HD DVD vs. Blu-Ray... Which one?

[Brian Boyko]

I chose BluRay over HD-DVD mostly because I can find and afford a BluRay Burner if I need to self-distribute.

Full stop.

I don't like Sony, I really don't. I think they're so obsessed with creating vendor lock-in that they're shooting themselves in the foot - and if BluRay wins the High Def war, pretty soon you'll have BluRay players only able to play Sony movies on Sony television sets connected to Sony speakers.

[David Moody]

Blu-ray

Full length movies with menus are possible and I can use my PS3 to test, as that is the most common high def player available in any format.

I did video on CD before I did DVD and don't want to do that makeshift solution for high def videos on regular DVD's again.

Besides I think that the BD-r coatings make them more durable than the HD-DVD-r discs.

[Maksim Yankovskiy]

Originally Posted by Thomas Smet

Just to point out that both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray can offer the exact same level of quality. They both support mpeg2, VC1 and AVCHD at equal bitrates.

Thomas,

As far as I know, although both HD-DVD and BluRay support same codecs (MPEG2, AVC - a.k.a. H.264, and VC1), BluRay player architecture supports transfers from the laser via data bus at higher rates than HD-DVD. It means that authoring houses could potentially use higher bit rate for any of the encoding schemes.

[Michael Jouravlev]

Originally Posted by Kevin Shaw

Single-layer DVD5 [holds] about 20 minutes. Dual-layer discs are unreliable and hence not of interest to me.

Does the unreliability of dual-layer DVDs come from your own experience? At what stage they are unreliable: during burning or after delivery? I use dual-layer DVDs regularly and so far had two incomplete burns (this hurts because disks are expensive and they are slower, so burning takes forever), but finalized disks work well.

Originally Posted by Kevin Shaw

After a lot of thought about all this I went ahead and ordered a Pioneer Blu-ray burner with a copy of the Adobe CS3 upgrade, and last night I made my first Blu-ray test disc successfully on the first try.

Does it require to set a specific region, or region info is optional like with DVDs?

[Kevin Shaw]

Originally Posted by Michael Jouravlev

Does the unreliability of dual-layer DVDs come from your own experience? At what stage they are unreliable: during burning or after delivery?

I've had brand new mainstream (Hollywood) DVDs which exhibit severe playback problems at a point which appears to correspond to the need for a layer break. I figure if Hollywood can't get this right with all their millions of dollars in equipment I'm not going to try, and it's common sense that the technical complexity of a dual-layer disc is more prone to playback problems than single-layer discs. Plus my finished videos frequently run to 90 minutes or so in length, which means that even a dual-layer DVD-R disc isn't going to work for delivering HD-DVD projects using MPEG2 encoding -- and other encoding options take too long. If I had a customer who really wanted HD-DVD I'd try packing my content onto a single-layer disc or using two discs before attempting a dual-layer approach.

[Giroud Francois]

since HD-DVD standard is accepting the HD on plain DVD-R, this will probably boost people to burn HD content on their DVD burner (almost every PC user got one today). Then they will look for players (coming soon, since most of DVD players blueprints can be easily upgraded to play HD content).
Prices for bluray now had better to go down very fast to keep up with this.
expect for Xmas to see lots of chinese player with the new standard.
that is probably a bad news for DivX either, since they were the only ones to promote HD on vanilla DVD.
Sony seems not to learn from previous failure (minidisc, microMV, portable playstation discs, mp3 players...)
overprotected, overpriced media kill the business.
I would be a Sony top manager, i would flood the market with cheap bluray burner even at loss.
after all sony has no benefit in burner, only on the special coating involved into bluray disc.

[Michael Jouravlev]

Originally Posted by Kevin Shaw

I've had brand new mainstream (Hollywood) DVDs which exhibit severe playback problems at a point which appears to correspond to the need for a layer break. I figure if Hollywood can't get this right with all their millions of dollars in equipment I'm not going to try

The layer change problem you experienced with dual-layer disks may be in fact your player's problem.

http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/volum...y-10-2000.html

Since the release of T2, we have been able to enjoy longer films without interruptions. While a minor pause is better than getting up and flipping a disc, sometimes it does disrupt the flow. WHQL was authored with a non-seamless layer change that takes place during a title roll. At this point in time, seamless layer changes are not allowed by the DVD spec. (Seamless means you don't notice the change, but it is complicated, and that is why it is not allowed by the spec.)
...
Because the change is always noticeable, it is very useful for evaluating a player's ability to quickly change layers.

Couple of results for 2004:
Denon - DVD-2200 -- 0 sec (seamless layer change)
Arcam - DV-78 -- 2 sec

Couple of results for 2007:
Toshiba - HD-XA2 -- 1.75 sec
Samsung - BD-P1200 -- 0.75 sec
Oppo Digital - DV-981HD -- 0 sec (seamless layer change)

[Michael Jouravlev]

Originally Posted by Giroud Francois

since HD-DVD standard is accepting the HD on plain DVD-R, this will probably boost people to burn HD content on their DVD burner (almost every PC user got one today). Then they will look for players (coming soon, since most of DVD players blueprints can be easily upgraded to play HD content).

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21095732/

Matsushita, the world's largest maker of plasma TVs, took the wraps off the new Blu-ray and DVD recorders at the CEATEC Japan 2007 electronics industry trade show on Tuesday.

The company said it will start selling three models of new DVD recorders capable of recording full HD programs on conventional DVD discs on November 1.

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/home-ente...vds-307067.php

Panasonic isn't the only one showing off high-def recording at CEATEC. Toshiba announced three new HD DVD recorders, including the new flagship Vardia RD-X7. All of them can convert MPEG-2 to AVCHD MPEG-4 on the fly, and can store high-def video on DVD-R (2 hrs) and single-layer HD DVD-R (6 hrs) discs.

[Kevin Shaw]

Originally Posted by Michael Jouravlev

The layer change problem you experienced with dual-layer disks may be in fact your player's problem.

But if the players I'm buying are typical of what my customers are buying, I don't want them experiencing the same layer break problems I'm seeing. As far as I'm concerned multi-layer discs are a complexity to be avoided, for either SD or HD delivery.

[Michael Jouravlev]

Originally Posted by Kevin Shaw

But if the players I'm buying are typical of what my customers are buying, I don't want them experiencing the same layer break problems I'm seeing. As far as I'm concerned multi-layer discs are a complexity to be avoided, for either SD or HD delivery.

I don't know what kind of problem you have with double-layer disks. If you player freezes forever and requires turning off and on, this is severe but very rare problem. If it simply freezes for 1-2 seconds for layer change, this is normal and I don't see this as a problem. What is more, most cheap players from Walmart don't have this issue. They may have issues with cadence, chroma or overscan, but they usually don't have issue with layer change because otherwise customer would have been returning them.

I think that your position against dual-layer disks is unreasonable.

[Kevin Shaw]

Originally Posted by Michael Jouravlev

I think that your position against dual-layer disks is unreasonable.

Perhaps, but as I said before it's common sense that adding the complexity of multiple layers to a DVD is inherently less likely to be reliable, and making reliable DVDs is enough of a hassle without that. Plus there's no cost-savings for using one dual-layer disc versus two single-layer, other than reducing time for the initial setup. In any case, I'm glad that a single-layer Blu-ray disc can hold a lot of HD content in a format which is quick and easy to render, so I'll prefer that over trying to pack HD material onto a red-laser disc.