 offers a level of detail far beyond that of standard DVD. The problem is, most of you haven’t seen it in action.</p>
<p>We could tell you all about compression rates and codecs and algowhatevers, but there’s an adage that a picture is worth a thousand words, and in this case, we fully agree.</p>
<p>The stills in the link below are from Lord of the Rings, of course, but the trick is to mouse over the primary image (standard definition DVD, or SD) to reveal the secondary version (HD). If you don’t think the differences are tangible, then you’re some sort of idiot who might consider a popular suicide cult.</p>
<p><a href=)
by
Matt Hickey
on
December 14, 2006
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HD-DVD (not Blu-Ray) offers a level of detail far beyond that of standard DVD.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ bias piece of crap. if you had a brain you would know that Blu-ray is just as good.
Is it just me or does the grass in the HD version of shot 2 look a lot like techni-colored grass?
Why all the fud on Blu-ray?
I agree with steve, the focus should be on HD quality video 720p/1080i/1080p vs. standard 480p dvd not Blu ray and hd-dvd media formats.
Also perhaps a lot of those people unconvinced as to whether or not they need an HD – dvd may not have a hd tv, and thus wouldn’t really need it.
Hmm, still looks frankly marginal improvement to me.
I’ll be interested when I can get a region-free HD-DVD player for under $400.
I agree with Thomas, and Steve, and with anyone else who can see this CrunchGear blogger is involved in disingenuous promotion of HD-DVD.
The storage medium is irrelevant to the appearance of a higher resolution image.
If the media was HD-DVD, Blu-ray, your hard drive, an HDTV cable connection, or a 500,000,000 PETABYTE HOLOGRAPHIC SUGAR CUBE USING THE LATEST IN QUANTUM INTERFERENCE REFRACTION, the fact is that a 1080p image is going to look better than a 480p image.
Where the media argument does come is which physical disc media one can store enough data to show a whole movie at high resolution. Both HD-DVD and Blu-ray can, and their standards allow for the use of the same codecs – VC-1, MPEG-2 high data rate, MPEG-4, etc – so there’s really nothing to pick between them.
Technically, though, Blu-ray is better as not only can it store high resolution data, it can store more of it than HD-DVD. So all the extras could be high def as well, whereas with HD-DVD they *may* have to use lower bit rates to fit if it is a long movie.
So Blu-ray is better as a disc, but the content itself, properly encoded, is indistinguishable.
I agree with Steve, Ryan, and Reg… the bias in this article was just silly and ignorant. Kind of disappointed with Crunch Gear on this one.
Every in-depth review I’ve read and what I’ve seen for myself has only one conclusion: the image quality of HD-DVD is better and will win this format war. In the grand scope of things, picture quality is what matters, unless you are a super-uber-geek and have no life. While the codecs are the same, then true, the raw data is the same, but to say the content is “indistinguishable” is false. How the player handles that content is where the difference comes in. Ever heard of upconverting…
1st I’d like to see a link to a reputable review that states that they have seen hd-dvd movie to be better quality than blu ray due to the recording medium, as this is what we are discussing in the comments area not the players. Though I doubt reviewer has shown that picture quality for CURRENT hd-dvd players is superior to current Blu-ray players. Perhaps a reviewer may give an advantage to hd-dvd players since they are significantly cheaper.
Picture quality is what matters, but you understand that the same file you put on an hd-dvd can be put on blu-ray. In fact I can use that same file stored on my computer’s hard drive and play that, if im using the same mpeg 4 codec for all instances it will be identical.
Also upconverting has really no relevance to this discussion, since what you might see is down converting if you don’t have a set that supports 1080p which is the resolution hd-dvds are usually recorded. Also even if you were to upconvert dvd quality to hd you would see a huge difference, which is basically what is being done in the article.
Personally I have my doubts about Blu-Ray winning, It has a higher storage capacity, but if they are not able to quickly bring down manufacturing costs of both player and medium HD-DVD may win.
The linked story has nothing to do with HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. The page is about a year old and is based off of Starz HD on cable or satellite. If there was a disc based release of LOTR it would actually look much better since the bitrate on cable / sat is quite limited compared to the disc formats. I have no idea why this is linked in relation to HD-DVD.
Brain got it right – the HD shots were taken from broadcast NOT from a commercially available HD disc. What we get on a silver disc may look different. This is an apples to twinkies comparison.
Just got an email from Amazon with the subject “An Important Message Regarding PlayStation 3 From Amazon.com” – unfortunatley the body of the email only contained the text to opt-out of future emails and nothing at all pertaining to the PS3! Not sure if they screwed up the announcement or if this was sent out pre-maturely.