No anamorphic Blu Ray/HD DVD 2.35:1 movies ?

Well if it is true (as sad as that is) it will be proportional to the maxed out rez like SD DVD is today...

Right now 1.78:1 is the max rez, 1.85:1 is 4% less and 2.35:1 is (my calculation must be out but I get ) 25% less vertical, by the full horizontal rez...

Mark

Stopdog, just because we will not get 1080 lines of information on the HD-DVD or BluRay disc isn't a reason not to have a screen that matches the aspect ratio of the majority of the material we will be watching.

Come up to Clovis in about 6 weeks and I will show you first hand the difference between running 16x9 and 2.35:1 and I am fairly certain that will put any doubts to rest. I should be running by then.

DVDs can be formatted for either 4:3 (non-anamorphic) or 16:9 (anamorphic). 16:9 equals an aspect ratio of 1.78:1. Movies with ratios wider than that have small letterbox bars encoded as part of the video data at the top and bottom of the frame.

HDTV is natively 16:9 and works the same way. The new disc formats could have added a new form of anamorphic enhancement specially for 2.35:1 movies on a 2.35:1 screen, but did not have that much foresight, so we are still limited to 16:9.


Generally, when people say "letterbox" they're referring to a non-anamorphic widescreen DVD, which is 4:3 with larger black bars wasting pixels.

Yeah, same ratio as 2.35 anamorphic DVD, although at a much higher resolution obviously.

What they were thinking is that no one really cares besides us, the posters in this niche forum.

Yes,this would be one argument againt CH . The lowest vertical resolution gets the largest screen and the highest gets the smallest.I'm not saying all the other merits of CH aren't heavier in the balance but still fact.

Art

Don't misinterpret my intention. None of the systems including constant area is without compromises, I realize that. The resolution paradox just happens to be one of those with CH.

Art

One major reason they didn't offer anamorphic HD is the extra processing to make the discs work for people without cinemascope displays. That would have added to the cost of every single player just for a few people without the hope of 2.35:1 becoming the new standard like 16x9 has for TV.

Look at they designed a 2.35 anamorphic for dvd but did not use it or put it in the standard.
P/s hd/dvd should have 4 anamorphic modes 2.05 2.20 2.35 and 2.55

Maybe, but I kind of doubt it, look at it this way, these players already have to convert from from any of: 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p to any other format, in comparision, adding letterbox bars should be trivial. I mean PCs have been able to properlly letterbox content for years, as have DVD players.


IMO, they should have provided the capability to encode everything at 1920x1080 with a 1-byte (8-bit) aspect ratio flag. Such a config would have made use of all the available pixels and supported every aspect ratio from 1:1 to 2.56:1 with 0.01 incriments and no wasted pixels.

Allas it appears we're going to be stuck in square-pixel world.

Most of those extra pixels will end up being thrown away anyway, so what is the point? Unless you can anamorphically adjust your projector to run full panel at every aspect ratio, such a system is going to have high overhead for little benefit.

We aren't talking about putting letter box bars in, but talking about taking one out of every 4 lines out and throwing them away for 16x9 displays. That is certainly more processor intensive than putting black bars at the beginning and end I would think.

Exactly it catered for the masses. Pity...

Mark

The HD disc features may not be set in stone, but the hardware spec is. 20:9 enhancement won't be added to software discs if the players can't support it.

Players are already going to have to convert from 1080p to 720p (throw out 1 out of every 3 lines and colums), they'll likely have to convert to 480p (5 of every 6 pixels), and will likely have to be able to letterbox for 4:3 displays. Letterboxing anamorphic 1080p isn't any more difficult.

It sounds like 1997 tech with higher rez and more capacity. I'm sure we will see anamorphic high-def dvds in 2 or so years. You would think high-def dvds would start where SD dvd left off... what a joke.

I don't think we will see anamorphic HD-DVD/BluRay in a couple of years. This isn't like DVD because anamorphic was in the spec from the beginning even if the content didn't utilize it.

How would an old player that doesn't do anamorphic handle anamorphic DVD? Would stores need to stock anamorphic as well as non-anamorphic widescreen HD discs and think of that confusion. We will probably have to contend with pan and scan 2.35 cut down to 1.78 on top of it all. I doubt they are going to make the high def players sold in the first 2 years incompatible with the later discs just to take care of less than 1% of the market.

Well it seems to me that one of the two formats should include an algorithm that would allow for full vertical resolution 2.35:1 ratio (at least). For example, this could be a competitive advantage that HD-DVD could use to get the big screen, high end buyers and also get some studios and directors into their camp as it were. I know it would influence my decision to go with Blue Ray or HD-DVD if one supported full vertical resolution 2.35:1 / CH set up and the other did not. I don't know how many folks currently are going CH, but 5 years ago how many front projectors were sold versus today? Perhaps the projectors themselves will have prismic lenses built in in the future? And 2.35:1 would be just a turn of a dial away . . . . hey, that was my idea.

Where has it been confirmed that neither HD-DVD and Blu-Ray will be encoded to afford support for full a vertical resolution of 2.35:1 in a CH set up?

I think it isn't "confirmed they won't have it" as much as it is that neither camp has made any mention of it in their specs. With players hitting the shelves so soon I doubt we are going to see any changes this late in the game. I could be wrong, but I wouldn't put money on getting anamorphic CinemaScope into the spec.

Like I've said before, back in 1996, no-one saw 16:9 coming either...

Mark

One workaround would be to encode with MPEG which has provision for 20:9. I know it is not ideal in that it is an older codec, but it would allow all players to decode the stream as MPEG2 *is* part of the spec.

ted

It might still happen. There was a post on another forum with plasmas that came out in native 20:9 ratio. Maybe they were designed to be constant area displays, but maybe, they are sign of things to come...

When did you first see a 16:9 WS TV? I saw my first set in 1993 from JVC, but anamorphically enhanced program like DVD didn't hit the market until 1996 and they didn't turn DTV on here (Australia) until 2001...

Mark

I think I've mentioned this in another subforum, but I believe the HD D5 masters are square pixels at 1080p, so for the HD-DVD or BD to be 2.35 anamorphic is really wasting bitrate.

With DVDs coming off of HD D5s with 1080 lines of resolution to be scaled down to 480 - 576 lines and over 816 lines of resolution in 2.35:1, there was a point to it.

If the source has only 800ish lines of resolution for 2.35:1 material, then scaling them up to 1080 would add additional bitrate requirements as black bars are far easier to encode than are regular images, and the quality of the upscale won't be such that there is an increase in quality that can't be achieved by a scaler/htpc/player with stretch functions.

I'd rather get a good 816 lines than macroblocked 1080 lines, not that this will ever coexist just that if the bitbucket were the same then that's how it would play out.

They have mentioned that the black areas are defined in metadata stored on the discs so that scalers would know what to not display if you were to fullscreen it for purposes of say horizontal stretches.

Cheers...
Duy-Khang Hoang

Trying not to beat a dead horse, but want to make sure I understand.... With the way HD-DVD's stand right now they will have black bars on top/bottom for movies in 1.85 or 2.35 AR - the same way DVD's now do with a letterbox?

thanks!
Austin

The way it looks HD-DVD/Blu-ray will be square pixels formats. It appears they support 4x3 and 16x9 resolutions (I believe I saw 1440x1080 and 1920x1080 given as examples once). Anything wider than 16x9 (1.85, 2.35 etc) will have bars just like anamorphic DVDs today.

That would be a shame, but most likey what will happen...

Mark