3D Save BD from 3D BD! (1 Viewer)

[senshu]

Hi Bill - I’ve appreciated your contributions to home video/film collecting for years. Now I hope to catch your ear about a new threat to the quality of the home theatre experience...3D BD. Seeing the first review of Monster vs. Aliens, I grow more and more concerned by this format SO MANY companies want us to have. There are many reason 3D will probably meet some considerable consumer resistance. 3D BD can live or die but its effect on the growing BD market appears troubling. First of all, even 50 GB disks are gobbled up by the 3D encoding. This means little room for lossless audio. I didn’t buy a Sony 7.1 amp for standard, lossy Dolby Digital. Then what of the 2D version? Are we going to be forced into expensive multi-disk sets for one movie, or is the 2D experience to be relegated to a super compressed special feature? (Non-anamorphic, perhaps?) If they sell 2D and 3D separately, then I’m fine. But companies are so hell-bent on the 3D format, how much you wanna bet they try to force the two together in an effort to force the format into homes? Hell, Universal is busy gluing together DVD and BDs together as we speak. Secondly, if the futures of BD and 3D BD are married together, WHEN 3D fails, will it take the future of packaged media with it? I live in terror of the day when my film collection is DRM’d to a specific device whose failure means the loss of rare films no one offers anymore because it’s not the ‘flavor of the month’. Please, save packaged media. Save Blu Ray. Resist the marriage of 2D and 3D BD. Champions of anamorphic widescreen DVD, champions of BD over the inferior HD-DVD, rise and be heard by the home video companies. This may be the beginning of our most desperate hour.

 

[Todd Erwin]

The Blu-ray 3D spec calls for the use of the MVC codec, built upon the AVC codec used on many Blu-rays by Sony, Disney, Fox, etc. The MVC codec works very similar to how DTS-HD Master Audio works, in that the MVC encoded file has a 2D AVC core that gets extracted when either 2D is selected or 3D is not available in the current setup. Please read through the HTF Exclusive: First look at Ice Age 3 and Coraline on 3D Blu-ray thread. Adam, Kevin, and I specifically asked the folks at Panasonic if there were two separate video files on these discs, one for 2D and one for 3D, and we were told that there was only one file. These discs also contained DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks.


So, take a breath, relax, and don't worry about the loss of a 2D version. The spec requires backwards compatibility with 2D devices.