Warner films on BD-9 Blu Ray?! (1 Viewer)

So guys, anyone have any idea how Warner plans to introduce its films onto Blu Ray? I've heard rumors that they want to encode their films onto a DVD-9 equivalent Blu Ray disk. If so, isn't the quality going to be atrocious? Even with the most advanced codecs 1080p should look pretty weak on Blu Ray at 9 gigs, I would assume. Will they maybe do 720p instead? Also, there wouldn't be room for more than one audio track, would there? And then you'd need a second disk for extras.

I'm guessin along with other fence sitting studios will release modifyed encoded versions with the video set round 20GB or so... it can be used on both BD SL(25GB) and DL HD DVD(30GB)..

BD-9s are a bad idea for all movies over an hour in length. Not enough room plain and simple. These could serve a purpose for promotional discs, extras, and very short programs but if Warner plans on using these for any full length movie we should boycott them.

You know what I think!

The wmv9 "HD" version of T2 on the Extreme Edition is about 6gb and it looks pretty good, and that's a 2hr+ movie with the rest of the disc space taken by extras.

Not saying this is the best way to go, but I think many here who are quickly jumping on the Blu-Ray bandwagon are discounting the fact that if HD-DVD uses the newer compression schemes that a 30G disc may work just fine for most films.

I agree that I don't want anything to do with BD9(red) disc.

I am still concerned about the thinner layer of protection between the data and the real world (ie. a one-year old who gets into dad's DVD collection)

I wouldn't disagree. But 2 competing formats at this stage in the game is good for no one...consumer or studio. So I'm voting for the format that will work "fine for most films" *and* accomodate higher peak bandwidth and greater capacity for bonus material, alternate cuts, more high-res audio choices and fewer needed platters for TV series (Blu-ray).


BTW, on the topic of the thread,

I'm curious how WB will handle movies on BD-9 if it turns out that first-gen BD authoring tools won't accomodate VC1. It seems there are conflicting reports...some say that Sony's first-gen authoring tools don't incorporate VC1 and other reports say that they do. Cearly, BD-9 isn't even a possibility without being able to abandon MPEG2.

I don't really understand this as all UMD movies are apparently MPEG4-AVC. So how can all these studios have MPEG4 tools for producing movies on UMD but not for the HD formats? What exactly is the problem? It can't be the encoders as there are MPEG4-AVC encoders out there in consumer level packages like Nero 6/7. There are even free encoders like x264. They could always use MPEG4-ASP which is not quite as advanced as AVC, but way better than MPEG2 and as mature as a codec can get.

I don't understand the technical details, but I don't think it's a lack of encoders so much as authoring software to produce a spec'ed finalized disc master (ie, being able to compress video with MPEG2 is not nearly as complex as integrating that MPEG2 file into an authored DVD).

In any case, I hope you're right and that it's not as difficult as it's been made to sound by the MS reps over at AVS.

I don't understand the details either. Just hoping you could help. It's strange that the different video formats wouldn't be interchangable as to how they're written to disc, though. Seems like it needlessly complicates things.

It's not the encoding that's the problem, it's the disk authoring. For instance, there are lots of tools out there which can encode video into MPEG-2. But just slapping an MPEG-2 onto a DVD-R is not going to play in your DVD player (well, not most players, anyway). You have to add navigation and header information to the MPEG-2 stream before a DVD player can properly use it. The result becomes a VOB file. That's done during authoring.

AVC and VC-1 are supported by the players and by the disk format, and certainly by a growing number of video encoders; what is rumored by the MS representative over in the AVS Forum is that Sony's authoring tool suite does not support import of anything other than MPEG-2. So while you could theoretically hand-hack the AVC or VC-1 stuff into Blu-ray equivalent of a VOB file with a detailed enough software spec and a Perl junkie, you couldn't currently use Sony's authoring tool to do it.