Nintendo know something MS and Sony do not know?

[assen]

Remember though, MPEG isn't just about the DCT in the reference i-frames, the p/b-frames are very important (this is the area where loads of optimisations have occured giving increased compression ratios at expense of compression time lately).

Sure, this doesn't contradict my point: that a high-resolution "real-world" image isn't likely to contain as much more information (in the information theory, how-much-can-we-compress-it- sense) as it contains more pixels. So, e.g. a 4x increase in pixel count should lead to only a 3x increase in data rate.

 

[fearsomepirate]

There's way more information in an image than you might think. The problem is extracting it quickly and accurately.

 

[Inane_Dork]

10mbit at SD is ok, i would prefer (and HD-DVD seems to agree with me) that 15-18mbit average is the needed bitrate.

10 Mbps for 480p is total overkill unless you're (inexplicably) still using MPEG2.

Ithink the visual compression artefacts on movies are far worse than the compression artefacts on low quality compressed audio.

The real question is not over what you think or I think but rather over what most people think. Given that most people aren't even aware that video on DVD is compressed, DVD quality is plenty for the mass market. I'm fairly sure that 720p encoded at 10 Mbps with VC1 offers at least DVD quality (per resolution, that is).

At 4 times the resolution of DVD, I'd want at least 4x the bitrate to give the same compression...

You shouldn't directly compare MPEG2 bitrates to MPEG4 bitrates.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

The real question is not over what you think or I think but rather over what most people think. Given that most people aren't even aware that video on DVD is compressed, DVD quality is plenty for the mass market. I'm fairly sure that 720p encoded at 10 Mbps with VC1 offers at least DVD quality (per resolution, that is).

I think the question is whether Joe Public will notice the difference at the store demos. Maybe they wouldn't notice the compression if there was nothing to compare it too, but when you see DVD next to HD optical, if the compression is less noticeable, will Mr. Public notice the difference and care? If it's the sort of difference I saw at Harrods, no-one could see that and not be impressed.

You shouldn't directly compare MPEG2 bitrates to MPEG4 bitrates.

Okay. I didn't mean hard bitrates. Just more a case of if you're going to up the resolution, you're going to need to increase the sampling rate. You're going to waste the potential of HDTVs if you don't increase quality markedly over DVD, and even with better codecs you're not going to get that at a marginal increase in storage capacity.

From my personal POV, DVD quality at highres isn't really good enough. I want a better experience. Maybe Mr. Public would have been happy with just an upping of the resolution and more 'smearage' of the picture, but we do actually have large storage optical disks that are going to provide crisper images, and we will get to see if people notice the difference and are willing to shell out for it.

 

[Ventresca]

10 Mbps is a pretty decent bitrate for MPEG4 or VC1 encoded HD video. That gets you about 9 GB for 2 hours. You can add the special features as separate downloads.

I'm sure there are people who disagree with my position about 10 Mbps being a decent bitrate, but eh. If most people can't tell or don't care about the difference between crappy MP3's and CD quality audio, 10 Mbps will likely be plenty. 720p could probably get away with 8 Mbps..

It sure is not enough for me to see a big jump in quality over dvd , i can't see why the mass market would want to buy very expansive players and more expansive movies where you have not a big improvement over upscaled dvd.

 

[Inane_Dork]

Shifty: If we're going to talk about how stores mercilessly butcher video signals, display them with entirely different contrast/brightness/color settings and then suggest the biggest, most expensive TVs to you, I kinda doubt we'll arrive at any intuitive conclusion.

It sure is not enough for me to see a big jump in quality over dvd , i can't see why the mass market would want to buy very expansive players and more expansive movies where you have not a big improvement over upscaled dvd.

In case you were not adequately following this subconversation, we're talking about downloading movies. Hence, there are no expensive players in the equation. As for how expensive the movies would be, who knows?

And if we're talking about 720p video encoded at 10 Mbps with VC1, that looks significantly superior to upscaled DVD to me. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find many people who see little to no difference between the two but see a big difference between DVD & HD-DVD.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Shifty: If we're going to talk about how stores mercilessly butcher video signals, display them with entirely different contrast/brightness/color settings and then suggest the biggest, most expensive TVs to you, I kinda doubt we'll arrive at any intuitive conclusion.

On the contrary, we will arrive at an intuitive conclusion - the butchered sets will not sell so well. And if the demo points show HD optical looks far better than the alternatives, it'll sell too, regardless of the technical merits of any platform.

As for low megabit HD movies, the few I've seen have had obvious compression artefacts, like any movie seen on computer, like DVD on a flat-panel display. Even if it is better than DVD, it's not as good as HD optical disks should be. Is it good enough for Joe Public, and they'll choose downloaded low-bitrate over purchasable high-bitrate? I don't know, but then neither does anyone here and no-one can argue what will happen. They can only present different viewpoints, and then wait and see which pans out. All I ca say, from my meagre experiences, is that there is a notceable difference between real HD optical sources and restricted HD sources, that makes for a far better picture and which is far more preferrable if I had to choose one format ofver the other.