They are? Any links?
Plenty do, as do many PC displays. Fully HD compliant ecosystem is available for the PC already.
Although its a clone of the initial Toshiba unit Thompson/RCA have already produced a drive.
Post-XMAS HD DVD Sales Surge: #8 ranked HD DVD surpasses #1 Blu-Ray in sales
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glocks out
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They are what? Selling out or selling for cheap? I know google is hard to use and all, but I've seen them around town here for around $150.
Alright, I see this now. Cool. They're not even that expensive. Thanks.
But RCA is not making players. http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/home...dy-clearing-out-rca-hd-dvd-players-191306.php
At this point in time I've seen no indiciation of a manufacturer price reduction. I'm sure there may be specials in various outlets but thats not indicative of low overall sales.
You've shown a link to a report of a retailer clearing out a product line (although that retailer does still have it listed [out of stock] on their website, as do others), however said product is still listed on the manufacturers website - do you have any evidence of the manufacturer taking them out of production?
Well if this is the case, AVS Forum certainly looks to be a hotbed of HD-DVD JMFs (juvenile male fanatics, to avoid using the F word) and anti-BD PR. I didn't realise that Toshiba's much vaunted $499 HD-DVD player couldn't do 1080p, and that you would need to spend $1000 to get a PS3 equivalent.
I find it strange why none of the HD-DVD supporters here from the AVS mentioned this when they have ranted on about a whole load of unsubstantiated rumors like allegations of JVC dropping BD combo disks, allegations of higher BD player manufacturing costs, allegations that VC-1 and AVC couldn't be done on BD format (VC-1 for licensing reasons and AVC for technical reasons), allegations that 50 GB BD disks were not technically feasible (because of poor yield) etc. etc. There seems to be an obvious bias here.
The Samsung has a crappy scaler, no CD upscaling, average picture quality, no built-in decoders, costs more. That's right you're paying more for crap. Nobody wants it hence the the big drop in price over a few months to get rid of them.
No, the majority of HDTVs that have been sold prior and up to the last 9 months don't suppot 1080p input. 1080p is a red herring.
It's not conjecture. Toshiba said it themselves endof 2007 $300. Also there wont' be any standalone BD players for $300 in 2007, you are living in an alternate reality if you think so.
You obviously don't know what you're talking about. Toshiba's first generation HD DVD players were $500 and $800 and they supported 1080i and had HDMI output. Their 2nd gen players are around the same price but supports 1080p. The top of the line $1000 model has HQV processing that's why it's $1000 instead of $800. 1080p has got little to do with any significant cost increase. In fact an outboard HQV processor alone usually sells for thousands of dollars yet your'e getting it for basically pennies in Toshiba's XA-2 HD DVD player.
Wrong.
The HD DVD-ROM drive is called X360 addon. I thought Google was your best friend?
Sorry your numbers don't add up.
You still didn't answer my question. Where are those standalone BD players that you keep on mentioning with your "major CE support"? Answer that first and maybe I'll feel like answering yours.
Then you haven't been paying attention and acting like it's some new relevation. This has been known since the launch of the HD DVD players over 6 months ago! Do you even read the HD DVD player forum at AVS? I doubt it if you didn't know this information.
Like I said 1080p is a red herring. Toshiba managed to sell as many HD DVD players as they could make despite "only" supporting 1080i. There are threads about this from way back and the consensus was it's a red herring.
It's obvious you have no clue about the happenings over at AVS with your ignorant statements. Nobody talks about the 1080i output of the 1st generation players because: 1. It's a red herring and 2. It is well known and old news and doesn't matter one bit because the video quality is OUTSTANDING despite BD zealots trying to claim 1080p is some holy grail!!!
I'm sorry but frankly you are confused. Maybe you should actually read the AVS threads to inform yourself and not whine about what you don't have a clue about.
The guy you should ask over at AVS who keeps a tap on most of the BD/HD DVD information is Alex AKA "amillians". He's very fair and unbiased reporting both the good and bad news from both sides.
Give it a break man. Production is only starting. At the moment there is only Toshiba (HD-DVD), Samsung (BD), Sony (BD), and Panasonic (BD) making BD players. All other major CE have licensed BD, and they will produce them when the blue diode shortage ends. Even Sony has shifted it's production away from it's BD players to PS3 because of the blue diode shortage.
Actually it is a revelation to me. I was intending to buy an HDTV first and then an HD Player only when the format war looks like it has been settled, so I haven't been looking at the players in very much detail. I really did think that the Toshiba player did 1080p. I mean geez, if the PS3 which is a games machine does movies in 1080p then surely a dedicated movie player should this. I am sure that many others were unaware. There were a lot of reviews between the PS3/Samsung/Panasonic/Toshiba players regarding IQ, and plenty of ranting about faulty firmware in the Samsung long after it was upgraded, but nothing about screen display format capability. I guess because all of them were done on 1080i HDTVs.
I don't read AVS a lot. While many of the opinions on the forum are doubtless valuable, there is too much uninformed conjecture being peddled as fact, and much of this has already been debunked. There is definitely an anti-BD FUD campaign going on (not necessarily originating from the AVS forum) - especially the crap about "HD-DVD has won" only 2-3 months after the competition began - but it is spilling over into other forums. I haven't got time to explain now.
Yadda, yadda, yadda. It isn't very long into the competition, and Toshiba hasn't sold that many.
I think for myself, I don't just regurgitate stuff I pick up from other forums like some people. For example, if someone tells me that BD50 discs have failed because they cannot be manufactured, I want to look for some evidence that this is actually true - I don't just take what might be just a HD-DVD f'boy's wet dream as the gospel truth even if it appears in the AVS forum. The production yield information that the AVS forum posters have is the same as you and me - Google - they are certainly not factory insiders, since that sort of information would be protected under an NDA.
As for the 1080p is no better than 1080i argument, I don't buy it, unless you view both on a 1080i HDTV as all the reviewers seem to have been doing including those at the AVS forum. If things are otherwise then please explain why, and tell me if you have actually seen 1080p and compared it to 1080i on a 1080p HDTV?
1080p HDTVs are now beginning to come out in UK, and if I am going to pay a grand plus more on players, HDTVs and Sky HD satellite, I want something that isn't going to be obsolete in a year or so. 720p is the best resolution for games and 1080i is fine for satellite TV, but for movie playing, I want the best picture quality, and certainly I don't want to miss out on a major display format.
It looks to me like for me the PS3 is a safe bet whichever way you look at it. The cheap HD-DVD options the Toshiba HD-DVD player and from what I have read, and even if BD doesn't catch on, you still have a decent game machine and basic Internet computer, and I am sure someone will do an XBox-360 add-on if BD doesn't catch on. I am pretty sure BD will win though, or at least end up as the major format, simply on the numbers of PS3s sold. We'll see by next Christmas.
I am sure he is a fair and unbiased guy, as is this forum, but it doesn't necessarily mean everything posted is right. There is a lot of PR being pushed on the Internet regarding the format war, and one has to be aware to this when reading forums.
Do you have sales # to back this up? Perhaps it's simply because of BD player competition driving the price down? I'm also thinking that the debut of their next gen BD player is also helping to drive older stock down.
Toshiba also said SED would take over PDPs. So it's conjecture until we see it. Don't get me wrong, it could very well happen but just because they said so, doesn't mean it's going to happen.
I dunno about this. Yes you can use the 360 drive on your PC but it doesn't seem that it's marketed/meant as that, it's just happens to be a nice benefit. A better example for you would be the soon-to-be released Toshiba HD-DVD drive.
Mintmaster
Veteran
SPM, hollywood movies are stored on HD-DVD and BR discs as 1080p/24 with flags denoting how to transmit it as 1080i. As long as the TV can do inverse telecine, it doesn't matter if you transmit the signal as 1080i or 1080p. All the information is there. In fact, a high end TV capable of displaying images at a multiple of 24 fps would be better off receiving a 1080i/60 signal instead of 1080p/60 because you can easily assemble the raw info from the former whereas the latter will blend frames together (though the new 1080p/24 signalling standard would be most bulletproof).
The only advantage that a 1080p player gives you is that it's less likely to make mistakes creating progressive frames than a TV, but this shouldn't be an issue the vast majority of the time.
The only advantage that a 1080p player gives you is that it's less likely to make mistakes creating progressive frames than a TV, but this shouldn't be an issue the vast majority of the time.
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OK, all the data may be there, but aren't you going to get artifacts when you convert the 1080p on the disk into 1080i for display?
Also are we going to see Hollywood movies in 1080p/60 in future (the next 3 years) on either BD or HD-DVD formats?
Supposedly this comes from the Wall Street Journal (posted on another forum). I cannot vouch for that, but people have been looking for some solid numbers so here are 'some' numbers, how accurate is another question. I would assume the numbers are probably "ending December 1st" and just NA based on the PS3 numbers. Take with a grain of salt.
Mintmaster
Veteran
The 1080i signal is created very easily from the 1080p/24 source in a standard way. There's no errors, it simply copies lines in a specific order. Some information is repeated because 1080i has a higher data rate (32,400 lines per second) than 1080p/24 (25,960 lines per second). This process is called 3:2 pulldown.
What a TV does with that signal is, of course, up to the TV. That's where you can get some artifacts. If it treats the 1080i signal like an ordinary 1080i signal without doing inverse telecine to recover the original progressive frames, then you'll see issues.
I suppose it's possible, but I doubt it. The odd disk here or there may be 1080p/60 for non-hollywood stuff like sports. That's quite a ways out, as I doubt any sporting events have 1080p/60 cameras today.
24 fps and 30 fps is what we're used to, and the former is what gives that cinematic feel. TV programs look sort of cheap when they use 60 fps for filming, whether interlaced or progressive. You can notice it on some low-budget TV programs that have a sort of a "Handycam" feel.
Nice. :smile: I wish we had some reasonably reliable rule of thumb for "PS3 owners who are using their BRD by buying/renting new BRD movies". As it is, you can get quite a respectable flamewar going over whether that number is closer to 1/10 or 2/3.
Hmmm. Just one thing I am puzzled about. Why is 1080p in the standard it is the same as 1080i without the lines interlaced?
Nice. :smile: I wish we had some reasonably reliable rule of thumb for "PS3 owners who are using their BRD by buying/renting new BRD movies". As it is, you can get quite a respectable flamewar going over whether that number is closer to 1/10 or 2/3.
I think it will take longer for PS3 sales to turn into BD movie sales, because most PS3 owners are buying the PS3 for games. They will buy games first and then start shopping for movies perhaps 1-2 months later.
After a bit more Googling, I am forming the impression that the better smoothness and clarity you get at 1080p as compared to 1080i is down to upscaling the motion compensation. Yes it is easy to convert progressive to interlaced and back, and you get all the bits you get from 1080p when a static picture is converted from 1080p to 1080i and then displayed, but the motion compensation doesn't seem to translate as well and presumably that is why you get a slight degradation in image quality on fast moving pictures.
The links in my previous post above also seems to confirm Microsoft's position that 720p gives a better picture quality than 1080i.
The links in my previous post above also seems to confirm Microsoft's position that 720p gives a better picture quality than 1080i.
Dude, a movie is a series of static images flipping rapidly before your eyes.
The player decodes the video bitstream into a full 1920x1080 framebuffer one image at a time complete with motion compensation and all. This framebuffer is the transmitted to the display panel the way Mintmaster already explained.
There is no visual difference between 1080i and 1080p from 24p source material if your set can do inverse 3:2 pull down, and almost all sets today can.
The only problem from this is that reassembling the full frame on the display device introduces ½ a field of latency, which can cause audio to de-sync to the video-stream if you loop audio through a seperate device. That's why on all surround decoders/receivers I've seen for the past many years you can define an audio delay.
Cheers
Spm
No, from what I understand, you haven't just got a series of flipping pictures when you are talking about VC-1 or AVC codecs. Both these employ motion compensation (temporal compression) with variable block sizes. To put it simply, the parts of the picture that change slowly do not need to be updated so frequently, but need high resolution. The parts of the picture that change quickly need to be updated frequently, but don't need such high resolution because you can't see the detail anyway due to motion blur. The VC-1 and AVC codecs interpolate at intervals between the encoded frame data, and use variable block sizes to achieve this, which is how they get double the compression of MPEG-2 and why they require so much more processing power to decode. If you have 1080p encoded data on a disk, convert that to 1080i and then back to 1080p, you will lose something on the conversion with moving pictures because the compression is not lossless and the motion compensation computations are quite intensive and are difficult to do, although on a static picture, as Mintmaster said, you would not lose anything.
Of course I am not an expert on this, but this is what I have read on the Internet seems to be suggesting.
No, from what I understand, you haven't just got a series of flipping pictures when you are talking about VC-1 or AVC codecs. Both these employ motion compensation (temporal compression) with variable block sizes. To put it simply, the parts of the picture that change slowly do not need to be updated so frequently, but need high resolution. The parts of the picture that change quickly need to be updated frequently, but don't need such high resolution because you can't see the detail anyway due to motion blur. The VC-1 and AVC codecs interpolate at intervals between the encoded frame data, and use variable block sizes to achieve this, which is how they get double the compression of MPEG-2 and why they require so much more processing power to decode. If you have 1080p encoded data on a disk, convert that to 1080i and then back to 1080p, you will lose something on the conversion with moving pictures because the compression is not lossless and the motion compensation computations are quite intensive and are difficult to do, although on a static picture, as Mintmaster said, you would not lose anything.
Of course I am not an expert on this, but this is what I have read on the Internet seems to be suggesting.
As Amir or Ben on avsforum directly. They'll happily give you details. Here is the right thread for it:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=774635
Mintmaster
Veteran
SPM, how AVC and VC-1 encode the picture is irrelevant, as is how the player decodes it. What the decoder gives you from the data streams is 1080p/24, and then the player either uses 3:2 pulldown to pass it on to the TV in 1080i, or spreads every 2 source frames across every 5 output frames if passing to the TV in 1080p. There's no compression in the signal to the TV.
If 1080p has more smoothness is because both of the following hold:
1) When the player spreads 2 souce frames across 5 output frames, one of them is a blend of the other two. Frames A and B, for example are A, A, A/B mix, B, B as opposed to A, A, A, B, B, which gives unequal time to each frame.
2) The TV does not do the above after it reassembles the frames from a 1080i source using inverse telecine, and it is stuck at 60 fps. It outputs a frame sequence like A, A, A, B, B.
If 1080p has more smoothness is because both of the following hold:
1) When the player spreads 2 souce frames across 5 output frames, one of them is a blend of the other two. Frames A and B, for example are A, A, A/B mix, B, B as opposed to A, A, A, B, B, which gives unequal time to each frame.
2) The TV does not do the above after it reassembles the frames from a 1080i source using inverse telecine, and it is stuck at 60 fps. It outputs a frame sequence like A, A, A, B, B.
