformers looks spectacular on my HD DVD player

Looked like a crappy waste of film to me. Oh wait, are you talking about PQ or the movie itself

S~

Originally Posted by rockymtnhigh

Transformers looks spectacular on my HD DVD player

Originally Posted by teachsac

Looked like a crappy waste of film to me. Oh wait, are you talking about PQ or the movie itself