On March 13 2009 16:42 PobTheCad wrote: gusbear what exactly is the next technology do you think? something to do with flash cards? this is certainly something i would look at before blu-ray , just for the fact optical discs are so fragile and easily scratched.
I do think that flash is the most obvious route right now, and there are startups such as this i just googled http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-190446.html ...don't think its catching on tho haha.
Personally, I like the ease of downloads mainly because i hate keeping and sorting through physical media. There are various vendors that are sorta "there" with digital content delivery such as iTunes, Netflix, Blockbuster, xBox... and it shouldn't be long before there are great improvements in delivering good quality HD content. Of course, presently you can just download HD torrents if you can live with the moral issues.
So then it just comes down to getting an unlimited ISP plan and large harddrives to store your collection.
I have to concede that if you are not satisfied with DVDs (and the studios are not releasing HD movies on DVD9) and you don't like downloading stuff then blu-ray seems like the only legit option now.
On March 13 2009 16:49 IzzyCraft wrote: You do know flash based SSD have write limits... they are hardly industry level esp with the cheap ones you are talking about usually hovers between 1000-10000 erases. Saying blu-ray is dead is saying VHS is dead 20 years ago when CD where breaking out. Guess what grand ideas of everyone watching tv though a pc is bull shit people need infrastructure why else do people use tivo instead of a HTPC? people frankly it's just too much work for people to do things your way. Simple point is disk costs near nothing to make they wont be going away for a long time.
Yes you may be right, I was too quick to put blu-ray down as I realise most people do not watch tv / movies like I do so my perception was warped. I have an unlimited data plan and I download almost all my stuff. My PC is also my HTPC and its hooked up to surround speakers and a 720p projector. Quality is a big deal to me and I actually personally installed a shit ton of sound insulation for the room, but as for video im satisfied with 720p for now as my eyesight isn't that great and I don't wear glasses.
On March 13 2009 15:06 GTR wrote: is it worth the extra download if you can get a blu-ray rip over a dvd rip? because i download at a max of 55kB/s and that's super slow, it will take me atleast 3 days to download a 1080p rip over a normal dvd rip.
Depends if it is worth it to download something for 3-5 days just see something that last around 2 hours
If its a good movie that benefits a lot from HD, sure i'll get it. For example the first 720p rip I got was The Fifth Element @ 4.5gigs 3 years ago, absolutely worth it. Otherwise no, for me I don't mind waiting for downloads but i just don't like deleting anything i've downloaded and i'd run out of space if everything was HD.
On March 13 2009 14:55 gusbear wrote:As for DVD to Blu-ray the only change is capacity, which is irrelevant for movies now that we have multi layer DVDs.
That's the whole point, isn't it? Higher capacity = higher bitrates and resolutions. 1080p won't fit on a dual layer without compromising quality, and it definitely won't be able to contain the movie + uncompressed 5.1 audio in four layers. While you think 720p and dts is fine, that's not what everyone thinks. That's the point. If you don't understand that, nothing can help you.
Blu ray on a lappie? Eh I'd say its not worth it. DVDs are cheaper, and there's still a lot higher variety out there. So unless you've got a sweet top end entertainment center its not really worth it. You won't be able to tell much of a difference anyways.
If you just have a better screen it's totally worth it starting with high quality and going to lower high quality 720p even is still alot more quality then from a normal dvd.
So if you only have a 921,600 pixel movie that is still 2.66 times the quality from the dvd not counting this is also starting out saying that the dvd has the best quality available while the blu-ray will have the best quality available.
Also blu-ray uses MPEG-4 part10 encoding usually ending up with more accurate colors etc while dvd only uses MPEG-2
It's easier to compare when im not talking about i because then the fields are split into 2. DVD quality at i vs p is double the quality if you didn't know i only shows every other line per frame p shows the whole picture per frame. Quality in p is double that in i although at 480 it's very hard to tell unless upscaled where you can see the lines in the tv but this is mostly a tearing issue in pictures that move fast due to i throws away as much data as possible.
Although i will say if you have a great dvd player and a good quality (recently made dvd) dvd one that can broadcast in 480p upscaling isn't that bad in quality but upscaling for a 480i signal makes it look like shit.
On March 12 2009 11:35 Chuiu wrote: There is a huge difference between DVD and HD in both resolution and color. Colors are much more defined and since the resolution is much higher everything becomes much clearer. These are crude comparisons but they give you a good idea of how much better HD is. Notice how closeups are significantly better in HD.
I don't know if anyone cares to do this, but if you repeatedly mouse over shot 3, one of the guys on the right claps. I thought it was neat for about 20 seconds :3
Did you only watch the right side of the image? There are many people clapping in that image...
There are alot of distorted or just plain wrong information in this thread. Don't get me wrong Blu-ray (and HD DVD) is a huge step forward compared to dvd.
First the filmformat used in blu-rays (and hd dvds) are not lossless and it is not as good as it can get. There are much higher quality digital standards like 4K (4096×3072). Even uncrompressed 1080p is insanely large around 1.6Gbps as as opposed to blu-ray which is around 15-30Mbps so to say that the quality from a blu-ray is as good as it gets is wrong.
I also saw someone saying that only new stuff would benefit from blu-ray that isn't true either. 35mm film has more then enough information to make a 1080p blu-ray and 70mm even more so and nearly all movies is and have been shot on 35mm (70mm in some cases) film and most tv-shows aswell it wasn't until the last 20 years or so that material intended for tv began shoting in video.
Blu-ray doesn't exclusively use one encoding format but the most common one now is vc-1. Mpeg 4 was used most when blu-ray was new.
5Gb is not enough to make a good encode of 1080p movies, maybe animated movies.
HD movies released on dvd9 as gusbear keeps talking about already exists and it is called wmv hd and it's played on computers it has pretty much failed completely.
Blu-ray is most definitely not dead altough it's only gusbear who keeps going on about it.
You guys (US) in general have way to crappy connections to make HD VoD realistic (good 1080p 12Gb+ encodes or full blu-rays as HD really doesn't mean anything will be good quality only that it will have a certain resolution. You can have a 1080p with very low bitrate and it will take very little space but look horrible) and without that there is no competator. Sure some or maybe most people will stay with dvd but that doesn't mean that blu-ray is dead it'll be around until next format comes along.
To answer TS question (altough he probably already bought it). I think it would be smarter to buy a standalone blu-ray player seeing as you can get one for under $150.
DVD vs. BluRay is such an amazing difference...I don't know what everyone is talking about, even on a 1920x1200 screen, 1080p is light years ahead of 720p.
remuxing(still lossless/source quality) might be a good idea, especially the last line
-You use MPC-HC (or similar DShow players) and standard filters for playback. You can also use better quality renderers like Haali, EVR and madVR. -You get the ease of playback of a re-encode without the quality loss. A double click off the .mkv will start the movie - no annoying warnings, loading screens, previews and setup menus.
-You never have to worry about the region code setting of a disc. -You never have to worry about HDCP or PAP content protection. -You never have to worry about your software player downsampling your audio - get full bit-depth and frequency resolution, 24bit/96kHz or higher, not 16/48.
^ Honestly I feel like Audio has been the most shit upon by Youtube/etc....FLAC files are amazing, it's too bad the general population settles for MP3s when the lossless, so much less-harddrive-space taking FLAC-than-WMV gets generally ignored.
On March 12 2009 10:56 renegade_zerg wrote: i upgraded to the 1080p. I dont think the bluray drive is worth it if you dont. Stick to the regular dvd drive if you're on a budget.... the picture still looks crisp and clear
Yeah budget is the only factor. The discs cost more also.
EPT
