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204.131.179.1
Am I having too much fun with these video goodies or what?
My setup, all purchased within the past few days or months:
Sharp LC-32GP1U 1080p 32" LCD (see link below)
Toshiba HD-A20 HD DVD player, latest firmware
Sony Playstation 3, latest firmware
To date, I've spent much more time viewing HD DVDs than Blu-Ray disks, and the HD DVD quality has felt consistently high in terms of features and overall production quality. It took me awhile to get used to HD DVD's popup menus, but they seem polished and I'm starting to like them. The bonus features are really taking some getting used to: Rather than simple video clips or commentary soundtracks, some of the HD DVDs have the feature sprinkled throughout the movie: With this feature switched on, you watch the movie as normal, and every so often a small icon appears on the screen. That's your cue to press a button on the remote to view a bonus feature, usually a second small video window. If there's a way to expand that window, I haven't found it. And there doesn't seem to be a way to simply view all of the bonus features without the repeated button-pushing. Disks like "40 Year Old Virgin" and "Charlie & The Chocolate Factory" incorporate an awful lot of extras. It's all very neat, but it can be tedious, and so far I haven't had the patience to actually sit through a whole movie's worth of extras. If there's some trick to viewing all of the bonus content without the repeated button-pushing, please let me know.
The Playstation 3's heavy duty computing power has been a mixed blessing: Good it takes only about 25 seconds to play a movie from the time I switch the console on, and it just plain feels responsive overall. Less wonderful in that the same processing power makes it run hot, and much noisier than the Toshiba.
On my little setup, Blu-Ray looks as good as HD DVD: Wonderful. Default PS/3 audio settings seem to lack a certain sparkle and richness, so I enabled the higher 2-channel PCM sampling rates, and that seemed to set things right. Even through the Sharp TV's built in speakers, music sounded richer and weightier with the higher sampling rates enabled.
I was watching "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" on Blu-Ray last night and found it was sort of a pain. Like HD DVD, Blu-Ray has popup menus. But with this particular movie, the popup menus don't stay popped up between features, and the popup menus themselves have an extra layer or two of depth, so several button-presses are required to view each featurette. The actual bonus content seemed pretty weak.
Standard DVD playback: I compared the two players with 1080p upscaling, and also running at 480i and letting the TV do the scaling. Video looked good to me in all instances, but I felt that letting the players do the scaling gave me some added clarity.
So far, I'm liking Blu-Ray and HD DVD about equally well. The HD titles I've viewed seem more polished and "next generation" to me, but the actual video seems great either way. Both formats need to refine their fancy menu schemes in order to reduce the amount of button pushing. And the remote controls for both players are mediocre: Too many buttons, cramped layout, and no illumination guarantee that you will be fumbling around in the dark when viewing bonus content. The Toshiba's remote is easily replaced by a universal unit (which I've done). The Playstation's is trickier because it's Bluetooth, but Nyko offers an infrared remote which I may try later.
Follow Ups:
Instead, I'm far more interested in the movie playback quality. Both formats have their fair share of video duds and masterpieces and your results will vary with the movies/studios you select. Even the "masterpieces" have their video issues. Of course, anytime the studios go with a high(er) bit video encode, it shows they are putting a little TLC into giving us good PQ and the results show. The jury is still out on what constitutes a "good enough' video bitrate for outstanding PQ but I'm betting on Blu-Ray to continue to have an edge in this regard until HD-DVD convinces me otherwise. Blu-ray has hit a few home runs with their high(er) video bitrate encodes on 50G discs. Can't say the same for HD-DVD yet; maybe King Kong but I think it's been trumped already. YMMV.
And *I* am more interested in whether the movie is any good ;-)So far I simply haven't seen any sign HD DVD delivers inherently superior results versus Blu-Ray or vice versa. HD DVD seems like a more polished product, but the actual movie-watching seems good either way. Granted that my TV is only a 32-incher, but it's a 1080p set. Speaking of which, you seem to be viewing on a very large screen and I wonder if you could *really* benefit from upgrading from your 720p projector (yes I realize it's ~$5K).
My favorite "720p-crippled FP owning" dealer sold a 1080p to another big screen user; Seems he made the mistake of setting it up for his customer and now he's got the "itch" to replace his two year old Marantz DLP after viewing 1080p.
My system would probably "benefit" from a projector upgrade ('tis merely 110" not 126"). It would also benefit from 1000W tubed monoblocks as well, A DTS HD MA/HDMI capable preamp/processor would be useful and extra subwoofer or two would also help. Room treatments (including acoustic ceilings) would help.
Getting rid of my outrageous car payments would also help... so would winning the lottery.
My preaching concerning HD PQ is for benefit in the long-term, even if I can't take full advantage today.
The fact that one format has more gigabytes of storage space doesn't necessarily mean that the transfers are any different/better on one than the other or that the space available is even being effectively employed. I'd be interested in learning about variations and similarities in the formats that extend beyond the hypothetical of what looks good on spec. sheets.
I realize that as this competition heats up folks will start digging in their heels in support of one format over another, but like I've said before, I have no dog in this hunt. My concerns are squarely focused on 1) viewing my favorite films and concert footage in the highest resolution possible and 2) being able to purchase British, Asian and European fare without region code intrusion. So far HD-DVD has the best selection for my tastes, but that is always subject to change.
Finally, I'm sitting on the fence at present & will probably hold out until 3rd generation players arrive, but as prices keep dropping on HD players that may not be possible (temptation being what it is). In any event, I'd rather opt for a universal player to cover all possibilities. That would make my purchase as future proof as possible provided pricing isn't prohibitive and the performance is excellent on both formats.
Sorry about the digression, but back to my original question: Have you done any side by side comparisons of films released on both formats?
Cheers,
AuPh
A couple of friends and I did a brief survey of select HD DVDs and Blu-Ray movies on a 126" screen because they were asking the same questions. It seems they noticed more subtle "motion blurring" with HD-DVD (relatively low bitrate VC-1 encodes) than with the Blu-Ray (relatively higher bitrate video encodes (AVC and/or MPEG2?). (Of course, both of them already have a bias against all things Microshaft). It could have been a setup issue, though I don't see how (same dual format player/display). More likely, it was the movie selection; at the time, I did not have the "reference demo disc" "King Kong"; we were making do with the likes of "Children of Men", "Good Shepherd" and "Batman Begins" . Nevertheless, I saw reason to believe we can do better than today's low bit rate VC1 encodes. Hmmm... I just checked two of those titles are Universal which hasn't been exactly rocking the HD video world with excellent video transfers.
In theory, you'll notice more artifacts with lower bitrate encodes, everything else being equal. In practice, it's debatable whether or not anyone will notice those differences. Some apparently have with AVC/VC1 Blu-Ray/HD-DVD shootouts with the same movie (Flags of Our Father?) with possibly biased Blu-ray fanboys giving the Blu-Ray version the edge, but you'd have to dig up the threads on these subjects (AVSforum, Highdefdigest, etc). Now if someone cares to loan me an HD-DVD copy of "Flags of Our Father" or "Letters from Iwo Jima"......
Of course, the closer I look for video issues, the less I enjoy the movies... And they all have video issues, I want the video masters and the player to play them.
Though I think HD DVD's as a rule tend to be slicker. I've been comparing both my A1 and my Samsung 1200. The PQ seems to be comparable so far. My Samsung is a better upscaler than my A1-must be the REON chip. I still prefer HD DVD's titles more, so it may be a while before I collect alot of BD titles.
enjoy,
Jack
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