Blu-ray.. even sony doesn't have full titles for demo

[Lazybones]

http://gearlog.com/blogs/gearlog/archive/2006/05/16/11622.aspx



Even if the content was a HD demo cut and burnt to disk.. It still looks bad for sony when they went through the trouble of having the Laptop, with the drive and Blu-ray packaging sitting there for the event.

[Mr. Analog]

I say screw HD! The next evoloutionary step in TV should be 3D anyway...

[Cova]

Hmm..., this opens up a whole new line of thinking of what we could do with HD content on existing DVD5 and DVD9 media.  You could easily fit a full movie on a DVD9 in full 1080p resolution using a MPG4-AVC codec - I've crammed 2 hours of 1080i into a DVD5 using x264 (an open-source implementation of said MPG4-AVC) and the quality was great (though it took 3 days to do a 2-pass encode on my P4 3.2 EE).  I can record HD content from digital cable easy - storing it and playing it back end up being the bigger problems.

[Tom]

Funny you should mention x264, I made a couple tests of reencoding some anime, and found that a single pass encode was much smaller, and the quality was so very close to that of the 2 pass encode, which was actually bigger than the original xvid encoded video. With the single pass x264, I saved almost 100MB per file, thus allowing me to burn 26+ episodes on one disk instead of having to split it accross 2 dvds just because the total size was a couple hundred MB over a dvd5.



Also, my media box is too slow to play back a 16x9, 704x480 (or whatever) in realtime . It will play, but it'll stutter a little, and takes up 100+% cpu, making my nice ATI remote useless for all intents and purposes (having a 2+ minute delay on any button pushing is faily annoying).

[Cova]

My HTPC is a Athlon XP 2500+, and it won't play back 1080i video's in x264 or in the original MPEG2 transport stream without dropping frames.  I learned  however that the xbox with XMBC does a VERY nice job of playing back 960x540 (exactly 1/2 W x H of 1920x1080 = 1080i/p, so no scaling artifacts either), and I can't tell the difference on my (new) 58" screen between real 1080 and XBMC 960x540.  So next time I'm playing with encoding HD content I'm gonna experiment with xvid at that resolution.



Once I get a next-gen DVD player of some type (most likely the HD-DVD addon for 360, PS3 / blue-ray isn't ruled out though) I'll look into encoding at full-rez again.

[Tom]

Yeah, my HTPC is just a mini-itx 1ghz. Not even enough to play DVD rips encoded with h264.