On Tuesday, backers for Blu-ray held a multimedia presentation for reporters to show the versatility of the next gen disc. The article at the Investors.com website says that they intend to cram a lot of material on these discs, but after reading the report, it does not seem to be that much added value. In fact, how much room is there if we start out with a single layer movie disc? A high definition movie could occupy 15 gigabytes!
|  Rather than just holding a single version of a movie '” as current DVDs do '” Blu-ray discs will include versions of films in both wide-screen and standard format, along with two hours of movie-related information. The discs might also include games and multiple movie trailers. And the content will all be in high-definition.
The demonstration helped answer a central question: What is Hollywood going to do with the 50 gigabytes of space planned for Blu-ray discs? After all, a DVD movie in high-definition only takes up about a third of that capacity. Current DVD discs store about 5 gigabytes. Bob Chapek, president of Buena Vista Entertainment, says Blu-ray's extra room will be well-used. "We'll load in as many consumer benefits as we possible can," he said. |
It just may be about time somebody in the Blu-ray group or the studios woke up and smelled the coffee. As I have several DVD movies that I can simply turn over to watch in wide-screen or standard format. There are some films offered in the two versions that come in separate shrink wrap, but this is not a benefit to me to have both on one disc. It is actually a benefit to the content provider as they can save in manufacture and distribution, so we can scratch that one off. Then I just got a DVD that contained two discs, but it included, aside from the movie, 6 hours of bonus content, including a 1 hour documentary, interviews with the stars along with the trailers created for the theater and television.
This additional content is nothing new and neither is a game. The only thing that is, is the high definition and we have to ask ourselves is this going to be enough to get folks to abandon the DVD? Or, do they (meaning the studios) need to come up with something extra, as revolutionary as high definition, to entice people to lay out the bucks for a system to run the Blu-ray disc. What will it take to entice you to make the leap to high definition? What extras would you like to see, what extra functionality would be nice?
Source: Investors.com
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By
gazjon,
Thursday 01 December 2005 23:11
Looks like padding over substance. Who really would buy these to watch the movie in wide screen and then in normal? I think they haven't thought this through, all the space, what to use it for?
As said above, its going to be copy protection that'll take up the majority of the disk, filler for most of the rest, and then the movie. Of course, it'll probably be a crap movie as well. Good films are harder to come by nowadays.
By
rdgrimes,
Thursday 01 December 2005 23:24
Unless a movie is actually shot in Hi-def video, there will be NO "Hi-def" movies anyway. All we'll get is a remastered 720x480 that takes up a lot of space and doesn't look any different than it would on a DVD.
Has anyone thought to ask the DVD distributers when they plan to rebuild all their mastering rooms so they can transfer film to Hi-def video?
Right now, all they have to put on these BD discs is more trailers and adverts and, of course, DRM protections.
The film masters are much higher resolution than 720x480. If a film is re-mastered at 1080i or 720p then it will have more detail than the DVD.
But I watch a lot of HDTV shows and maybe my eyes are not so great, or my HDTV is junk but some of them are not really much better experience than good DVDs or XviD.
The broadcasters have pulled the wool over our eyes for a long time by slowly lowering the quality of SD broadcasts - trying to cram more data in a smaller space by increasing the compression. We are all used to artifacting now that anything looks better. Now along comes HDTV which has all these promises and of course will look better. I download the odd show that we miss and play using XBMC - the quality of the XviD HD-rips blow away any SD broadcast.
The television manufacturers are also to blame... the way they design televisions now, they are optimized for HDTV resolution and anything less looks blocky and bad. Most new HDTV sets give inferior PQ than older CRT technology - what is with it with all these crappy LCD RPTVs ? A friend just bought one and I think it looks like shit compared to my TV which is almost 5 years old! People are buying all these fancy HDTVs now and everyone looks pixelated, short and fat for most shows that are watched. When watching HDTV it would look fine, but many that hook DVD players up still do not realize how to get the aspect correct on 16x9 TVs... I see this all the time on floor demos in stores.
By
kallek,
Friday 02 December 2005 17:49
Most movies are sampled at 2k and that's only slightly higher than 1080p so going beyond that is pointless with today's movies. I read something about hologram discs that could store movies in higher resolution than blue-ray, hd-dvd which only sounds like a marketing thing.
Ivid, I don't work in the film industry, but were did you hear that saving private ryan has uncompressed DTS audio. To my knowledge the maximum bitrate used on DTS for 6-channel audio is the same as stereo uncompressed PCM. I don't see how it would be possible to fit 6 uncompressed channels in the same space as 2 uncompressed channels.
Blue-ray and HD-DVD supports the new lossless DTS and Dolby Digital compressions which I hope will be mandatory on Hi-Def discs.
By
shimman,
Friday 02 December 2005 18:10
as you know not all dvds are remastered well, so that there are tons of artifacts; i wonder how well the bd provides is remained to be seen
i will think dvd9 provide enough space for hd contents however, bd & hd-dvd would be useful for studios to make single disk series like simpsons season 1 in one bd or hd-dvd
if inphase will bring the price of drive + disk competive to hd-dvd & bd, i would go for holographic not to the blue laser disk
)
I've read movies done on film are sampled at 4000 lines, so they will look progressively better at 480p, 720p, and 1080p and beyond.
Lets not forget to compare the price of DVD movies compared to the CD soundtracks for the movies. (Why does a sound track for a movie cost more then the movie?)
DVDs are not cheap but they are not near the rip off that music is.
And you freaks all know you will buy a HD-DVD set of lord of the rings and a HDtv if you have the money for it.
Happy Birthday to you Puppetmeister 
r_saotome thank you for your reaction in the news section. 
Pernal just logged in, Good to see you back!