Exclusive Interview With Richard J. Casey Regarding The Format War & Nature's Journey

[beatboy77]

Hi-Def Preview

We had the opportunity recently to interview Richard J. Casey, President of R&B Films about such things as the format war and the costs involved in producing for each format and also about R&B Film's newest dual format release, "Nature's Journey."

This interview is full of some great information and surprises, take a look!

~Josh

 

[diogen]

It is an interesting interview of a professional in his field made obviously on the heels of a original discussion on AVS (referenced 5 times in the interview)
Nature's Journey - HD-DVD featuring 26Mbps Encode and 96/24 DTS-HD - AVS Forum
Reading pro's comments on issues of expertise always reminds me a coder's joke: "There are 10 types of people in the world: those that understand binary and those that don't".

This is the statement I'm referring to:

...we have heard some "artifacts", "anomalies", "processing" for lack of better terms to use when comparing PCM to certain Lossless CODCES as well.
We do not stand alone on this as many of the more sophisticated engineers will agree.

taken from here
AVS Forum - View Single Post - Nature's Journey - HD-DVD featuring 26Mbps Encode and 96/24 DTS-HD
In other words, 2+2=4, but in some cases can be 5 and in some exceptionaly rare cases even 55.

This happened on the 6-th page of the AVS thread and for another 6 pages people were bugging him for this very statement while he was trying to avoid any further commentary... until finally

Lossless CODECS technically speaking should sound the same as the original...

Nature's Journey - HD-DVD featuring 26Mbps Encode and 96/24 DTS-HD - Page 11 - AVS Forum
...and the thread died on the next page.

It has been proven before that lossless codecs are like zip/rar compression: after you unzip/unrar you get the original. No ifs or buts.
Whatever else can affect the perception of difference in audio quality applies to the same degree to both, lossless and PCM.

Diogen.

 

[mike123abc]

In theory the lossless compression should sound the same as a PCM. Eventually I believe they will sound exactly the same. The compressed ones still have more steps (i.e. you have to correctly decompress) to go through where errors can be made. This has to be done in real time of course. Just give it some time to work the bugs out and get the processing power up to the point where they do not have any issues.

 

[diogen]

From what I read, audio decoding in both formats HD/BD (including the first "Linux PC" Toshiba player) is done by dedicated chips (audio only or audio+video in one).
What is mandatory in the format has to be decoded by those chips, and there are special DolbyLabs/DTS suits that test for this capability.

Strictly speaking, HD DVD has only TruHD 2.0 mandatory and from this point of view you could be right that the chips can't decode 7.1.
But I don't think this was the topic of discussion on AVS.

Diogen.