Home Video Asylum

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Hidef and audio/video bitrates

I thought this post from an admittedly blu-ray advocate but with some credibility on the AVSforum might be interesting. Especially since some of the folks in this forum just might have a tiny bit of interest in audio quality for Hidef movies. I've had lingering questions concerning why HD DVD doesn't support lossless audio ? And wondered if storage capacity and audio bitrates were more the reason than studio indifference to lossless audio ? Paidgeek's opinions are not inconsistent with my own suspicions.

It starts out with a Paidgeek quote:

"To be very specific, what I am saying is that it is using lossless coding on all HD-DVD titles is not practical because it will compromise the picture. Not so on Blu-ray. Period."

Followed later in thread by some clarification:

"What I am trying to convey, (unsuccessfully so far as it generated a whole thread on one sentence) is this:

At a max rate of 25 Mbps for video, HD-DVD always has some coding artifacts. At a max rate of 40 Mbps for video Blu-ray always has some coding artifacts (regardless of title). Having 60% more bandwidth for coding a difficult scene means Blu-ray can do a better job on such a scene. This has been demonstrated in months past using Paramount titles. Having said that, when you max out video bit rate on Blu-ray, you still have 8 Mbps to work with and we can put a lossless stream in there. If you have to limit the max rate of and HD-DVD to something south of 20Mbps in order to accommodate lossless audio, sometimes you will get away with it (avoiding obvious picture break-up), and sometimes you won't. This is one of the principle reasons that so few NA HD-DVD titles attempt it and why even fewer will do so for Europe."
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Sony Pictures BD Insider


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Topic - Hidef and audio/video bitrates - oscar 05:14:49 08/23/07 (54)

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