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-------------------------------------------------------------- This story was printed from CNET Asia. --------------------------------------------------------------
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Blu-ray and HD-DVD: The facts
By Rob Gillman, CNET.co.uk
07/06/2007 URL: http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/home_av/others/0,39037627,62019326,00.htm Tip 1: The benefits
High-definition video (usually abbreviated to hi-def, or HD) represents the crème de la crème of visual entertainment in the home. Where standard-definition (SD) sources such as DVD deliver their images at a resolution of 720 x 576 pixels (or 720 x 480 pixels in the US and Japan), HD resolutions can reach the giddy heights of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels--which means they contain roughly four times the amount of detail. HD video also tends to be better encoded and less compressed than SD pictures, which makes colors brighter and artifacts such as noise less visible. Feed some HD video to the right television or projector and you'll get an experience far beyond what DVD can offer. Take the climactic Empire State Building sequence of Peter Jackson’s version of King Kong. Watch the standard DVD edition on a big TV and Kong's fur will be a largely indistinct mass of dark grey and black; the buildings and streets of Manhattan, lying in the background, will be slightly fuzzy; and behind them, you'll notice little speckles of noise in the clouds where the video information has been compressed. Swap it for the HD-DVD version and it's as if you've removed a layer of grime and vaseline from your screen: Individual bristles can be made out on Kong's back as he climbs the building, while the cityscape behind leaps to life with clean, razor-sharp edges and the sky becomes crystal-clear and noise-free. The improvement, especially on a screen of 42 inches or larger, is nothing short of a revelation. Different hi-def flavors HD-DVD and Blu-ray can deliver HD video in three formats: 720p, 1080i and 1080p. 720p offers the lowest pixel count (its resolution is 1,280 x 720 pixels) but each frame is scanned on to your screen progressively, or in its entirety, which results in smooth edges during motion.
But HD-DVD and Blu-ray's talents don't begin and end with rapier-sharp picture quality. They also offer the best sound available. As long as the right hardware is hooked up to your disc player, you can experience lossless Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio--new digital audio formats encoded so efficiently they lose none of the original recording's quality when they're decoded by your disc player or home cinema receiver. The new disc formats also take DVD's interactive menus and extra features one step further. Both can incorporate complex, fully animated menus, including pop-ups that can be browsed while you're watching a movie, and both can offer picture-in-picture video--although this feature is not supported by all Blu-ray hardware currently. Also available to both formats is the ability to drag in more content from the Web--as long as your player is equipped with a network connection, certain discs will allow you to access exclusive online content, including videos and updatable stuff such as cast bios and filmographies.
Tip 2: Which is best? Most of you will be aware of the format war between Blu-ray and HD-DVD. Echoing the VHS versus Betamax dust-up that rocked the video-cassette world in the 1980s, this conflict could well result in one of the new formats becoming at first marginalized and later completely obsolete. It's clearly in your interest to pick the right one--but which is it? Technical differences There's little to choose between the two formats when it comes to picture quality. Both support the MPEG-2, VC-1 and AVC (also called H.264) video-compression standards, although which one is actually used depends on the individual movie disc, so quality can vary. HD-DVDs almost exclusively use the more advanced VC-1 and AVC codecs, while the first generation of Blu-ray movies uses the aging MPEG-2 codec. This led to early criticism of Blu-ray's picture quality in some circles, but the more recent Blu-ray releases that utilize the advanced codecs look every bit as gorgeous as HD-DVD.
On the memory front, Blu-ray's greater storage capacity would appear to give it a slight edge. A dual-layer Blu-ray disc has 50GB of space, while the equivalent HD-DVD has "only" 30GB. In real terms, this means a Blu-ray disc can hold around 8.5 hours of HD video to HD-DVD's 5.1 hours. It's not as if you're going to have to spread single movies over multiple HD-DVDs, but more a case of Blu-ray having more space for extra features and additional audio tracks. There's also the possibility that the extra capacity could be used to encode video or audio at higher quality in the future. Content is king Since some time has passed since the launch of both formats, there are now the beginnings of a decent movie library available worldwide. HD-DVD is not currently region-coded, so any US discs you buy will work on an Asian player--you can go online and buy the likes of The Departed and Babel right now. Blu-ray movies are region-coded, however, so you'll have to stick with US discs for your local Asian player. This is a unique advantage for Asia because the US library of Blu-ray movies is far better than other regions, of which only the likes of Casino Royale and Kingdom of Heaven really do the format justice.
Blu-ray's superior studio support is certainly a major selling point, as Sony CEO Howard Stringer was keen to highlight in a January 2007 interview with CNET's sister site GameSpot. "The three biggest box-office winners of this year were, in order: Sony, Disney and Fox. Those are the three Blu-ray players. The fourth is Warner, and they release in both formats, so it doesn't hurt. If you are going to be buying discs, you are going to be buying an awful lot of Blu-ray discs going forward--if you want Pirates of the Caribbean or James Bond or Da Vinci Code or Spider-Man."
Sony PlayStation 3 has also done wonders for the Blu-ray cause. Prior to its launch in March 2007, HD-DVD players had been significantly cheaper than their Blu-ray equivalents. The So, at the moment, things are looking very rosy for the Blu-ray camp. But the war is far from over--HD-DVD technology is cheaper and easier to mass-produce, and it's not inconceivable we could be seeing boatloads of affordable Chinese-made HD-DVD players hitting the shops by the end of the year. That could change everything.
Tip 3: The kit While it's gradually becoming more affordable, HD-DVD and Blu-ray hardware is still very pricey in comparison with standard DVD kit, and as such isn't really aimed at the casual movie fan. For those who want to crank things up a notch on the home cinema front, it's certainly worth investing in a player.
HD-DVD hardware is the cheaper of the two, with Microsoft's addon drive for the Xbox 360 available for a mere More powerful, but still pretty affordable, is the Blu-ray The cheapest Blu-ray player around is the PlayStation 3, which costs Samsung's first Blu-ray player, the BD-P1000, is a more traditional disc spinner, and its
If you can't decide which of the formats to back, there's one other option available online: A universal player. LG's US$1,200 BH100 is the only one available at present, and while it does play both formats and has great picture and sound quality, it can't display the menu screens properly on HD-DVD discs, so it's hard to find the extras. It also lacks a network port, so getting any of the online extras is also off the menu. Samsung has announced that its own forthcoming multiformat player, the BD-UP5000, will fully support both formats and have a network connection, so waiting for that is another option. Sadly we have no release date or pricing details at present. Sony, Pioneer and Philips are among the companies that have Blu-ray players on the way and, as we mentioned in the previous section, there is talk of Chinese manufacturers preparing to unleash a wave of ultra-affordable HD-DVD players upon the rest of the world. One thing is for sure--the hardware will get cheaper and, as the range of movies available in both formats improves, more and more people will be replacing their standard DVD collection with HD movies. This story appeared originally in CNET.co.uk. |
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