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Hi-Def Media Lovefest: The war is over and we can all go home.
- Thread starter HyperionX
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Alcibiades said:
They CAN be lossless ... up to a certain point, obviously studios can use masters that are beyond what they are specced to handle.
Regarldess, that doesn't mean it is always used that way. As you stated, it is a form of compression. It can be encoded to be lossless, or it can be bit-rate started.
DarkJediKnight
Member
Oh good lord, the latest Universal title release of Alpha Dog and Hitcher is not going over well in the HD DVD forum. :lol
A gem from AVS:
:lol :lol
I actually think they are overreacting, as they're reacting to the fact that these two have been announced for May, with no announcements yet for April. However, aren't these just day-and-date releases with the DVDs, so it doesn't mean they're not going to announce other releases for HD-DVD.
Doesn't make the forum reactions over there any less hilarious though. I'm glad I only take the projector forums over there seriously. :lol
:lol :lol
I actually think they are overreacting, as they're reacting to the fact that these two have been announced for May, with no announcements yet for April. However, aren't these just day-and-date releases with the DVDs, so it doesn't mean they're not going to announce other releases for HD-DVD.
Doesn't make the forum reactions over there any less hilarious though. I'm glad I only take the projector forums over there seriously. :lol
It looks like Blu-Ray software sales have officially surpassed HD-DVD for the lifespan of both formats:
http://www.videostoremag.com/news/html/breaking_article.cfm?sec_id=2&&article_ID=10323
http://www.videostoremag.com/news/html/breaking_article.cfm?sec_id=2&&article_ID=10323
DarkJediKnight
Member
chubigans said:
Way ahead of you, friend. Check out post 1077.
DarkJediKnight
Member
ugh. Stupid double click.
Ah, I'm sorry about that.
BTW I am convinced that IGN now leads AVS with horrible HD format comments. When I posted the same news here's what I got:
I cannot for the life of me understand any of these posts. Someone help.
BTW I am convinced that IGN now leads AVS with horrible HD format comments. When I posted the same news here's what I got:
Libtax said:
Microplaya said:
MrFinch said:
wisconsin_DEATH_trip said:
I cannot for the life of me understand any of these posts. Someone help.
plagiarize
Banned
Dolby Digital TrueHD IS lossless by definition. blu-ray would be better off using it, just as it's better off using vc1, avc or mp4 over mpeg 2... and hopefully people will start to.Onix said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_Digital#Dolby_TrueHD
using more advanced codecs would allow for a lot of bd discs to be 25 gigs without any loss of quality. whether the studio hands that saving over to the consumer or not, it's a good thing for them.
Kleegamefan
K. LEE GAIDEN
plagiarize said:
This is a sticky subject...
IMO, since most Blu-ray players are PS3s, the studios "should" just bite the bullet and include an optional DTHD track on the disks.....most BD players will be able to play them, because most Blu-ray players are PS3s!!!
However, the newer BD players have the option to upgrade to DTHD and/or dts-HD MA via firmware (the PS3 will also have a firmware upgrade for dts-HD MA, I believe) and so I hope we will see more DTHD soundtracks on Blu-ray disks....*GLARES AT WARNER*
Also note that some Fox BDs are encoded in dts-HD MA Lossless....although you can only decode the 1.5mbps dts core at the moment....
plagiarize said:
Given sufficient bit-rates. I highly doubt the TrueHD encoders prevent you from controlling the bitrate. Otherwise, why have reviewers stated that the sound quality of the bit-starved TrueHD soundtracks sound inferior to their LPCM counterparts?
Either what I'm saying is correct, or TrueHD is busted.
AVC is MP4.
Regardless, there are plenty of non-MPEG2 BluRay titles ... though I'm not sure why we're discussing video codecs. The argument at hand is about audio codecs, which are in no way coupled to video.
Define 'loss of quality'. Simply using an advanced video codec doesn't make it a perfect transfer, since they are never lossless. Using BD50 allows for higher bit-rates, as well as more extras.
Again, most new titles are using AVC or VC1
plagiarize
Banned
apart from in one review i saw the departed sound tracks rated equally. most reviewers noted that the dd truehd was encoded at lower volume than the uncompressed pcm sound track on the blu-ray disk and when that was accounted for they were indistuingishable.Onix said:
please though, show me those reviews.
a codec cannot be called lossless unless it is mathematically identical after being compressed and uncompressed. dolby truehd isn't optionally lossless, it HAS to be.
the bit rate of the compressed file which is the only bit rate being quoted, is irrelevant.
if the uncompressed file isn't identical to the one that hasn't been compressed it cannot be called lossless. dd truehd is lossless. that isn't an option, that's part of the spec.
all i'm saying is that by using a lossless compression like dolby truehd instead of uncompressed pcm, is the same thing as choosing avc or vc1 over mpeg2. you can fit even more on the disc with no loss of quality between the two, or fit the same thing on a smaller disc either saving the company or the consumer money.
TAJ
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Kleegamefan said:
You're officially a joke now. But anyway, multi-channel PCM tracks really aren't very big. They seem to range from about 4.5 Mbps to about 6 Mbps so far. Lossless stereo compression (and Dolby TrueHD is also known as Meridian LOSSLESS Packing/MLP) tends to cut file sizes in half, roughly, though lossless compression is inherently variable bitrate. There's more room for space savings when you move beyond stereo, especially if the surrounds aren't very active.
plagiarize said:
Okay ... I think I found the problem.
I was wrong when I thought engineers were forcibly reducing the bit-rate to reduce the size. What is happening on some titles is that they are first downsampling the original master ... and then encoding it with TrueHD.
On some titles, the TrueHD soundtrack was handled in this manner, while the LPCM soundtrack was at the original sampling rate and bit-width.
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=695146
Sorry for the confusion.
TAJ said:
Oh I know ... some studios just suck
For some dual releases, the studios are using the same video transfer coupled with audio encoding using the same downsampled soundtrack.If you look back to where this tangent started, we were discussing the implications of the bit-rate advantage BluRay has over HD-DVD ... and how because of this, audio suffers on HD-DVD titles that use high video bit-rates.
See posts #1060 and #1084
TAJ
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Onix said:
It also started out with people throwing out fantasy numbers for how much bandwidth high-quality audio needs. The 18 Mbps number that was being thrown out there was just ridiculous. You could do 8.0 channels of PCM at 24/96, and it still wouldn't use 18 Mbps. You could do lossless 7.1 at 24/192 and still not average 18 Mbps.
They quoted a number for Dolby Digital Plus (lossy) bitrates that was higher than the highest PCM track on BRD so far, FFS...
plagiarize
Banned
while this is true, again, it would be to blu-ray's advantage to use Dolby TrueHD or similar as that would give blu-ray an even higher potential video bitrate than uncompressed PCM.Onix said:Oh I know ... some studios just suck
If you look back to where this tangent started, we were discussing the implications of the bit-rate advantage BluRay has over HD-DVD ... and how because of this, audio suffers on HD-DVD titles that use high video bit-rates.
See posts #1060 and #1084
i've always felt that the blu-ray releases using mpeg2 and uncompressed audio are throwing away blu-ray's advantages.
it's also a fact that we have no examples demonstrating this advantage yet.
sure, it mightn't happen until hd-dvd is off the market, but some of warner's transfers are amongst the highest rated video quality of either format, the departed included.
again, you can't use bit rate of a codec like vc1 or avc and compare it to dvd. they're variable bit rate codecs which do a lot better at any given bit rate than mpeg 2.
plagiarize said:
Even using video bitrates above what HD-DVD can do, you still have enough room left over to handle most soundtracks losslessly with LPCM (without downsampling first)
In general, studios used MPEG2 because they had to ... not because they wanted to. That is no longer an issue.
I'll have to search around for a direct comparison.
That being said ... if you've been paying attention to reviews and the A/V sites/forums ... BluRay has more titles with high quality audio then HD-DVD. This is simply due to have more titles that are using 24/48 and 24/96 soundtracks as their source material.
Let's keep to one argument at a time.
Who was?
Naked Snake
Member
Sorry if this is off topic... but I'm curious how does H264 compare to AVC and VC1?
Edit: ^^ Wait, so not all BD boxarts have that stupid circular swish on the front eating up the film picture? Thank God!
Edit: ^^ Wait, so not all BD boxarts have that stupid circular swish on the front eating up the film picture? Thank God!
Onix said:
this is the real deciding factor in terms of pure audio quality. Bluray uncompressed LPCM is tending to use higher quality sources. TrueHD tends to have the soundtracd downsampled before encoding.
So although both are lossless, they are not from the same source and so differences will still arise.
Then you also need to take into account the much wider support of lossless on bluray in general. TrueHD really has stalled on HDDVD, whereas LPCM is getting wider and wider support on Bluray.
I really don't think there is any argument here. Bluray clearly is the better platform currently for audio.
Pristine_Condition
Member
Naked Snake said:
I agree.
The solution? Make your own boxart. Print it out, and slip it over the studio cover. There are templates available on the web, but I don't have the link handy.
This story has a link to some nice fan-made alternate boxart as well, to use, or inspire:
High-Def Fans Fight the Box Art Blahs with Custom Cover Designs
AgentOtaku
Member
Pristine_Condition said:
I remeber they had a site dedicated to this a long time ago and It got shut down fairly quickly =/
Forsete said:Yes PAL movies..
Why do you hate on swedish, you racist swede. ;P
Haha, I don't know. It just feels really wrong with Swedish on the cover of movies and games. I just don't like it.
I saw Blu-ray cases for the first time today at EB Games. I like them a lot more than standard DVD cases. Something special about them.
plagiarize
Banned
Onix said:
right, but if you use a lossless compression that leaves even more room for even higher bit rate video, more extras, or you might be able to fit the same content on a bd-25 without losing any quality and saving you manufacturing costs.
i know few people are still using mpeg2, and the ones that still are now have enough room on bd-50's to make it look good, i'm just saying this is the same thing. a codec that allows something to take up less space without losing one bit of quality.
this IS news to me based on the reviews i've been reading. i've never sat down and tabulated the scores though. if someone has i'd be interested to see it.
more important to me as a multiformat owner, is whether any multiplatform releases have any decided advantage on either system. right now that's a no, and as i said many of warner's discs have good reviews despite using the same exact transfers that happily fit on hd-dvds.
it was in one of the two posts you referred me back to. someone was saying that dolby truehd bitrates sometimes went down as low as dvd audio bitrates, like that was a bad thing.
since we're talking about a lossless codec, the lower the bitrate the compressed audio can go, the better. not a bad thing at all, an impressive thing.
i'm not into the platform war. i see the blu-ray camp missing a trick that would benefit them by using uncompressed audio instead of lossless compression. imho every disc that has had uncompressed audio should have had either a master dts or dolby truehd soundtrack instead. then they could have fit more audio options on the disc, or more extras, or what have you.
a 6 channel uncompressed 24/96 sound track takes up around 15 gigabytes of space. that's a ton, and that's only 6 channel. you could fit the same soundtrack at the same quality two times into that space, and still have room left over.
plagiarize
Banned
you get that i'm NOT arguing hd-dvd vs blu-ray here though right?mrklaw said:
i'm arguing the many benefits of blu-ray using lossless compression against uncompressed pcm.
and since you want to frame it as hd-dvd vs blu-ray show me the multiplatform release that has these differences, because as of yet, there isn't one.
if uncompressed pcm becomes standard on blu-ray, that isn't a good thing for blu-ray and it's minimising their size advantage. but whatever. ignore that i'm suggesting something that would be better for the format.
not everything is hd-dvd vs blu-ray you know?
Forsete
Member
Midas said:Haha, I don't know. It just feels really wrong with Swedish on the cover of movies and games. I just don't like it.
I saw Blu-ray cases for the first time today at EB Games. I like them a lot more than standard DVD cases. Something special about them.
Det ser tattigt ut helt enkelt?
I agree, sometimes.Yes I like them also, they are a lot thinner and feel better when you hold them in your hand.
Forsete said:Got my first movies yesterday.
Wise choices?
Kingdom of Heaven has amazing picture quality
if you need reference for PQ, then check out this list from the AVS blu-ray folks or the review from high def digest. Though I don't agree with some of them, it's the
AVS reference
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=753726
high def digest
http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/reviews.html
Kleegamefan
K. LEE GAIDEN
TAJ said:
6 channel MLP audio as used in DVD-Audio often used up nearly the entire 9.6mbps data rate of the DVD......in fact DVDA disks sampled at 24-bit/192Khz were limited to 2 channels only because why???.....because even 9.6mbps isnt enough data rate for 5.1 channels of 24/192Khz sampling even with MLP compressions...
And so NOW DTHD are somehow suppose to be transparent to the audio master at 1.5mbps????:lol (which so happens to be full bitrate dts lossy compression, but most DVDs use 768kbps.....and I wonder why that is....HMMMMMM????)
Your princess is in another castle......
mrklaw said:
You get the cookie
you know whats kind of pissing me off about blu ray discs? Forget the ugly ass packaging! when you get home and open it up there is NOTHING inside! not even a peice of paper with the chapter list. $30 bucks and all you can be bothered to do is put the disc in? Shit most DVDs come with little books or something!
Another stupid thread AVS HD-DuDers
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=810502
Don't they realize Universal silence can simply be caused by:
1. Universal Mgmt shake-up. When mgmt shake-up as big as this, they re-work their plans/strategies starting from the highest priorities items: box-office movies --> TV channels --> DVD, etc, etc.....and I'm pretty sure HD is pretty far down in their list, it's still a very small stream of revenue for them
2. Studios have learned that it's better to release day-and-date current new releases for HD. And Universal has been doing poorly with current box office. So why current new releases? because: First they sell better, no one has them yet in DVD, look at the sale of The Departed, Casino Royale, Babel, Crank, etc. They all current releases, and they sell better than older titles. Second, they don't want to exhaust their catalogues too fast too soon. Also older catalogues are better released when there is more market penetration.
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=810502
Don't they realize Universal silence can simply be caused by:
1. Universal Mgmt shake-up. When mgmt shake-up as big as this, they re-work their plans/strategies starting from the highest priorities items: box-office movies --> TV channels --> DVD, etc, etc.....and I'm pretty sure HD is pretty far down in their list, it's still a very small stream of revenue for them
2. Studios have learned that it's better to release day-and-date current new releases for HD. And Universal has been doing poorly with current box office. So why current new releases? because: First they sell better, no one has them yet in DVD, look at the sale of The Departed, Casino Royale, Babel, Crank, etc. They all current releases, and they sell better than older titles. Second, they don't want to exhaust their catalogues too fast too soon. Also older catalogues are better released when there is more market penetration.
Naked Snake said:
AVC is H264 (though Sony has a new implementation for use with BluRay that appears to give it a significant advantage versus VC1 and the standardized H264).
I'm hoping they will work to add DeepColor to it next.
No ... as someone mentioned previously in this thread, there appear to be 3 types of cases out there.
mrklaw said:
Yep. I previously made the mistake in thinking everyone (regardless of encoding) was using the same original masters, but that many HDDVD titles using TrueHD were somehow forcing the bitrate down.
The downsampling is happening before the encoding.
Yes. It is basically universally excepted that BluRay titles have better audio on average. This was even true at launch. Everyone that was complaining about the crap video of BluRay versus HDDVD still admitted that audio was better.
Naked Snake
Member
Onix said:
Are any consumer-model TVs with Deep Color in the market yet?
plagiarize said:
Obviously the movie length and extra content will determine whether they can get away with it on BD-25. I'm not sure what the cost differential is between BD25 and 50 right now, but yeah it can save some money (though I believe they are getting close and closer every day).
That being said, when talking about bitrates, please note that the max video bit-rate for BD is 40Mb/s (which is higher than HDDVD) ... but that still leaves 14Mb/s for audio. I'm pretty sure that is enough for LPCM of a 5.1 soundtrack (which is what most still are).
Yes, some are (mostly Sony) ... but it is actually the minority for new releases. I can only assume they have their reasons. I expect this number will continue to head towards zero though.
Really? I'm not joking when I say it is pretty common knowledge.
Many multiformat releases are suffering from the typical least common denominator syndrome. The majority use the same video and audio.
The BluRay-only titles on the other hand, most are using the original soundtrack.
Oh ... I see what you're saying. Yes, it isn't an apples to apples comparison.
That being said however, TrueHD (MLP) isn't some magical compression algorithm. It isn't dramatically better with bitrates than DD. What the original poster is stating is that the majority (all?) of the titles that had these low bit-rates were obviously using a downsampled soundtrack.
This is easy to verify if you look at the bitrates of DVD-A titles. DVD-A used MLP (Meridian Lossless Packing), which Dolby purchased to use as the core compression for TrueHD. 5.1 and greater soundtracks do not have that low of a bit-rate when using 24/96 ... nor generally even 24/48.
Generally, I agree. This is a bit of a special case though.
The initial BluRay players did not all support TrueHD, so using LPCM allows a greater audience to get the benefits of the soundtrack. I think it should be part of the BD spec, but I'm guessing it was a cost decision. That being said, the chips are getting cheaper ... so pretty much all the new players will have it. We'll probably see a shift to it at some point.
Note: Multichannel TrueHD decoding isn't mandated for HDDVD either (just stereo). However, all the players have been by Toshiba so far, and they have included it (after firmware upgrades)
You have to understand that BD has had a ton of growing pains (advanced codec tools, BD50 availability, and decoder support for TrueHD). However, this is something that has been improving.
In the case of HDDVD ... it is an actual HW limitation. For high bit-rate video transfers, the spec simply doesn't have room left over for high bit-rate audio.
I understand your point, but read my above statements.
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