HD DVD and Blu-ray not ready for prime time
 

Teething problems for the first HD DVD and Blu-Ray models as reported by AV installers. It looks like it may take a couple of production line revisions to get some of these problems to shake out.

http://www.avrev.com/news/0706/13.hd_installers.shtml

Interesting, and not surprising. Thanks for sharing.

:iagree: .....and recorder is still not out.:tsk:

The bleeding edge is still bleeding. No suprises here. The Blu-Ray and HD-DVD camps are falling over each other trying to get to market first and out-spec each other. If it was up to engineering instead of marketing the products wouldn't be out yet.

Being on the bleeding edge has it's advantages and disadvantages. I can tell you...I am fully enjoying HD DVD from the Toshiba HD-A1 in my home theater on 80 glorious inches. At $500 to get in the game, it has been well worth it, and my wife even comments on how amazing it is.

Cool. Late adapters like me thank the earlier adapters like you. ;)

Do you have the load time and HDMI switching problems reported in the article above? Do you have any heat dissipation problems with the unit? What HD-DVD titles do you have?

The bleeding edge is still bleeding. No suprises here. The Blu-Ray and HD-DVD camps are falling over each other trying to get to market first and out-spec each other. If it was up to engineering instead of marketing the products wouldn't be out yet.


I SECOND THAT

That's why I'm waiting for the PS3 at least I can argue that I can play games on it.

:thumbup:

Sure the player takes more time to load. Does it bother me? Not really. I have it hooked up to my Internet connection to recieve the firmware updates via download, works great, and fixed most of the HDMI issues and some of the load time issues as well. But then again, I never really had any issues because I pop a movie in and watch it all the way through. I don't switch sources. Would I like it fixed? Sure. I have no heat issues with this player, and I have another player on top of it as well.

I have Serenity, Constantine, Doom, Swordfish, Pitch Black, and The Chronicles of Riddick. The Chronicles of Riddick is amazing, my wife's jaw dropped. The picture is amazing, as alluded to in the article. Worth every penny on that alone IMHO.

At this time I would say the Blu-Ray camp has many more issues than HD DVD. They are suffering from poor transfers, older, less efficient video codecs, and audio support issues as well. On the flip side, HD DVD has less studio suport. It truly is another format war. If anyone is interested in following the trials and tribulations of both formats...here is a great place to look.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdisplay.php?f=148

I watched The Chronicles of Riddick on the HD movie channel. It was impressive. How does HD-DVD stack up against cable/sat HD?

:iagree: Blu-ray camp has more vendors support than HD-DVD. HD-DVD may have betamax fate unless the format war decides it otherwise.

Unless BD get's there act together, which they probably will, then HD DVD will survive. Personally, I don't care as long as I get HD on disc. But today, HD DVD blows BD away...by a long shot. Disney has now announced support for HD DVD and LG and Hitachi are commited to building HD DVD players. Word is the other studios may jump over to HD DVD if BD doesn't get it's act together.

Far superior to Satellite due to no compression jaggies. I have not seen cable HD, but as I understand the bit rate is higher on HD DVD discs so it should look superior as well. I kid you not...it is kind of creepy how good it looks in my home theater.

Invitation
 

Anyone in or around or passing through Atlanta from the forum has an open invitation to stop by and view the HD DVD setup. Night time is best for viewing. Just give me a days notice. We are also having a party soon, so if there is anyone in Atlanta when the date comes, you are welcome to attend as well. PM me if your interested and I will provide details. Should be mid to late August.

Larry

As Asawa pointed out on his earlier post, the best Cable/Satellite signal is 1080i (interlaced) and HD DVD should be 1080p. Should be twice the bit rate.
Correct me if I am wrong. I'll check with my bro., his chip does this conversion thing.

Bit rate and Resolution are not the same. And, I would actualy challenge all but the keenest of eyes to even notice the difference between 1080i and 1080P. It has to do with how the picture is drawn. Interlaced weaves and alternates to build the picture, progressive combines in one pass to build the picture. This is a highly simplistic view of resolution. In fact, ABC and ESPN are in 720P, and many people think it is much better due to the way it handles motion better than 1080i.

The Samsung BD player actuall converts the 1080i picture and deinterlaces it to 1080P. This is bad as it can introduce artifacts from the conversion.

Interlaced vs. Progressive Explained - Long
 

Here is a quote from Projectorcentral.

"The truth is this: The Toshiba HD-DVD player outputs 1080i, and the Samsung Blu-ray player outputs both 1080i and 1080p. What they fail to mention is that it makes absolutely no difference which transmission format you use—feeding 1080i or 1080p into your projector or HDTV will give you the exact same picture. Why? Both disc formats encode film material in progressive scan 1080p at 24 frames per second. It does not matter whether you output this data in 1080i or 1080p since all 1080 lines of information on the disc are fed into your video display either way. The only difference is the order in which they are transmitted. If they are fed in progressive order (1080p), the video display will process them in that order. If they are fed in interlaced format (1080i), the video display simply reassembles them into their original progressive scan order. Either way all 1080 lines per frame that are on the disc make it into the projector or TV. The fact is, if you happen to have the Samsung Blu-ray player and a video display that takes both 1080i and 1080p, you can switch the player back and forth between 1080i and 1080p output and see absolutely no difference in the picture. So this notion that the Blu-ray player is worth more money due to 1080p output is nonsense."

More granular explanation of 1080i vs. 1080P
 

A quote from an AVS forum member. Saves me from typing it all. :)

480p looks better than 480i because most traditional video material is encoded at 480i and designed to be displayed on 480i devices. 480p only looks better when it is properly deinterlaced with the proper "pull-down" and then displayed on a 480p display device.

I guess it is better to say that 480p display devices look better than 480i display devices as they actually do show you twice the apparent resolution at any given moment due to these techniques.

Now, this falls apart with 1080i and 1080p as we are basically all using progressive (p) display devices. This is true even if your device only takes in a 1080i signal. All current technologies (with the exception of CRT) actually display a progressive signal (DLP, LCD, SXRD, DiLA, Plasma, etc.) Since this is true, they must be grabbing an interlaced signal, holding one field, combining it with the next field prior to display (this is what any progressive output device previously did before outputting the image).

The issue here is that the technology is EXTREMELY robust and that for very little cost almost all displays can do this perfectly. For film, it is trivial as there is no "time offset" between two interlaced Fields - they come from the same Frame so putting them back together is extremely simple.

You can view it as follows:

A Progressive Signal is sent as
Line 1
Line 2
Line 3
Line 4
etc.
Display

An Interlaced Signal is sent:
Line 1
Line 3
Line 5
etc.
Line 2
Line 4
Line 6
etc.
Display

In the end run the same information is in the Frame Buffer prior to display - ergo no difference.

Another point is that people continually confuse the subject when talking about 1080i and 1080p. You MUST distinguish between TRANSMISSION and DISPLAY. In your context you are talking about how the signal is TRANSMITTED as almost all of the 1080 monitors, etc. DISPLAY 1080p and can not DISPLAY in an interlaced fashion anyway.

:iagree: A good deinterlacer should give you the same picture quality as a progressive signal.
That depends on the quality of the deinterlacer on your display. There are many HD displays that do NOT properly deinterlace a 1080i signal. They cheat and use a technique called bobbing (as opposed to weaving) which is basically interpolating between the lines without the using any information from the previous or following frames. It boils down to which device has the best deinterlacer, your display or your source component. It is conceivable that the Samsung BD player has a better deinterlacer than some HD displays.

Again true. But the more conversions you introduce, the higher chance you have of introducig artifacts into the picture. Adding another chip into the Samsung player and adding one more conversion was probably not the most eloquent way of passing 1080P material. HD discs are encoded in 1080P. So they are undoing what has been done, and redoing it because they did not have a one chip solution ready. This is arguably flawed.

At some point an interlaced signal has to be deinterlaced, whether it be at the player or the display. That's just one conversion. The 1080p signal coming out of the player should pass through the display without further deinterlacing. I fail to see where the extra conversion is. Are you saying the Samsung takes the 1080p data from the disk and converts it to 1080i then converts it back to a 1080p signal? If that's the case then the Samsung is indeed brain damaged.

That is exactly what the Samsung player does. Kind of silly isn't it?

And further more...if your display is 1080P like the newest ones on the market...then that just chaps my butt. Because then no conversion is needed.

You know as long as the chips are working properly, it shouldn't really matter. But there are chip solutions that will handle this without the conversion. I am still leary of the process, even though I know better. It just bothers me when signals are converted for no reason...why tempt fate?

As a late adapter I was going to wait until the dust settled before checking this stuff out but this has piqued my curiosity. I'll have to do some research now. More to follow...