HD DVD vs Blu-Ray Round: 1

[Wayde]

Now that both formats have their first devices on the table let's see where the format war stands by comparing both feature sets. We'll include Capacity, Interactive Features, Content Protection and everyone's favorite - Managed Copy as our categories. We won't include movie selection because neither has the Star Wars or Lord of the Rings Trilogies.

Capacity

HD DVD: 15 Gigabytes single layer.

Blu-ray: 25 Gigabytes single layer.

Winner: Blu-ray, but not by much. Many people see Blu-ray as the superior choice because of the relatively tiny numeric advantage. But put it into perspective with the capacity of a future storage medium. A possible successor to the new disk media has already been developed, it's called Holographic Versatile Disk developed by InPhase and to being manufactured by Maxell and Hitachi. To give you an idea how unimpressive the storage difference between HD DVD and Blu-ray are: A single HVD will be a 1.6 Terabyte rewritable storage medium.

Interactive features

HD DVD: iHD interactive standards were created by Microsoft in conjunction with Disney and the DVD Forum. iHD will be support interactivity with your Windows PC when Windows Vista is rolled out. It's not exactly clear how or even if it's going to be used in practice.

Blu-ray: The BD-Java standard is a special version of Sun Microsystem's Java. Again, who knows what it'll do exactly but potential for these are vast. But in terms of a straight movie player, do we really want to interact with our Blockbuster rental? Are studios liable to add the expense of interactive features to movies?

Winner: HD DVD in a slight edge here just because more people use Windows. The standard is directly supported by Microsoft so it's likely to have a major inroad to compatibility with Vista. But realy. How much of this interactivity are we really going to see when either medium arrives? When DVD first came out we heard about all the interactive euphoria then too. To us jaded DVD veterans we have little use for animated menu systems when we just want to watch a movie. Many of the promised DVD features are not much more than an annoyance. Studios aren't likely to spend extra money developing substantial interactive features and if they did; would we the unwashed movie watching public be buying?

Content Protection

HD DVD: Will use the AACS (Advanced Access Copyright System) DRM (Digital Rights Management) scheme. This is going to be the complete solution for copy protecting all digital high definition entertainment. Welcome, to the new, real world.

Everyone will get used to AACS, it'll be integrated into any future connection standard (such as HDMI or DisplayPort) computer operating system, video card or anything that wants to transmit, store or playback any entertainment content created by the major studios.

Blu-ray: Will also use AACS. However Blu-ray gets extra points with the studios for being a good little format by making it even harder for hackers. Two added layers of content protection are BD+ and ROM Mark. Forget Blu-ray's greater storage capacity, this is why more movies going to BD than HD DVD.

Managed Copy

HD DVD: First to impose Mandatory Managed Copy (MMC). MMC is one of those tricks of AACS that will fully control any copies you make across your network. HD DVD was the first to support this feature which will allow you to move your HD DVD movie to your home server and other computers or a mobile device. MMC could incorporate a pay-per-copy system or it could arrive on the streets in a system that allows you to buy a "premium" version of a movie with unlimited copies through MMC or the "just one" copy version. How MMC will be used is up to the studio releasing the disk.

Blu-ray: Wasn't going to support MMC until HP drew a line in the sand and demanded both MMC and iHD for its continued support of the Blu-ray standard. That Blu-ray initially didn't support MMC is what gave BD a major push by the recording studios who don't want any part of copying their intellectual property. But with a majority of the studios behind Blu-ray, the Blu-ray specification relented and gave HP MMC. It's still a pay-per-copy system, it's unclear exactly how it will be implemented but it's up to the studio and the disk exactly how MMC will be applied.

Winner: Neither. That's right, neither side wins here because neither Toshiba's HD-A1 nor Samsung's BD-P1000 will support Managed Copy in any form. Your prize for being an early adopter is a device stripped of the full feature set of the format you've chosen. AACS, the content protection DRM (digital rights management) scheme hadn't completed the standard in to time for it to be included in the early players. Instead the first round of next gen disk players will an Interim AACS developed specifically for the early devices.

Richard Doherty, spokesperson of the AACS Licensing Association says: "We expected the first early players to be basic players and we didn't want to slow down the roll out of those devices."

Link To Original Article

[bobgpsr]

Current status is a bit different IMO. Currently shipping hi def DVDs use:

HD DVD - 30 GB using two layers - high yield during manufacture 90 to 95%
Blu-ray - 25 GB using one layer - alledged moderate yields 60% ? Possible constraint to only use 23 GB.

Hearing about major problems trying to make 50 GB two layer Blu-ray discs with an acceptable yield. Reports are that this may be solved this coming fall. Some say 1st quarter 2007.

Bob

[bobgpsr]

The initial reviews of the Samsung and BD-25 discs are in (from the AVS Blu-ray Players forum):

Originally Posted by Cliff Stephenson 5:17 PDT on 17 June 2006

Alright… after spending several days with the Samsung player and several different Blu-ray discs, I feel I’ve got an excellent grasp on what you can expect from this player and the format in general for the next few months. Old readers of DVDFile might remember that I used to be one of the site’s main reviewers for DVD content, so I do have a bit of a background here. I’m going to focus on what I viewed to be the best looking of the BD titles I viewed in addition to a title that hasn’t been covered elsewhere: XXX. This is a title that provides for a longer running time than most of the early BD titles (123 minutes) and also contains lots of movement to test MPEG2’s abilities.

The short of it is that I completely agree with Andrew P and, by extension, BigMikeATL. Blu-ray, as it exists today in both hardware and software, is a good, but not great format. I’m starting to see a bit of a pattern with these early BD titles as they generally are shorter films with bright, colorful cinematography. Those are the conditions under which MPEG2 BD looks its best. While I was initially questioning what the early adopter appeal of films like Hitch or 50 First Dates could be, now I can understand it.

Let’s start with SD ability as it compares to the Toshiba. Again, I put the player in the very good but not great slot. I think the Toshiba still presents a slightly sharper picture overall when compared to the Samsung. But the Samsung is very much improved over their older models. So if you owned an 841, 850, 941, or 950, you should be happy with the improvement that the BD-P1000 provides. However, those previous models provided an option to pillarbox 4:3 material and zoom 4:3 letterbox images, neither of which is possible on the 1000. So the Toshiba gets a point on that, but the Toshiba also lacks the ability to zoom 4:3 letterbox material, so shame on them both. But overall, advantage Toshiba on SD DVD presentation.

For BD ability, I’m now going back to my XXX disc and BD in general. Had this format and these titles launched in early April, I would have been happy. Unfortunately for Blu-ray, HD-DVD launched in mid-April and did two things to impair BD: They’ve gotten more titles out to consumers and they’ve provided an HD experience that is better than BD. Now the difference isn’t huge, but it should be noticeable, even to people who might not normally see these kinds of things. Sorry to have to say it, but BD is an unimpressive format in the shadow of HD-DVD. Had they happened in reverse, HD-DVD would have had to work hard to impress upon people that buying their player (even at half the price of BD) was worth the effort for the slight improvement they offered. Now, BD is in a position to justify a premium for a product that is slightly inferior to what is already available. When I first cracked open the HD-A1 in April and popped in that Last Samurai HD-DVD, I was wowed with what I thought to be the best HD image my television had ever produced. The HD image was smooth and rich with a sharpness and depth I’d never experienced. Most of the HD-DVD titles released thus far (with a few now famous exceptions) have this “pop” that takes them out of the realm of what I would consider normal HD. The Blu-ray discs I’ve sampled thus far, while they’ve looked good to even great, have all lacked that “pop” and instead generally look a lot closer to good OTA HD broadcasts. If you were to show me the XXX BD and tell me it was a Showtime broadcast, I wouldn’t hesitate to think you were telling me the truth. But I would never believe that about most of the HD-DVD titles out there right now.

The sad truth is that MPEG2 just isn’t cutting it against VC-1. Now while it’s difficult to impossible to be able to judge the quality of one film in one codec against a different film in a different codec, I can stack the deck to try and approximate a decent comparison. I compared XXX BD to Unforgiven HD-DVD. Unforgiven is 10 years older than XXX, so this should have been a slam dunk for image quality in favor of XXX. Guess what, the VC-1 Unforgiven consistently outperformed the MPEG2 of XXX. Just look at chapter 4 of Unforgiven. All of the characters are sharply in focus, while the intricate detail in the background wallpaper is consistently resolved. XXX, by contrast appears somewhat soft and lacking in dimensionality. In all of the BD titles I viewed there’s a consistent soft, yet noisy quality to the images that appears as a mixture of natural film grain and digital noise. Fine details, such as rocks on the ground or wall textures, are often seen flickering slightly, which is often annoying.

I’m also curious about how many of these initial discs are truly 1080p. I saw more stairstepping and artifacting throughout one viewing of XXX than I have in 2+ months of HD-DVD viewings. Here’s a few moments for reference… at :38 the tail of the Revolutions logo there is some pretty good banding visible. Right after that, serious jaggies on the XXX logo that starts the film. At 32:08, look at the grill of the car for more jaggies while 10 seconds later, at 32:18, you’ll also get some pretty good stairstepping at the base of the balcony. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you view it), these artifacts don’t appear on the SD Superbit version of the film when viewed on the Toshiba A1. More surprising, they also don’t appear when the Superbit DVD is viewed on the Samsung BD-P1000. The banding was visible on the Superbit, but it was much less severe than the Blu-ray banding.

Essentially, from what I’ve seen so far, visually Blu-ray is, at its best, all of the worst qualities of HD-DVD right now. If you’re someone who was bothered by the HD-DVDs of The Fugitive, Full Metal Jacket, and Perfect Storm, you’re not going to find a ton to like in some of these early offerings. Again, they can look really, really good, but they don’t consistently look great. How much of this is a byproduct of the Samsung player is unknown until other players make it to market but a few things are pretty clear…

Sony, as a company, has a lot riding on the success of Blu-ray. With as much at stake as they have, these titles needed to raise the bar over what we’ve already seen. But because as a company they seem to be more focused on their royalties and the ability to cross promote, they have succeeded in being the second to market with the second best product. Here’s an example of what I mean… The XXX disc has a selection in its menus for “Previews.” These are the SD MPEG2 trailers for Stealth, Into the Blue, and SWAT. So there’s approx. 200-250MB taken up by Sony trying to get you to buy other Sony products. With that space, Sony could have instead done a few other things. Why not include the XXX trailer and the Rob Cohen commentary? Why not use that 200MB to try and eliminate that banding at the beginning of the movie? Instead, Sony appears to have needed that space to get you to spend more money rather than providing us with the best product to entice us to spend more money. Compare that with the Warner and Universal titles, which are not only visually more impressive, but also packed to the rims with bonus content. Universal certainly didn’t need to include all the stuff from the more expensive 2 DVD Cinderella Man, but they did and provided an excellent value on that disc.

Sony has two things that have to happen and happen fast in order for Blu-ray to really make this a good race: They need to implement the advanced video and audio codecs and they need to get 50GB discs working. They have to do both of these and they have to do them fast. With only 50GB and still working MPEG2, they’re probably going to be able to equal or hover slightly below HD-DVD as it exists now. With newer codecs but only 25GB discs, they’ll be able to match HD-DVD visually, but will have a 5GB disadvantage. Only with both of these in existence will this format even have a chance. And they need to do this much sooner rather than later. Unfortunately, by the time the Sony player launches in mid-August, there are going to be maybe 30 titles available, while HD-DVD, by that point in August, will be sporting double that and could be up to as high as 75 different titles.

A few of the quirks about the Samsung BD-P1000 that I haven’t seen mentioned yet are the resolution and audio settings. On the video side, I’ve had a few instances where the resolution would change on the player without me having to select it. It switched from the 1080i that I had set it to to a very much inferior 720p setting that softened the picture even more that I found it at 1080. I’ll be curious to see additional comments as the player becomes more widely available and whether the player switching itself from 1080 to 720 happens with others. On the audio side, I’m running the player HDMI to a new Denon 3806 HDMI in. Unfortunately, there seems to be something bungled with how the player handles the bitstream vs. PCM tracks. To play the Dolby 5.1 track, the player has to have the digital out in the player’s menu set to “bitstream.” However, if you select one of the Sony uncompressed 5.1 tracks from the menu, it will only play back in 2-channel PCM. Selecting PCM from the player menu will output 5.1 PCM via HDMI, but then converts the Dolby tracks to 2-channel PCM. So you could potentially have to change player settings depending on the disc and soundtrack you want to hear. Can anyone else using their player via HDMI confirm this behavior?

Ultimately, the potential is there for Blu-ray to succeed, but it is unclear when that potential might be approached. For all of the complaints about HD-DVD not being ready for primetime, I think that despite all of its faults, the bottom line is that HD-DVD delivered the big jump up in picture quality and interactivity that many of us were anticipating and has set the bar in terms of HD. Blu-ray, unfortunately, has failed to go “Beyond High Definition.”

Cliff

Equipment list:
Toshiba 50” 50H13 DVI in from
Denon 3806 HDMI out and in from
Samsung BD-P1000 HDMI out and
Toshiba HD-A1 HDMI out

[Sonnie]

Wow! There's a lot of info in that post that makes me wanna go ahead and pick up the Toshiba HD-DVD player at 500 bucks. It appears Sony has a lot of work to do to get Blu-ray up to par... plus they are slack on their title offerings too. Things that make ya wanna go hmmmm.

Thanks for the update on this Bob! Many thanks!

[Tommy]

I have the toshiba but wouldnt object to switching if the blue-ray was twice as good as it but so far thats just not what im hearing. I think it will be a year or so out before we really see who the leader is, till then I'll keep on enjoying the hd-dvd.

I would however like someone to translate some keywords that were used in the above review for clarification.

1. stairstepping
2. artifacting
3. banding

[Sonnie]

I agree... no Blu-ray interest for me right now... and even with improvements it doesn't seem like it's likely to be twice the price better. I ordered up my Toshiba unit.


1. STAIRSTEPPING: Slopped lines or edges jagged in appearance.

2. ARTIFACT: A reproduced image having color contamination, imperfections.

3. BANDING: Faint, darker vertical bands or stripes.

A post of an image showing the problems will explain it much better. Some projectors have banding problems on some scenes. I was able to see banding in my Sanyo Z2 on occasion. Motion artifacts was something many of us saw in Dish Networks SD programming on several of their channels. It is not as bad as it once was. This was where some parts of the scene looked little worms moving around... like in close up scenes of a face. I've seen an image someone posted once of stairstepping, but to notice it I had to look at the identical image without stairstepping... then I could clearly see it. I almost hate it when I learn things like this because then I find myself looking for it all the time.

[Tommy]

Sonnie wrote:

I almost hate it when I learn things like this because then I find myself looking for it all the time.

Thanks Sonnie for the info. And yes its funny how we pick out things that we didnt before we started researching everything A/V

[Wayde]

Great post Bob! Lots in intimate details on the BD player.

Personally, neither will get my business right now. I'll wait until either a unified standard comes along or I might get LG's player if it supports the uncompressed audio formats in DTS and DD. Maybe HDMI 1.3 too.

I just called Samsung to ask about the Dolby Digital Plus support on their BD player, apparently the spec sheets (what the droids on the phone are programmed to say) it does support DD+. They had no idea if it supports HDMI 1.3.

[Sir Terrence]

I read this morning that Bill Hunt of www.thedigitalbits.com is now getting much better performance from bluray bypassing the HDMI input and using the component inputs. It seems that the HDMI input on the Samsung is not operating properly and seriously degrades the video when it is passed through that input.

Right now I think it is pretty silly and useless to make any comparisons between these two formats. Neither of the HD formats have players with complete features. The Toshiba converts DD+ to the Dts format, and Bluray is using 5.1 uncompressed PCM with no DD trueHD or Dts HD master audio in sight till next year. All we can say at this junction is that the picture quality is great, though I like Sony's idea of using 5.1 uncompressed PCM for its audio. Why do we need Dolby or Dts with this?

[bobgpsr]

Uncompressed PCM audio takes up an unnecessary HUGE amount of space on the disc. Does not make sense when already constrained by 25 GB and the use of old MPEG2 video codec. The result is that the video quality suffers.

The DTS re-encode by the player is just to enable users to use legacy S/PDIF (coax or toslink) connection which cannot carry DD+ or the other new lossless codecs. Users who use PCM over HDMI or the analog outputs get the full benefit of DD+ or the current 2 channel limited (current player firmware) Dolby TrueHD.

Stacey Spears of Microsoft has done careful testing (with appropriate equipment) of the Samsung 1080p HDMI output. He says it does not "bob" and he will be doing tests of the component output today to be posted tomorrow.

The $1500 Pioneer avail in the Fall does appear to be shaping up to be a pretty good Blu-ray player.

Bob

[bobgpsr]

This just posted this morning 2 July 2006. It concludes that on the Samsung, component video is NOT better than HDMI.

Bob

Stacey Spears wrote:

Samsung Blu-ray: HDMI vs. Component Video Comparison

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I finally got around to comparing the HDMI to the component output.

The HW:
-Samsung HL-S5088W

The SW:
-Hitch
-My own BD test disc

I performed these tests at 1080i out on the Samsung player. I hand calibrated both inputs before any comparison was made. I used SMPTE color bars to set black level and to ensure color was correct. I did a bunch of tweaks in the service menu to get 1:1 mapping, etc...

The first thing I looked at was my disc. I looked at a custom Luma only H & V multiburst pattern that goes out to Nyquist. (37.09 MHz) This is the max the format can do. The Nyquist burst came in at full amplitude as far as I could tell by eye with HDMI. The component did not. It was pretty rolled off.

Next up was the chroma version of the H & V multiburst. Nyquist on this pattern was 19.545 MHz. (Half the chroma as luma being 4:2:n.) Again, horizontal burst was full amplitude while vertical burst was pretty gone due to Faroudja chip via HDMI. Both H and V were much worse via component.

What does the above tell us? It tells us objectively that the HDMI is producing more detail than the component.

How about some real content? Well, if you take a look at the fancy FBI warning on the BD titles, it contains a highly textured background. It looks great. HDMI has more visible detail than the component.

Next up was the menu of Hitch. The cityscape overlay is contains a lot of detail while the video in the background is fuzzy, just like the movie. Again, city menu looks more detailed on HDMI.

Besides detail, I paid close attention to the color saturation on the synthetic patterns as well as the live. Because I calibrated each input to the source, there was no difference. It is very easy to be thrown off when comparing the two if you are not skilled in the art of "black level adjustment". I know, I know, rocket science.

I know what Pen & Tellar would say about those claiming component looks better and I would agree with them.

This is my experience on my display with proper setup. It is possible that other displays may provide different results. Improper setup would clearly be a reason why people see such a difference.

[fibreKid]

With all the money that's at stake, I'm not going to believe much of the corporate mumbo jumbo from either camp. There has been much talk about the problems with blu ray media having a limit of 25 gig. I don't know where the real issue is but in the June/July issue of HDTV etc. page 75 there is an article that states TDK has quad layer media "100 gig" prototypes at 216 MBps and is on the verge of a 200 gig prototype. "IF" this is true, the dual layer problem is old hat and it's a sw mastering issue or somewhere else in the chain. Regardless of where the glitch is it will be fixed long before either of the formats are embraced by us the consumer.

There is also some jabs being taken at how the audio and video streams are being stored. http://www.blu-ray.com/faq/ has some interesting info "if it's true" about the various options that the blue ray spec allows.

Lets all have some popcorn and enjoy our HT a little longer :-)

-john

PS: I'm not trying to knock the Tosh player, I was very close to dropping some coin this week and picking up a HD DVD player until I came to my senses. I need to wait, money doesn't grow on trees.

[JimP]

Hey John,

Technically, money does grow on trees. The paper used to print money is derived from wood chips.

It does seem that neither HD format is ready for prime time. I just can't see buying a player that you already know lacks the improved sound formats.