I have already decided not to double dip for HD for most of these reasons... most notably the bares bones editions. I will not be buying "HD Superbits", if you will.
Are you quite sure? I've seen estimates of 14-18 MB/s being tossed around. The PBS channels usually multicast a second (fairly decent quality) SD stream, and quite often, this causes visible artifacts in the HD stream.
Jeremy, it isn't clear to me if the 14-18 MB/s figure quoted in that post you linked to is with or without null-packets omitted from the calculations. Be aware of this!
The best HD broadcast I have ever seen was the BS.Hi (Japan) airing of Contact. My god...the only other broadcast I saw that equaled it was the HD broadcast of Bridge Jones' Diary. Too bad the Contact broadcast had some bad dropouts and corruption in a few scenes.
This is one of my main concerns. Being mostly a fan of animation, where it is especially noticeable, if studios are once again going to insist on this malpractice (Yes Disney, I'm looking at you!) then I won't support them and will definitely not double dip. Nothing ruins a perfectly clean picture like some "enhancement."
This is a valid concern, and since some of the EE we see is apparently an artifact of the telecining equipment, high-def won't help or hinder the matter.
I'm gonna get lynched here but after Five Years of "Special Edition" Dvd's I just don't care about extras anymore, I rarely watch them. Give me a steller transfer, with the best sound and no EE, I'm a happy guy.
I HD-DVD does indeed put the Hi def on one side and the DVD on the other this is gonna be a huge selling point. Not only will they sell to mister Early adopter but to Joe Six Pack who wants HD DVD in their future, it's a pretty smart Idea.
What's all this about anamorphic/non-anamorphic? This doesn't mean we'll have window-boxed features on our 16:9 sets, does it? Like a non-anamorphic DVD now? I think this came up in another thread. I'm sure I'm just missing something because I can't believe that the next format would take such a huge step backwards.
I started a thread about this earlier but it may have died a quick death.
How will HD-DVD and Blu-ray appear on our widescreen displays? Surely not with side bars too I hope, that just would seem like a blow to all of us enthusiasts who got home theater started in the first place!
What a short-sighted stance if we do get side bars.
A drawing or model would help set our concerns to rest once and for all... the blu-ray home page mentioned nothing about 16:9 enhanced support...
And, unlike DVDs, material in 4:3 will be pillarboxed inside the 16:9 frame. People with 4:3 SD screens will therefore get a picture with black bars on all sides unless they've included a pan'n'scan feature.
HD pre-recorded media like BD and HD DVD have speced one and only ONE aspect ratio: 16x9.
that means that 2.35:1 movies get letterboxed, and 1.33:1 movies get pillarboxed.
I personally wanted a "constant height" HD format that would actually be BETTER than the "anamrophic" concept of using the same 1920 x 1080 matrix for everything. In my paradigm, you simply add more horizontal pixels to capture a wider image...and all images have the same vertical resolution of 1080 no matter what.
So a 1.78:1 image would be 1920 x 1080. And a 2.35:1 image would be 2538 x 1080.
Then players would be programmed to downfold to 1920 x 1080 or 720 x 480 or whatever for legacy gear...but future-thinking constant-height systems could take full advantage and their image would always have the same clarity no matter how "wide" it was.
Are you sure that is what the one & only 16:9 HD spec means? I agree all HD will be on a 16:9 'frame' (sorry I am not technical enough to use a better term, hope everyone knows what I mean or someone corrects my terminology, thanks). How can someone jump to the conclusion all 2.35:1 films will be letterbox? They all were not on TV, cable, VHS, LD, sat, DVD, or HD cable/sat. Is HD on disc really that special that we are guarantied by spec to get OAR for all content? That would be amazing! Hope your right.
right...HD isn't "anamorphic" in that it only does a single "frame" shape...16x9.
what I meant was that HD specs for BD and HD DVD only provide a 16x9 frame option. WITHIN that frame of course you can letterbox, pillarbox, or do whatever the disc producer wants to do.
But this "ONE" frame aspect ratio contrast with DVD which has *two* aspect ratios to choose from: either 16x9 (what we often inaccurately call "anamorphic" dvd) or 4x3. DVD has a flag which instructs the player which aspect ratio is represented by the 720 x 480 frame and the DVD player can then do appropriate downconversion or move electronically-generated subtitles around etc.
However, HD is only ONE aspect ratio: 16x9. I wish that the devlopers of BD and HD DVD had thought a little more ahead and incorporated a 20 x 9 aspect ratio to give more resolution to 2.35:1 material (or better yet have used my idea about vary-width resolution) but they didn't. So we're stuck with a 16x9 1920 x 1080 frame within which we have to "fit" the content...preserving OAR by wasting pixels on black-bars if necessary.
Thanks DaViD. I get all that (well, maybe not ALL that! ;-) ) What I don't get is how we are all being assured by that the HD specs, that not a single 2.35:1 source will be released in a 16:9 (non-letterboxed) transfer (hope that's clearer this time). As some films on all previous home video media have suffered the fate of being presented in MOR. Again, hope your right. I do trust you, just can not put my trust in "The Powers That Be". Who to this very day release non-OAR product.
I think that the 16:9 ratio is the new standard for HDTV, and really doesn't have anything to do with the OAR's on DVD's.
Sure, more movies are probably framed in 16:9 than anything else, and thus they won't have to be adjusted (with bars), and I can really see 99% of all new movies coming out with a 16:9 OAR ratio, but that is just because they picked those numbers because it worked for the majority of films.
This is why more and more TV shows are going the widescreen route, because they know that 16:9 is going to be the next standard.