CNET: 10 ways HD-DVD falls short (1 Viewer)

[Holadem]

Are you serious? You know, you don't have to buy the initial releases either if you don't feel they will utilize the full potential of the format (which is very likely). Just wait for subsequent releases then.

Nothing is gonna "settle in" without blockbuster releases to generate interest. Whatever crappy transfers were released in the early days of DVD were mostly still miles ahead of the alternative and the best pictures availabale at the time.

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H

 

[MarkHastings]

I really don't care. I'm just not ready to see the "Double Dipping" gripes.

 

[Mike_G]

I stopped reading after point #2. I mean, what are we supposed to do? Hop in our DeLoreans and go back to when the interviews were done and tell the camera guy "No, you fool...use HD cams!".

/sigh.

The only legit issue about lack of HD content is the trailer. That should have been in HD. But you know, studios have been screwing up trailers for years on LD and DVD. To this day, I have yet to see a proper 5.1 version of the 1997 Star Wars trailers. The one on the LDs were in 2.0 stereo; my 35mm prints are in 5.1. Same thing with Tron - there's one trailer which is better than the others which never made it to LD or DVD. I even contacted the guy working on the Tron LD back then saying "I have a Tron trailer on 35mm. Want to use it?". "Oh, no. We have everything we need".

So don't blame the FORMAT for the problems, blame the people putting the content together.

 

[Mark Zimmer]

Well, on something like DOOM, a film produced just last year, and the DVD of which was produced just two months ago, it's not too much to ask that they'd have done at least some of the extras in HD. It's not been a secret that HD formats were coming, so it seems absurd that Universal wouldn't have bothered to actually anticipate this by a few months. Now, APOLLO 13 has an excuse that I'm happy to accept, being over 10 years old. But I'm not buying that excuse for things that just came out. It does smack of double-dipping (not that anyone would be silly enough to double-dip on DOOM).

 

[Nils Luehrmann]

Personally, I'll be first in line to quadruple-dip when Universal Rereleasal unleashes the Ultimate Extended Unrated Doomiest Edition down the road.

 

[Juan C]

re extras in HD, I don't know if they can't afford to do that. Just look at The Last Samurai, a 2½-hour movie in 1080p with nearly 2 hours worth of extras in 480i. And it fills 25+ GB. Just imagine that same movie with those 2 hours of extras in 720p: you go over 30GB easily. And that's where the HD DVD producer has to make a choice:

(a) To discard some of the extras;

(b) To move the extras to another disc;

(c) To compress bonus content more aggressively;

(d) To compress the movie more aggressively;

(e) To downgrade the audio.

 

[MarkHastings]

Yeah, even with the latest DVD realeases, the bonus stuff isn't always at the highest bit rates, no 5.1 audio, non-anamorphic, not coming from high-quality sources, etc. It's definitely "dumbed down" for space issues.

And that's fine with me, as long as the movie isn't sacrificed for bonus material space.

 

[Garrett Lundy]

Now the important questiom: Will the Lord of The Rings Extended Editions still be on 4 disks, or be squeezed onto 2?

 

[Chris Moreau]

While I know that it's quite true that the larger the display the more one will notice the difference between SD DVD and HD-DVD, I can assure you that the difference is very obvious even on a smaller screen. I have a 30" Philips set in my bedroom, connected to a Sony SD player. Yesterday, I connected the HD-A1 to the HDMI port and did a comparison between the two units.

Let's just say that anyone who's not blind would see the quite startling improvement of the HD player over the SD.

 

[Mark Booth]

With a 70" JVC 1080p set, I guess the CNET article makes me one of the "targets" for HD-DVD. But I'm not jumping on the bandwagon just yet. Reason: The best standard def DVDs in my collection look pretty damn good when upscaled to 1080i via the Oppo. I know that a high definition player of some type will eventually find its way into my equipment stack. But this particular Toshiba won't be it.

Mark

 

[Paul_Scott]

i watched the first ever HD source on my projector last night (Million Dollar Baby via the A1), and while it was an excellant presntation, i was actually more impressed by the sd dvds i threw on afterwards.
some of this comes down to asthetics; MDB was a dark movie and fairly monochromatic for most of its run time,while the sd content i watched was scenes from things like Fifth Element, ie. colorful, flashy, and tons of eye candy.
another BIG caveat is that the res of my pj is only XGA.
and lastly, i'm going thru component until i get my HDMI cable in.
so i'm not ready to declare the HD DVD disappointing yet

on the other hand, i have a 74" wide screen and at that size i would have though, XGA or not, i would have seen a much greater difference than i did.
Rather than increasing the performance of my current gear, watching HD DVD now has me jonesing to upgrade my pj to at the very least a 720p asap. And even then i know i am still short-changing the potential inherent in the source material.
if i could afford a 1080p, it would be well worth it- as i saw the HD A1 fed into a Ruby the other day and it was, as expected, absolutely awesome- at 106".
i would also have to say my own set-up wasn't as impressive as the 42" westinghouse plasma i saw in BB the other day. that was 1080p too.
seeing that initially is what made me ready to jump on the bandwagon, but now i realize that this format shines not with screen size so much as resolution.
When the Batmobile went over the bridge into the city- you could make out every single rivet on the girders of the bridge...and this was on a 42" set.

 

[Max Leung]

Huh? I thought these initial HD-DVD releases were single-layer discs with a maximum capacity of 15 GB!

I hope it was mastered in h.264 or VC-1 - otherwise, it won't be much better than the typical network mpeg2 HD broadcasts (probably at 12 megabits/sec or less).

BTW, HDMI is supposed to be hot-pluggable. At least it is for my home theater PC and projector...

 

[Paul_Scott]

these are all dual layer releases-so 30gb. Blu-ray's first titles (probably most this year, if not all) will be limited to single layer (25gb)- so actually right now (and for the foreseeable future?)- HD DVD has the capacity advantage- to go along with a more efficent codec.

 

[Max Leung]

Really? Interesting - I thought, like DVD at launch, everything would be single layer. How do we know they are dual-layer though? Is there a test we can do to verify that?

 

[Dave Moritz]

The problem for HD-DVD is when Blu-ray starts using dual layers and quad layers for BD-R 100 gig discs then HD-DVD will be outclased in the data storage area.

 

[Lee-c]

Juan C: That's why the extras should always be stuck on a second disk. The movie itself, like your
The Last Samurai example, should always be given the max video bit-rates and high bit-rate DD+ or
Dolby TrueHD soundtracks. However much space that takes, then so be it. Stick the extras on disk 2,
then it has no negative affect on the movie.