Is that giant sucking sound Blu-Ray going down the drain?

I miss the Double Sided HD disks. I could play the HD on my HD player and turn the disk over and play the same movie on all my lesser TVs in DVD format. They cost about $5.00-$8.00 more than DVDs and they were well worth the price as far as I was concerned.

To date, although I have rented just about all the Blurays avail. I have not bought any. Further, I am so dissatisfied with the Bluray possibility of picture quality and the actual final picture quality on the disk itself, it has come to the point that unless it is a "BIG" movie or a Marvel comic book movie, I just rent the DVD or buy the DVD.

Comparing my Toshiba A3 with my PS3, the only advantage of the PS3 to me is the 2.0 USB port.

Tony

As the proud owner of exactly one Blu-Ray title - Planet Earth - I have to say I am impressed by the picture quality, but not enough to rush out and buy others.

Originally Posted by DVWannaB

WOW, surprised some of you are willing to fall on your swords in some fanatical belief that BD is dead. I dont own a BD player of any movies as they are too darn expensive. I didnt buy a DVD player until around 2001/2002, which was maybe some 4 years after acceptance.

From my perspective two things stand out above a bunch of others, with some that I cant probably see, and that is we in the USA are in a recession and folks are watching their spending. A BD player, BD movie and even HDTVs are luxuries at this point in time. People are not going to be running out there to buy these things over the next number of months. Second thing is we are still in the adoption phase of a new technology. People are going to be comfortable with what they have for sometime. Until such time when the economy starts to pick up and people start having confidence in their own future earnings and the prices of the new technology becomes palatable, it is not going to be a market winner. Lets revisit whether BD is a champ or chump around 2010/2011.

Good point, as is the bit in the article:

Recognition that consumers don’t need Blu-ray. It is a nice-to-have and must be priced accordingly.

it is also the cheap $25 DVD players that people put on their 2nd, 3rd and 4th TV's that will keep them from putting buying BluRay disks.

And sometimes on primary TVs. I think a lot of people have gotten used to players (including region-hackable ones) that they can replace rather than repair and a BluRay player is an investment (not just in terms of price, but in terms of necessary upgrading with firmware and having it repaired/replaced through the store or the manufacturer rather than just grabbing another player).

I appreciate HD and BluRay but its as impractical for me to purchase this time as it is for me to feel left behind in any way by the HD revolution (remember those "if you don't have HD, you're in the dark ages" commercials and the recent switch to DTV commercials full of bewildered and frightened couples and parents and children whose screens suddenly go to static).

I purchased an Insignia blu-ray player for a friend for 99.97 CAD @ futureshop. Even though it's a low end player, those kinda prices should attract the mainstream.

Originally Posted by nick101181

I purchased an Insignia blu-ray player for a friend for 99.97 CAD @ futureshop. Even though it's a low end player, those kinda prices should attract the mainstream.

unless they come bundled with $99 HD Tv sets, price of players won't do sh*t to start "high def revolution", no matter how many stupid and stupidier ads are out there on tv...

Most of people are unfortunately still very happy with SD television, and cable companies' greed is another unfortunate roadblock. And the fact that almost entire tv content was made in SD (by that I mean stuff that is not news or idiotic 'reality' programming) isn't helping. Its like playing DVD from an upconverting player on a HD TV set isn't it, except that the cable co.s charge customers more for it LOL

Whadda thay expect?
theres only a few players that actually play BLU-RAY
it has to say 2.0 java to be current.
Last I checked there was a confusing array of old player on sale that won't play extras even with firmware update..
Way to go Sony............

comcast has a download cap of 250GB a month, and ive heard of less in high traffic areas. so theres no way people can download several movies a month and still have bandwidth left for other things

its hard to imagine that in this day theres a bandwidth cap. but thats what BT did to everyone. thx piraters

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/23/AR2008102301279.html

Originally Posted by fishywishy

comcast has a download cap of 250GB a month, and ive heard of less in high traffic areas. so theres no way people can download several movies a month and still have bandwidth left for other things

its hard to imagine that in this day theres a bandwidth cap. but thats what BT did to everyone. thx piraters

You do not have to blame this on pirates. I think they are least of the problem.
Look at all those game promotions (play online), movie downloads and such.
This is just other example of corporate greed. For $140/ month and not knowing when you go over??????

Originally Posted by PuzZLeR

Originally Posted by wulf109

I wonder what 1920x1080 would look like on a SD DVD in regular vob,ifo,etc files. A DL disk does provide 7.95GBs. On many retail disks the movie is 5.0-5.5GBs,the rest is special features.

Well, it would look like, well, a DvD! :P

But, jokes aside, if DvD can handle that higher rez you could get great quality for about a 20 minute movie on one DL. You'd need to go more modern than MPEG-2, such as using H.264 or VC-1, to get 30-50 minutes.

Most encoding BD content on DvD-DL would go with 720p and H.264 to fit a full movie at very respectable quality.

actually H264 and/or VC1 only has an advantage at low bitrates, once you start hitting the 20Mb/s bitrate threshold the difference between the 3 isn't noticeable and when you get into the higher bitrates mpeg-2 is still king as far as i'm concerned. i currently have blu-rays that use mpeg-2/lcpm and blu-rays that use H.264/lcpm and the mpeg-2's are crystal clear.

as a matter of fact i have stopped using VC1 or H264 (i can't stand x264 or main concept's h264 codecs) for 720p, i just use tmpgenc express, set the DC component precision to 10, the motion search precision to high and use a constant bitrate of 10Mb/s with AC3 audio at 320 kb/s and the final output is incredible.

Originally Posted by joecass

Interesting how heated the discussion gets concerning Blu Ray. Reminds me of the digital/analog debate that went on for years when audio CD's came out. I think the whole 'digital' video revolution is all nonsense designed to extract hard earned cash from an unsuspecting public.

actually the "digital" revolution was necessary if the industry was going to start working with video on a computer. allow me to explain:

in mathematical terms, "analog" can be thought of as a function, say a sine wave, that has an infinite number of points on the line; "real life", on the macroscopic level is analog in nature, so is film.

"digital" on the other hand refers to the practice of representing a curve with infinite data points with a finite set of data points; in math terms "analog" could be thought of as taking the integral of a function to find the area under a curve, "digital" could be thought of as using linear algebra to estimate the area under the curve.

because of the above, analog will always have a higher quality than digital because an analog source will contain all the data that has been recorded and from a mathematical prospective it is composed of an infinite number of data points, that is why film can't be thought of a having a finite bitrate or a finite pixel number.

where "digital" has an advantage is in broadcasting for one very simple reason: the signal doesn't degrade. where as an analog signal is subject to interference, shifting (where the frequency changes), and other types of distortion, a digital signal, being a collection of finite data points, doesn't degrade. the drawback with digital is that if it is block, it stops all together, it's an all or nothing deal.

now onto computers: all data stored on a computer, be it hdd, optical disk or the like, is stored as a bit, conceptually either a 1 or a 0; on a hard disk the bits take the form of a series of electrical states in an electromagnetic field, either on or off.

now in order to store the film on a computer, distribute it on dvd, edit it on computer or any similar such task, the analog film must be converted into a digital representation. if this were not not, the only way for you to buy a movie would be by buying a reel of film and the only way to edit it would be manually, by splicing and similar such techniques (like movies were made before computers).

as an interesting side note, when porn first became available it was sold as film on a reel, a buddy of mine still has some original releases from way back when and it was film on a real with adult packaging, packaging similar to what adult dvd's and blu-rays (<---yes, there is hi def porn) have today.

Originally Posted by PuzZLeR

Originally Posted by deadrats

actually H264 and/or VC1 only has an advantage at low bitrates, once you start hitting the 20Mb/s bitrate threshold the difference between the 3 isn't noticeable and when you get into the higher bitrates mpeg-2 is still king as far as i'm concerned. i currently have blu-rays that use mpeg-2/lcpm and blu-rays that use H.264/lcpm and the mpeg-2's are crystal clear.

as a matter of fact i have stopped using VC1 or H264 (i can't stand x264 or main concept's h264 codecs) for 720p, i just use tmpgenc express, set the DC component precision to 10, the motion search precision to high and use a constant bitrate of 10Mb/s with AC3 audio at 320 kb/s and the final output is incredible.

Almost any codec, WMV, DivX, Xvid, etc would look as good as any other given enough bitrate.

But I agree somewhat. MPEG-2 was designed to be optimized for high bitrates, and is even capable for today's needs, which was why it was first developed long ago - to be the evolution of the then MPEG (later renamed to MPEG-1). If anyone hasn't noticed, MPEG-1 kills MPEG-2 at low bitrates.

However, this was the mindset behind VC-1 too - great at high bitrates. Did you give that a try? (Then again the encoding tools for it aren't as accessible IMO).

H.264/AVC, particularly if you use its bells and whistles, was designed for low bitrates - SD video looks best with this format.

I'm curious though what kind of source you're using with TMPGEnc Xpress to get those nice results. I have the app too and now am interested in trying your settings.

yes, i have tried VC-1 but to my eyes VC-1, and WMV in general, always seems to have a slightly "blurry" look, even the movies i have seen that are professionally authored or even those WMV downloads that microsoft has on their site to show off the codec.

H264 codecs vary greatly in quality: x264 you need to max out all the settings to get a nice encode, but it takes forever to finish, even on a quad core phenom, main concept's h264 just absolutely blows chunks, no matter how much i tweak it i hate the results, cinema craft's is too expensive (as is panasonic's) but the quality is outrageous (the pro blu-rays are encoded with these) and nero offers some really, really nice quality, but again, takes forever.

as for my source, it's usually a downloaded mkv made from a blu-ray rip encoded with x264/ac3 and at resolutions of "quasi" 1080p (you know, 1920x800 or similar such resolution).

even better, and these are hard to find and few in between, but if you can get your hands on a HDTV capture, i have found some captures at 1920x1080, usually captured at high bitrate (like 25 Mb/s) mpeg-2 and either LCPM or AC3, i have a few of those, music videos, army of darkness, naked gun, a few others, they are always captured in a transport stream (thus they have a .ts extension).

as a general rule of thumb i always try to use one resolution increment above my target resolution, thus if i want to encode a 720p i use 1080p as my source, a 480p uses a 720p source and so on. i don't bother downloading 720p material though and if i find something as a true 1080p (i.e. 1920x1080 or 1440x1080) i don't bother re-encoding at all.