Great Week for High Rez

I was editing that to say 16/48 when you replied ! I am not suggesting you use MLP for the 24/96 stereo stream on the DVD layer. You dont need to use it. From what I understand (an old Stereophile magazine article) you only have a bandwidth issue with 5.1 channels of 24/96.

I don't care if you drop Dolby Digital instead of DTS. I have stated that DTS is a lot better than Dolby Digital. But you mentioned backwards compatability and all DVD players support Dolby Digital. The problem is that DTS files are a lot bigger than Dolby Digital files so DTS is the one that has to go. As regards to quality, you have the highest quality mutichannel on the DVD-A layer under my proposal so what do you care about dropping DTS?

As for HD-DVD being a niche thing. I thought that about DVD at the start (and I admit it here). The market will take care of cost issues as it did with the cost of DVD players. Then again I think Duran Duran is the greatest band in the world (just so you know what you are dealing with)

 

Nothing wrong with Duran Duran IMHO - the Astronaut album has some great surround mixes on it. Shame it is Dobly Dirgital only...
The problem with 24/96 in the Video_TS is again one of compatibility - there are far more players out there that will NOT -play a 24/96 stream in stereo without
A - truncating to 16 bits, or
B - decimating down to 48KHz
than there are players that will not play a DTS stream.
Problem is that it is impossible to keep all happy unless we include 5.1 & 2.0 as MLP in the Audio_TS, and to stay in strict spec, keep the LPCM to 16/48, or possibly 24/48 and include both DD & DTS.
Personally, I would include both 16/48 & 24/96 in the Video_TS, have 2 separate streams, and use DVD15.
We generally have to stay with DVD9 though. Production costs & all that.

As far as HD DVD goes, this is NOT going to do what SD DVD did. Too many different versions. We are at 3 already, with more on the way.
It just is not going to go mass market until & unless the compatibility issues get dealt with. We already have the laughable situation where none of the current BD set top players will play the latest BDi discs. It's a joke.
Damn Sony to hell & gone. Yet again, they are trying to do what they did with High Rez multichannel and split a niche market (which is all HD will ever be for at least 5 to 10 years) and that will only ensure neither last.

 

Let me tell you why HD-DVD has already won. I'll leave open the possibility that a new format will appear that will catch everyones interest. But failing this HD-DVD has already won IMHO. There are 2 reasons why this is the case.

1 - There are 9 million XBOX-360's out there than can and will be upgraded with relatively cheap external HD-DVD drives. There are 1 million PS3's. You can actually thank the introduction of Nintendo's Wii with taking the interest away from the PS3. That and the high cost of the PS3. The only hope for Sony is that a new range of games can be designed that will exploit the power of the PS3. Failing that the PS3 is going the way of Betamax. Sony will of course still sell some more PS3's but will need to cut the cost of the unit in half pretty damn soon or it is dead.

2 - The porn industry is not interested in Blue Ray because of the cost of production. Sony needs to reduce the cost of production by 75% pretty damn soon for this to change.

Video games and porn. Who would have thought it?

 

Out of HD DVD & Blu Ray, HD DVD is superior IMHO as well, but it is still to expensive, too flaky & far too untested.
Authoring right now is $150,000 sheets plus burners that do not yet exist either (The much touted first burner loks like a hound to me).
Porn drove DVD in the first place, so no surprises there.

BD is also too f***ing fragile with the insane 0.1mm technology (Look how easy it is to damage DVD and CD, with 0.6mm technology) - and the cases will not help. I hope BD falls over sooner rather than later.

Don;t forget EVD, or VMD as it is called. Software players are going to be free. This will count for much.
It's red laser based, and still gets 40Gb on a DL disc.
It supports all the same video codecs as HD DVD.
It's a fraction of the cost, and this is the format that will come out of asia. There are unlikely to be cheap HD DVD players because Toshiba are not about to license the technology to no-name manufacturers.

Wait at least 5 years, maybe more.

 

So its a race between EVD and HD-DVD then. I won't put my money either way as I don't know what Toshiba will do with licensing. Will they learn from Sony's mistakes? I am prepared to wait and see. I own a Wii anyway and don't have the cash to upgrade to a HD tv right now.

 

Me too.
I am remaining on my fence until one comes out on top.
I cannot afford to back the wrong horse - and to be honest, I really hope that it is not Sony.

 

I didn't notice this thread had gone over to page 2 until tonight! I am interested to know what your ears tell you about the sound of SACD? I have a notorious Pioneer player so can't be sure if my previous comments (on page 1) are really reflective of SACD or my cheapish player. I also intestested in what you think of Class A amps compared to Class AB.