Blu ray vs DVD (which is better?)

Yo yo
Does anyone think blu ray are gonna replace dvds?

 

I've seen HD-DVD and it is not night and day between that & DVD and Blue Ray is going to look exactly the same except triple the price, so I would say no. Another thing is that the studios are split between BD & HDVD while DVD has all of the studios.

Out of the two new ones, I see HDVD as being the one with the most potential to replace DVD, but that will happen in about 5 years or so either way. The reason being that HDVD is currently $500 with movies at $25 each. This is not far off from DVD where a decent player is $200 with movies at $20 at release!!!

Also, the Toshiba HDVD player is made in Japan!!!! You will have to spend at least $800 to get a DVD player made in Japan. DVD and HDVD are not far off in terms of price and I see this thing dropping to about $350 to $400 by Christmas. Also, the actual movies will be around $12 - $15 for previously viewed. However, since this is still in the initial release state, prices on new movies (store bought) will not go under $20. This is because there will be steady or even increasing demand for those titles.

I am strongly considering buying one of thoe HDVD players simply because it is Heavy and Made in Japan!! I am afraid that in a year, you will only see made in Taiwan, China, Malaysia (if your lucky), etc... The only thing is that there is no selection since all the movies are re-releases.

The difference in picture is there, but you are comparing apples with oranges. You cannot compare a standard DVD to HDVD or BD because standard DVDs are compressed to crap quality. You need to look at full bitrate DVD vs HDVD of the same title. I am sure there will be a difference, but not as much as with standard DVDs.

 

These big companies are always looking to save a buck, and the fact that the same pressing machines that make DVD can also handle HD DVD has got to look good to them. Blu-ray requires starting over. Some of the studios have even expressed disdain for Blu-ray since the PSP movie discs flopped, so Sony does have some work to do to prove it's going to be the winner.
The thing I hear touted about most with Blu-ray is that "it's 50gb and HD is only 20gb" when in fact a single layer blu-ray is 25gb. Only 5gb more than HD DVD, not 30gb. They can absolutely make two layer HD DVD as well, so the storage capacity is nearly identical between the two.
Personally, I think HD DVD has the edge due to stronger studio support at this time, and the ability to be manufactured using existing infrastructure. Blu-ray seems to have more of a "gee whiz" factor, and will enjoy Sony's marketing power to it's mindless PS2 drones, but I am far from interested myself. Yet anyway. We'll see I guess.

 

Jigen, you are exactly right!!! Those HDVDs can go multiple layers as well and a movie will take up around 11.25 GB of space per 1 hour of video in Full Bitrate (assunming the specs full bitrate of 25mbps is used)!! This means that even if BD is 400TB there is no advantage in the media size except for tons of worthless extras!!

A 45GB disc is more than enough for any full spec bitrate HD movie with lots of extras and such. Anything more is overkill. Heck King Kong would take up around 39GB of space video only and that is assuming full bitrate, however, I think actaul bitrate will be around 18mbps so about 33GB will be more than enough for evn King Kong with extra audio and such!!

Note, that all of the file sizes were in DVD bytes so 45GB = 42GB and so on.

 

Thats true for MPEG-2 files. If the much more efficient MPEG-4 codec(s) are used then the bitrate drops to 14mbps which totally establishes that HD-DVD has plenty of space for HD movies and extras (including my favorite extra; Lossless surround sound audio).

Ced

 

Jigen, I don't know where you got that whole 5gb less fact, here's the real ones:

These are both for single sided, 12 cm (normal sized) disks

Blu-Ray
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluray
Single Layer: 23.3/25/27 GB
Dual Layer: 46.6/50/54 GB
Quad Layer: 100 GB
8 Layer: 200 GB

HD-DVD
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD-DVD
Single Layer: 15 GB
Dual Layer: 30 GB
Triple Layer: 45 GB

Thats just slightly more than 5GB...

 

HD-DVD writable media is 20GB for single layer. That is probably what he was referring to and what I was referring to, but I think HD-DVD has upto triple layer right now which is 45GB.

Also, like I said before, with Mpeg-2, it will be 11.25 GB per hour (including audio).

 

I support HD-DVD because you do not need all that memory that is on a Blu-Ray disc and it is much cheaper for most consumers to afford.

 

' 'I've seen HD-DVD and it is not night and day between that & DVD and Blue Ray is going to look exactly the same except triple the price ' '

you havent seen the 1080p blu-ray flicks ,so yep its not the same at all.

 

However, keep in mind that Blue Ray is made by Sony, who make by far the WORST QUALITY DVDs!!! About 30% of Blue Ray Movies will be from Sony Studios.

Also, there is not a big difference between 1080p and 1080i. Both are at 1920 x 1080 resolution. However, there is one thing about bitrate that concerns me with 1080p. Is bitrate caluclated like so:

horizontal x vertical x depth x number of frames???

If so, you will have this for bitrates:

Blue Ray: 1920 x 1080 x 24 x 60 = 2,985,984,000 bps uncompressed

HD-DVD: 1920 x 1080 x 24 x 30 = 1,492,992,000 bps uncompressed

Now add compression into the mix and assume only 1 Dolby Digital 5.1 at 448kbps so that leaves 24,552,000 bps for each (actually it would be 24,500,000 bps) so that would mean:

Blue Ray is 122:1 compression at MAX bitrate (longer GOP)
HD-DVD is 61:1 compression at MAX bitrate (Shorter GOP)

If this is the case, HD-DVD will have a better picture, but Blue Ray will look smoother.

Also, I am assuming 1080p is 1080/60p. Please let me know if my numbers are wrong as I do not know much about bitrate calculations and such.

 

I've never had a problem with them.

 

Do you mean with Sony?? Sure the quality is acceptible, however, if you are paying for something, shouldn't you get the most???

Sony uses an average bitrate of 3500kbps on DVDs. The max allowed is about 9800 or about 9300 or so video. So this means Sony Quality is about 37.6% Quality. Most other movie studios use around 6000kbps so that would be about 64.5% quality.

If you look closely, you can tell the difference, but it is more noticable on a large screen.

 

I can accept that, after all most of my television viewing takes place on a 13 incher (FEAR ME!).

 

Yeah, the 20GB discs are the writable kind, which is what I will be using since I have no equipment for pressing my own. That's five hours of HD footage. As for the 200GB Blu-ray discs, they are probably incompatible with the blu-ray standard which will mean the standard drive will not be able to read them. If they do, great, but that's not been demonstrated as yet, so I'll hold my entusiasm.

 

JaguarGod, I'm almost certain the movies aren't stored on disc at 30 or 60fps. They're stored at 24fps, and the player does the telecine conversion for the 1080i signal, or for 720p, double-displaying every 4th frame and resizing all of them.

So Blu-ray could have the better image quality if using mpeg-4 instead of mpeg-2.

 

I was just about to say that midflinx. Yes, movies that are transferd from film are captured at 24 fps (film frame rate) with a 1080p telecine.

As for MPEG-2 vs MPEG-4, it depends more on the total bit-rate and encoder used. right now MPEG-4 is more effecient and can out preform MPEG-2 at about half the bit-rate but movie studios don't have as much experience with MPEG-4. Thats why most of the videos have been done using MPEG-2 so far.

I will say this though, MPEG-4 evens the playing ground. With its low transfer rates and high quality compression ratio it gives HD-DVD the ability to be just as flexible as Blu-ray in terms of special features.

Sony has no real intensions of utillizing MPEG-4 because they have alot invested in MPEG-2 (i.e. Super-Bit DVDs). There Super-Bit DVDs look quite good and show that DVDs and MPEG-2 encoding are very flexible formats. So there won't be any pressure from Sony to switch to MPEG-4 since it would be adventageous for its competitors and a burden (in terms of a learning curve) for them.

Ced

 

anyone thinking of going to blu-ray should read this article first. It appears that they self distruct when copied material is used
http://www.tgdaily.com/2005/08/10/blu/index.html

 

Well this sucks, I still prefer Blu-Ray but this protection sucks ass.
The thing is this will gain approval from pretty much all places that will utilize hd: super secure protection = less piracy = more money.

 

I am not touching any format with Sony's name on it. They are only interested in charging a lot for the privilage for using their technology.

 

If I read that right they are saying people will have to have their blu-ray players hooked up to the internet so it can do a security check on disks, or it wont work. And this is how theyre going to protect copywrites. If I read that right theyre killing the blu-ray format before its on the market because nobody will buy something that absolutely must be hooked to the internet to work.