M$ with xbox 360 offering HD/SD downloads 11/22
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Curious as if the network distant is related or why its not related. dish cant send to customers distants but M$ can offer their prime shows.....
Has anyone d/l the preview videos off of XBL. THey look like crap. And a 4.7GB movie is always going to look like CRAP. The idea is GREAT, but if you're going to do it do it right.
Are you talking about movie trailers, or are there actually previews of the XBM "HD" content available for DL?
I downloaded the trailer for "A Scanner Darkly" and it looked pretty damn good on a Samsung 61" 1080p DLP set. Even the lame "Titanic" HD demo that came with the system looked pretty decent (although it did stutter a few times).
4 minute trailers looked good, but they are only 500 MB in size. Even the Viva Pinata TV episode was OK. But that was SD on a 20 minute clip.
The worst quality I've seen as the Battlestar Galactica "The Story So Far" that looked like streaming media from 5 years ago,... ok in a 3 in. x 3 in. window....... but awful on a bigscreen...
This may work, but they need bigger hard drives....
The worst quality I've seen as the Battlestar Galactica "The Story So Far" that looked like streaming media from 5 years ago,... ok in a 3 in. x 3 in. window....... but awful on a bigscreen...
This may work, but they need bigger hard drives....
I downloaded the Borat trailer and it looked good at 720p. Don't know why hpman thinks they look so bad. I would love to see "A Scanner Darkly" in HD cause i missed it this summer. Can't wait to see how this all comes together. Does anyone know if I can use a USB HDD to store these downloads?
Trailers in 720p do look great Borat esp. But I'm talking about the 11/22 preview stuff. I don't think it looks that great. AND IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO GET AN HD MOVIE AT 4.7 GB. So don't even think thats what you are watching. HDDVD or BD will be so so so much better, even standard DVD will be better than that.
4 minute trailers at 500MB. Considering the movies will be arond 4.7 GB that will give you about 40 minutes of video. I don't know too many movies that are 40 minutes. Even at 8.5 GB you would only get 1hr 20minutes of video and many movies are longer than that. The quality will be DVD at best, but I'd place my money on DVD over a movie d/l service any day
The skepticism is certainly warranted, but I think plenty can be done in the advancement of codecs that might remedy the situation in the future. I guess we will see what happens. MS would be wise to quickly come up with a solution to the storage/HD bandwidth issue.
I'll be DLing those 11/22 preview trailers soon and view them on the Samsung 1080p display and a 720p set I have to compare.
I'll be DLing those 11/22 preview trailers soon and view them on the Samsung 1080p display and a 720p set I have to compare.
I agree with you to a certain extent, but you have to admit there is only so much you can do with a codec before dininishing returns set it. It has to happen. And if this technology were to be avail in the near future wouldn't you think BD and HDDVD would have held off until the future?
Well, yes and no. MS (along with other companies) have already been producing WMV-HD discs on regular sized DVD's now for quite some time. The Blu-ray and HD-DVD technologies have been running concurrently with the WMV-HD market. One reason the WMV-HD market didn't take off was because it was limited to the PC market. Some of the movies will be 4.7GB or under, while some will near closer to 8GB. I figure with a variable bitrate they should be able to do a decent job if they encode correctly. There is an entire science around encoding, but the DivX enthusiasts have proven you can get almost painfully close to DVD when encoding to VBR (variable bit-rate). Like the VCD market, VBR encoding takes longer, but analyzes segments of the film that are high action versus low action. High action scenes obviously need a higher bitrate because the data varies more from frame to frame, while low-action scenes that use just a few fixed camera angles and not a lot of panning are just fine using lower bitrates. Some of the posters on here have been comparing the bandwidth and storage requirements of satellite MPEG-4. The reason why comparing satellite or digital cable bandwidth and encoding isn't entirely valid is because they use real-time constant bitrate encoding as opposed to methods that could produce approximately the same quality using lower storage and bandwidth requirements.
I would nay-say and write off the entire exercise as being hopeless if I hadn't seen what the encoding community is capable of by fitting a DVD-quality movie onto a CD-R.
