any studios planning on using MPEG4-based compression instead of MPEG2? (1 Viewer)

just curious. anyone have heard any news? both HD-DVD&BR will be using MPEG2 (a very inefficient way to compress). correct me if i'm wrong, but ain't MPEG2-based codex (VC1, H.264) more efficient?

H.264 has some great compression....it's just too bad it takes so damn long for home conversion heh. I would love to see a quality title using that compression in HD from a studio though, but I wonder how much processing power it would take to decode one.

h.264 is OKAY but 2 processor intensive. if i were to choose, i'd probably pick VC1 despite microsoft. it's a more efficient delivery system.

Everyone butt Sony.

Where do you get these things? We might as well debate for an hour that HD DVD won't be encoded as "1080I"...



So far *NO* HD DVD studio has announced plans to use MPEG2 on HD DVD. There isn't enough space given the bit-restrictions of the disc structure. In fact, the big push for the new compression codecs started out as a way to get decent HD images onto HD DVD media (oversimplifying I realize).

So there you go. Warner will use VC1.

Now, as to Blu-ray...VC1 and MPEG4 are also part of the spec. HOWEVER, Sony's first-generation authoring tools are *rumored* not to support VC1 encoding at this point but within a few months they hope to add it. I've been asking about this at AVS and am not getting any clear answers.

But in any case, as far as Blu-ray is concerned, given the plentiful bit-space, it should be easy to use MPEG2 to do a high quality "movie" in HD...though for any special-feature rich single disc title we'd need to move to VC1. Everyone has plans to use VC1 ASAP on Blu-ray except Sony which seems to be in love with MPEG2, though we all expect them to come around once the market pressure forces them after other studios start to make the most of Blu-ray's bit capacity with better codecs...

No. MPEG2 is part of the HD DVD and Blu-ray specs (as well as VC1 and H.264). So both "can" use MPEG-2, but they also have the other two newer codecs as options.

HD DVD is supposedly using primarily VC1 (at least Warner Bros has stated that this is their intention)

Blu-ray supposedly has some issues currently with software encoders for putting VC1 on BD, so initial titles will be MPEG-2. Sony has at least stated that they are going with MPEG-2 for now and will move to one of the newer codes at a later time. I think there may some uncertainty right now about whether other studios could use VC1 or H.264 at launch if they want or if they will be forced to use MPEG-2 initially. We know that Warner Brothers wants to use VC1 or H.264 on Blu-ray (although they may not be able to on the early releases).

*EDIT* looks like DaViD beat me to it!

thx for confirmation =).

One thing I heard on the doom9.org forums is that h.264 is a bit-perfect encoder and decoder - which means that if a player supports h.264 decoding, it should match all other players with an h.264 decoder to the nearest pixel, regardless of decoder chip. Provided it is bug-free of course.

This is a bit different from mpeg2 decoders, where they can vary by video levels, macroblocking, color rendition, etc.