Is it possible that the future of regular DVD movies using AVC/VC-1 encoding?

It would break DVD, so it won't happen. As a side note, one can get DVD results at CD size with h.264. I bet SD DVD sized discs would look really good.

Is it possible that the future of regular DVD movies using AVC/VC-1 encoding?

They are not part of the DVD spec so they can't be used.

I would be interested in seeing SD video using avc or vc-1 at high bitrates.

+1. I was about to ask this question. Would be interesting to compare a 8 Mbps VC-1 encode on a DVD and 12.8 Mbps VC-1 encode on HDM ?

+1. I was about to ask this question. Would be interesting to compare a 8 Mbps VC-1 encode on a DVD and 12.8 Mbps VC-1 encode on HDM ?We already know what would happen. The PS3 bitrate counters would come here crying and complaining about "bitstarved VC-1". SOSDD.

You mean 8mbps mpeg-2 on dvd, right?

I don't think we ever got to see SD at it's best on dvd. The compression was almost always lousy and the video was almost always filtered or had EE and other garbage. I imagine high quality SD encoded in high bitrate vc-1 or avc would surprise a lot of people.

You mean 8mbps mpeg-2 on dvd, right?

I don't think we ever got to see SD at it's best on dvd. The compression was almost always lousy and the video was almost always filtered or had EE and other garbage. I imagine high quality SD encoded in high bitrate vc-1 or avc would surprise a lot of people.

I remember viewing some of the SD extras on the HD DVD of Blood Diamond. They are encoded in VC-1 and look really good. I was indeed a bit surprised by the quality.

You mean 8mbps mpeg-2 on dvd, right?

I don't think we ever got to see SD at it's best on dvd. The compression was almost always lousy and the video was almost always filtered or had EE and other garbage. I imagine high quality SD encoded in high bitrate vc-1 or avc would surprise a lot of people.

I know a few DVDs in my collection could have used the extra bitrate. WWE ones particularly (with lots of fast action and camera switches) are pretty bad, even with relatively good bitrates (6-8mb/s).

you can get 720p or even 1080p encodes of movies using h264 onto dvds, but i dont think there's any point to doing it now, new players will be required, only thing you save on is replication. there's also no room for advanced audio.

Microsoft's WMV-HD already went that route in early 2003. :)

WMV-HD delivered 720p/1080p content on DVD-ROM this way. This required a computer for playback, however. It was an interim way to get home high-def content to home theater PC users. It was either 1280 x 720, or 1440 x 1080 with 'non-square' pixels to reduce the CPU load required for playback. Think of it as a live beta test for VC-1 and modern high-def media. Considering the DVD performance/space limitations, the quality was impressive.

Microsoft's WMV-HD already went that route in early 2003. :)

WMV-HD delivered 720p/1080p content on DVD-ROM this way. This required a computer for playback, however. It was an interim way to get home high-def content to home theater PC users. It was either 1280 x 720, or 1440 x 1080 with 'non-square' pixels to reduce the CPU load required for playback. Think of it as a live beta test for VC-1 and modern high-def media. Considering the DVD performance/space limitations, the quality was impressive.

It should also be noted that you had to connect to the internet for them to play (this was the case with Terminator 2: Extreme edition at least). The real catch was, you weren't allowed to play it unless you were using a US internet provider (they check by your IP address). If you think region coding is bad.. well this was just awful.

There are ways to get around it (find an open proxy in the US, and tunnel through it just to get the license), but I'm just glad those discs never took off.

It should also be noted that you had to connect to the internet for them to play (this was the case with Terminator 2: Extreme edition at least). The real catch was, you weren't allowed to play it unless you were using a US internet provider (they check by your IP address). If you think region coding is bad.. well this was just awful.

There are ways to get around it (find an open proxy in the US, and tunnel through it just to get the license), but I'm just glad those discs never took off.
Have you tried to get around the BD region coding? It is a hell of a lot harder than using a proxy server ;).

And only that title used such measure. Most others used local license acquisiton which didn't require network connection or region restriction.

It should also be noted that you had to connect to the internet for them to play (this was the case with Terminator 2: Extreme edition at least). The real catch was, you weren't allowed to play it unless you were using a US internet provider (they check by your IP address). If you think region coding is bad.. well this was just awful.

There are ways to get around it (find an open proxy in the US, and tunnel through it just to get the license), but I'm just glad those discs never took off.
T2: EE was a particularly problematic title. The others had a much smoother experience.

Have you tried to get around the BD region coding? It is a hell of a lot harder than using a proxy server ;).

And only that title used such measure. Most others used local license acquisiton which didn't require network connection or region restriction.

Region coding isn't really an issue for me. In my area (Caribbean/Latin America), all the electronics are imported (Region1) anyhow, so we never run into that issue. The internet-license thing was the first time I had to "get around" something like that.

For anyone curious, there's this here webpage (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/musicandvideo/hdvideo/contentshowcase.aspx) you can check out, which has trailers/samples of the technology behind those discs.

I ask this question because I notice Resident Evil and Resident Evil: Apocalypse on one DVD. On the same side. Maybe these movies don't take up a lot of space. But to be able to buy:
Matrix series
Bourne series
Mummy series
X-Men series
Star Wars series
Lord of the Rings series
Pirates of the Carribean series:
etc

All on one SD DVD disk would sell! Just imagine going into the menu and selecting which series you would like to see instead of popping in a disc. The idea alone would sell more DVDs at a higher price point.

7Mbit SD AVC/VC1 looks really good. HD to have the same compression ratio needs about 35Mbit.

Andrew

If they are going to release SD content using newer codecs on HD-DVD/Blu-ray/HD-VMD they should upconvert it first to full HD resolution then we'd have more colour samples when watching at full hd res. It would be better than 4:2:0 SD def. And you should increase the bitrate to lots more than standard def :) and have as many I frames as SD dvd so the response time of the player would be as good as an SD dvd player

Then we open a Pandora's Box of being able to buy 1 disc to watch either SD or HD movie. If you have a SD dvd player that is what will be played. When you have a HD player that is what will be played. The day we see this is the day High Definition adaption would reach epic proportions IMO.

To be able to buy 1 disc that can either play SD or HD at one price point is what mass adaption is all about.


Just imagine one day having a library of DVD movies that were capable of being watched in High Definition without having to re-buy them. You already have a HDTV all you do is buy a player capable of higher definition.

Hmm, imagine that...

7Mbit SD AVC/VC1 looks really good. HD to have the same compression ratio needs about 35Mbit.

7 Mbps is way overkill. For 24p stuff, 2.5 Mbps VBR is going to be transparent for pretty much everything you need. Maybe a little more for hard interlaced stuff.

7 Mbps is way overkill. For 24p stuff, 2.5 Mbps VBR is going to be transparent for pretty much everything you need. Maybe a little more for hard interlaced stuff.

It was a comment about lgans316 post (in my head).

I wouldn't say "way overkill" rather fully enough.
I didn't check, but maybe 2.5 can be transparent, but I wouldn't say for everything.
Progressive film besed source makes big difference.


Andrew

It was a comment about lgans316 post (in my head).

I wouldn't say "way overkill" rather fully enough.
I didn't check, but maybe 2.5 can be transparent, but I wouldn't say for everything.
Progressive film besed source makes big difference.

7 Mbps in VC-1 for 24p SD, VBR? Yeah, that's overkill, that's substantially higher in ABR and PBR than a typical commercial SD DVD gets in MPEG-2.

Give the 2-pass VBR implementation in the new VC-1 Encoder SDK a whirl. Lots of nice efficiency gain over the older WMV implementation.

7 Mbps in VC-1 for 24p SD, VBR? Yeah, that's overkill, that's substantially higher in ABR and PBR than a typical commercial SD DVD gets in MPEG-2.

Give the 2-pass VBR implementation in the new VC-1 Encoder SDK a whirl. Lots of nice efficiency gain over the older WMV implementation.

Indeed, 7Mbps VBR with any advanced CODEC is overkill, hell try it with x.264 (open source ftw...) and then do the same scene at 4Mbps VBR and you'll be hard pressed to see any difference.

What would be required to have lossless SD video?

Is it possible that the future of regular DVD movies using AVC/VC-1 encoding?

That was the original plan with Warner and the DVD Forum. New codecs on DVD9's, but AOD came about and the rest is current events.

What would be required to have lossless SD video?
Mathematically lossless? Unpredictable, since it's dependent on content. Peaks north of 100 Mbps in worst case. True lossless doesn't get much value out of temporal compression, since you have so much entropy in the LSBs.

I'd rather have 4K lossy than SD lossless!

It depends on DVD player chip support. If chip manufacturer start to make DVD player chip with HD VC-1 decoder, DVD player will be able to play HD (for example 1280*720p and bit rate upto 10 Mbps ). It will come as HD AVI / DivX file support function.

Current generation chip like MediaTek MT-1389 or ESS chip were introduced in 2004-2005. They can play resolution up to 720*560 or 800*600. I guess that some leading DVD chip manufacture will make next-generation chip with HD VC-1 decorder within 1-2 years.

What would be required to have lossless SD video?

Not sure with YUV, I'm going to guess what it would be for RGB cos that might be easier :)

Assuming UK format 'PAL' and assuming the entire 720*576 is used

720*576*3=1,244,160 bytes per frame

or 1,215 KB per frame
or 1.1865 MB per frame

*24 = 28.47 MB PER SECOND (around 28 Megabytes per second?)
1,708.59375 per minute

102,515.625 MB per hour
205,031.25 MB for a 2 hour movie?
200 GB for a 2 hour movie (assuming stored in RGB)?

PS: This assumes 8 bit 0-255 colour. Might not really be 'lossless' in terms of colour if the original colour was 12 bit log but it's the same colour res as is used currently (well apart from the 4:2:0 way of encoding and 16-240 colour use)

Indeed, 7Mbps VBR with any advanced CODEC is overkill, hell try it with x.264 (open source ftw...) and then do the same scene at 4Mbps VBR and you'll be hard pressed to see any difference.

Looks like :)

6Mbit average on 25p clean source gives 50dB PSNR. Looks perfectly tranparent :)
4Mbit average gives 48dB PSNR and also looks tranparent.

Andrew

Looks like :)

6Mbit average on 25p clean source gives 50dB PSNR. Looks perfectly tranparent :)
4Mbit average gives 48dB PSNR and also looks tranparent.

Andrew

Is this assuming a DVD source? If so, since you are using a lossy source to begin with, you already lose efficiency. Start with the uncompressed source and you won't need to be transparently encoding compression artefact's.

200 GB for a 2 hour movie (assuming stored in RGB)?
..and with 200 GB, we could easily deliver 2K 12-bit 4:4:4 visually lossless.

I think I'd rather have that than uncompressed SD :).

Is this assuming a DVD source? If so, since you are using a lossy source to begin with, you already lose efficiency. Start with the uncompressed source and you won't need to be transparently encoding compression artefact's.

It was an uncompressed source.

With interlaced source (typical average source) things don't look so good. 6Mbit gives 44dB PSNR and it does look very good, but not as good as progressive.

Andrew

..and with 200 GB, we could easily deliver 2K 12-bit 4:4:4 visually lossless.

I think I'd rather have that than uncompressed SD :).

True, and a lot of films are more than 2 hours (say 2.5 to 3 hours) so it wouldn't be easy to store even if 200GB discs existed and could be played on players. And it would be limited to 24fps content and no higher.

So I agree truly visually lossless compression with high definition is better than lossless compression of standard definition when it's for playback on consumer HDM. (assuming the high definition is capable of all the frame rates as SD - or more :) and it would also be good if the TV is capable of displaying the colour/contrast range and has the response time as a standard def CRT or better).

7 Mbps is way overkill. For 24p stuff, 2.5 Mbps VBR is going to be transparent for pretty much everything you need. Maybe a little more for hard interlaced stuff.

I find 2.5Mbps VBR overoptimistic.

Just count the following facts.

1. Some encodings for difficult/grainy 1920X800p24 (2.40/1) material (prouved to) need about 20Mbps(avg)/28Mbps(peak) bitrate to be almost tranparent.

2. Best quality SD encoding used to be 720x576 anamorphic. So the hd/sd pixels ratio is 3.70.

3. High frequencies must be filtered up to the Nuyqvist limit and not much lower (as is usually the case with current DVDs).

4. For equal quality (visual/PSNR/SSIM) the needed bitrate is not 1:1 linearly proportional to the HD/SD pixels ratio but near 0.7:1 or 0.8:1. (2X pixels need 1.4X to 1.6X bitrate)

So, from all of the above i take 20Mbps/0.8/3.7=6.75Mbps !!!

So Andrew_HD is totally right for his CLEAN source needing 4-6 Mbps to be tranparent.

I find 2.5Mbps VBR overoptimistic.

Just count the following facts.

1. Some encodings for difficult/grainy 1920X800p24 (2.40/1) material (prouved to) need about 20Mbps(avg)/28Mbps(peak) bitrate to be almost tranparent.

2. Best quality SD encoding used to be 720x576 anamorphic. So the hd/sd pixels ratio is 3.70.

3. High frequencies must be filtered up to the Nuyqvist limit and not much lower (as is usually the case with current DVDs).

4. For equal quality (visual/PSNR/SSIM) the needed bitrate is not 1:1 linearly proportional to the HD/SD pixels ratio but near 0.7:1 or 0.8:1. (2X pixels need 1.4X to 1.6X bitrate)

So, from all of the above i take 20Mbps/0.8/3.7=6.75Mbps !!!

So Andrew_HD is totally right for his CLEAN source needing 4-6 Mbps to be tranparent.
How did you go from numbers for a difficult/grainy source to "CLEAN" numbers at the bottom? Certainly your 6 mbit/sec number is wrong if the logic flows from 1 to 4.

Keep in mind that if you think you need an advanced coded at 6-7 mbit/sec, then you must be watching pretty awful DVDs because they use MPEG-2 at even lower average data rate! Yet most people would be pretty satisfied with that quality. If so, you can safely assume a 2:1 ratio of advanced to MPEG-2 codecs and be good to go, getting you in the 2-3 mbit/sec.

How did you go from numbers for a difficult/grainy source to "CLEAN" numbers at the bottom? Certainly your 6 mbit/sec number is wrong if the logic flows from 1 to 4.


Sorry for my wrong typing for the "-6Mbps". Andrew wrote that "clean 720X576p25 @4Mbps looks transparent to him".

Don't you find a relation between 7Mbps for a difficult source and 4Mbps for a clean one ??



Keep in mind that if you think you need an advanced coded at 6-7 mbit/sec, then you must be watching pretty awful DVDs because they use MPEG-2 at even lower average data rate! Yet most people would be pretty satisfied with that quality. If so, you can safely assume a 2:1 ratio of advanced to MPEG-2 codecs and be good to go, getting you in the 2-3 mbit/sec

Well, (what i watch on DVDs) not exactly awfull but certainly not transparent to a properly resampled master. To much filtering generally, much blocking in difficult scenes ....and go on.

One more point. While I agree that ocassionally a 2:1 ratio advantage is the case, I could "safely assume" no more than a 1.5:1 ratio advantage between advanced codecs and MPEG-2. Don't you remember the 1.3:1 ratio at the Doom9 codec shootout ??.

Sorry for my wrong typing for the "-6Mbps". Andrew wrote that "clean 720X576p25 @4Mbps looks transparent to him".

Don't you find a relation between 7Mbps for a difficult source and 4Mbps for a clean one ??
Sorry, I don't follow what you are asking :). Can you clarify?


One more point. While I agree that ocassionally a 2:1 ratio advantage is the case, I could "safely assume" no more than a 1.5:1 ratio advantage between advanced codecs and MPEG-2. Don't you remember the 1.3:1 ratio at the Doom9 codec shootout ??.
We are talking about using state-of-the-art VC-1 encoding tools with operator behind them. Batch executed re-encoding jobs by Doom or whoever, using stale encoders doesn't give us much data here. So yes, I stand by 2:1 and very much so. As the bitrates go down, the strength of advanced codecs increases as the overhead of MPEG-2 bitstream and format becomes larger.

What were the bit rates of the WMV-HD clips on multimedia showcase encoded at? Also, were those movies just encoded with WMV9 or WMVA and a high bit rate? Reason I ask is because I have a HD camcorder that can record in 1440x1080 (1.333PAR). I'd like to encode these clips using Sony Vegas. The camcorder records with a bit rate of 15mbps. Could I render these in WMV9 (or would it be better with WMVA) with a bit rate of 10mbps or 15mbps and get results as good as WMV-HD? Playback would be on a DVD in a 360.

I think the showcase clips were the same or slightly lower data rate than the WMV-HD discs. For WMV-HD, since they had to live on DVD, the max rate could not exceed 10 mbit/sec. Most were in the 6-7 mbit/sec from what I recall. All constant bit rate by the way. So 10 to 15 is way over the rates used there.

Did this answer your question?

What were the bit rates of the WMV-HD clips on multimedia showcase encoded at? Also, were those movies just encoded with WMV9 or WMVA and a high bit rate? Reason I ask is because I have a HD camcorder that can record in 1440x1080 (1.333PAR). I'd like to encode these clips using Sony Vegas. The camcorder records with a bit rate of 15mbps. Could I render these in WMV9 (or would it be better with WMVA) with a bit rate of 10mbps or 15mbps and get results as good as WMV-HD? Playback would be on a DVD in a 360.

Do you shoot interlace or progressive?

Clean progressive source can be ancoded with 3Mbits/s and look very good.
Grainy, interlaced source needs much more.

Test with very nasty, grainy source (no filtering): 3Mbit (7mbit max) 36dB PSNR (far away from transparent).
After some filtering 39dB.


Andrew

What were the bit rates of the WMV-HD clips on multimedia showcase encoded at? Also, were those movies just encoded with WMV9 or WMVA and a high bit rate? Reason I ask is because I have a HD camcorder that can record in 1440x1080 (1.333PAR). I'd like to encode these clips using Sony Vegas. The camcorder records with a bit rate of 15mbps. Could I render these in WMV9 (or would it be better with WMVA) with a bit rate of 10mbps or 15mbps and get results as good as WMV-HD? Playback would be on a DVD in a 360.
You could do substantially better today, by using Advanced Profile (which used to be WMVA, but is now WVC1 in its SMPTE-compliant flavor), getting four years of codec improvements, and being able to use 2-pass VBR.

Certainly, today's VC-1 @ 6 Mbps beats the old WMVHD stuff @ 8 Mbps.

I would be interested in seeing SD video using avc or vc-1 at high bitrates.

I don't think we ever got to see SD at it's best on dvd. The compression was almost always lousy and the video was almost always filtered or had EE and other garbage. I imagine high quality SD encoded in high bitrate vc-1 or avc would surprise a lot of people.

You don't have to imagine. Many of the 480p supplements from Fox are encoded with AVC at around 10 Mbps. Check out the trailers for the Die Hard films on all three discs. It's 480p, but it's better than anything a DVD player can produce.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc#AVCREC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_DVD#HDREC

Wow, thanks guys. The video looks fantastic now. I encoded at a VBR with an average of 8mbps and a peak of 10mbps en WMV Advanced Profile. Looked excellent. As for the earlier question, the camcorder records in 1080i AVCHD.

Do these players play DVD-R with HD-DVD file structure and VC-1 codec?

Wow, thanks guys. The video looks fantastic now. I encoded at a VBR with an average of 8mbps and a peak of 10mbps en WMV Advanced Profile. Looked excellent. As for the earlier question, the camcorder records in 1080i AVCHD.
Did you encode in interlaced mode?

What did you use to encode with?

Yes, it's a Sony HDR-SR7 and it records in 1080i and that's the only option. You can record at three levels though, 5mbps, 10mbs, and 15mbps. I encode using Sony Vegas Pro which actually has a wide array of encoding options. It will actually let you encode AVCHD DVD's which can be read on a bluray player. As yet I've only encoded to WMV and either streamed from my PC to the 360 or burned to a DVD and played through the 360. The 360 handles anything up to 15mbps pretty well. You can download a free 45 day trial version of Sony Vegas Pro from their website to see the encoding options yourself. It's a nice product and I'm happy with it so far.

I encoded the rendered file at 1080/29.95p from the original 1080i/60 AVCHD file.

Have you tried to get around the BD region coding? It is a hell of a lot harder than using a proxy server ;).


Living in Japan, at least I can play imported BDs from the U.S. with no problem. And once prices come down, importing players from other regions will also be an option. On the other hand, I'll NEVER be able to play the Terminator 2 WMV-HD disc here. I also have friends who had problems getting Step Into Liquid and In the Shadow of Motown to play in WMV-HD as well.

There are many HD TV programming converted to 720P in H264 (AVC) floating around in cyberspace. These are ~3GB for 2 hour shows and look hell of a lot better than any SD DVD in resolution, color fidelity, and macroblocking (lack of). If HDM catches on even as a niche, I wish there was some studio out there that would try releasing some SD content or 720P content with VC-1 or AVC encode on SL or DL DVD.

I encoded the rendered file at 1080/29.95p from the original 1080i/60 AVCHD file.
If you're using VC-1, you can keep it interlaced too. Xbox 360 plays back 1080i quite nicely.

Thanks, I'll try that. I'll post some videos I've taken to see what you think if I can figure out how.

Living in Japan, at least I can play imported BDs from the U.S. with no problem. And once prices come down, importing players from other regions will also be an option. On the other hand, I'll NEVER be able to play the Terminator 2 WMV-HD disc here. I also have friends who had problems getting Step Into Liquid and In the Shadow of Motown to play in WMV-HD as well.

Its easy to get around region coding on the PC.

Can someone explain to me what they did with Blade Runner? I notice there appears to be 2 different versions:
VC-1 HD
VC-1 of what looks like Standard Def but cannot be played on SD DVD Player. AKA Theatrical/International/Director's Cut. They all look good but the 1st disc looks the best. This is part of why I asked about/created this thread.