Industry Insiders Q&A Thread: only Questions to insiders please - Page 59  

Addressed here on page 46 of this thread.

- Talk

Anyone have any idea how many HD-DVD players have shipped or sold to date? we've been mulling this around on another thread and have some conflicting numbers from various sources.

Any light you can shed would be appreciated.

Thanks

Amir,

MS has stated that they will not publish any 360 games on HD DVD. Is there anything stopping 3rd party developers from putting games or extra content on an HD DVD?

Probably not in the short term as there are no APIs to access the second drive within a game. But it is an interesting suggestion :).

Note that the above is my personal opinion. I don't know enough about the Xbox game architecture to give a definitive answer.

I'm certain you have to go through a certification process to finalize your 360 game. So if MS won't certify a HD-DVD game, you will never be able to release it. Or at least you will never get the disc pressed so that it can run on the 360. So if MS says no HD-DVD games, a 3rd party won't be able to make one.

Amirm, yesterday Gamevideos.com posted a video of some MS employees showing off the peripherals (including the addon drive). At the end of the video was a tag line to check back today (8/23) for prices and packages. Nothing so far, any news (or hope of impending news?)

link to video

I take it that the video decoder chip of the HD-A(X)1 is not able to actually decode the 1080p/24 content on the discs as such but adds 3:2 pulldown and outputs just 1080i/60.

In theory this doesn't/shouldn't matter much - but in the real world it actually does:

1) From the technical point of view you need to "deinterlace" (inverse telecine) the 1080i/60 stream in order to display it on a progressive display device. That has to happen at some point. Problem is there are VERY few video processors/scalers and even less display devices out there in peoples homes that do a proper job (read: restore the full vertical resolution of the 24p source and not just "bob" the "interlaced" stream) with that. When you are lucky and have a device that allows for proper inverse telecine it is still not a very elegant solution to go the 24p content->60i decoding and output->24p/48p/60p display route.

2) Sony has a (stupid or not so stupid, see above) marketing weapon with this whole 1080i versus 1080p issue. You hear BB employees convincing Joe Six Pack that BluRay is the way to go BECAUSE it is 1080p and HD-DVD is not. You read USA Today articles claiming that BluRay is the more advanced format BECAUSE it is 1080p. You even see alot of confusion around here at a so called enthusiast forum regarding this matter. Sony has done a marvelous job of making the general public believe that BluRay's 1080p "support" is vital. They even obviously made Samsung integrate an extra "deinterlacing"/inverse telecine chip into their BluRay player just to keep the 1080p argument and marketing buzz going.

Now on to my question - Is the hardware design/SoC that allows native 1080p/24 decoding and output (without any inverse telecine step in between) already available and ready to use for a next generation Toshiba player? Or is upcoming PC HD-DVD playback going to be the only solution for "real", native 1080p/24 decoding for the time being?

Oh yeah! I can't wait to try that out. But the question remains, will either format support the extra bitdepth? I hope we find out soon if ever.

Cjplay.

Amir,

I heard that the new firmware fixes the "720p bug" in the A1. Question... is the player bobbing to 540P then converting to 720p with the fix or applying IVT/3-2 reversal in order to get a proper 1080p frame to downconvert to 720p (I'm assuming not).

thanks!

A few questions if I may:
With PS3 offering a model without HDMI and possibly the HD DVD add on for the X box 360 also haveing a version without HDMI are we seeing a move away from this being a required part of the BD/HD implimentation?

There has been some confusion re the BD writer from Sony, and its ability to play back commercial BD releases without the presence of an HDMI supporting graphics card can anyone offer a more definitive answer?

I really appreciate all the time and effort the insiders have invested in this thread

John

I don't know what they fixed unfortunately. We may run some tests to see what it is doing. If reports are right that it looks as good as 1080i on a 720p display, then it seems like it is doing the right thing.

HDMI is not required in either format.

Amir or anyone in the know for HD DVD

what is IME (is it PIP and the audio that goes with it or does it also include subtitles and menus )

does IME have a max bitrate (and what is it) or does each part have their own limits (IME video can't be longer then X, audio can’t be higher then Y....)

I cannot comment on how CE companies use our chip in any given product. But if they want to achieve 24P that is possible.

I have a general question: People use the term "pulldown". Does anyone really understand what that means?

(This is a trick question of course; We know the answer.)

OK, got the answer to this. Region coding is a function of the console itself. Not the drive or the software for it. So you can attach an HD DVD drive to your machine and the main drive would still act in the manner it does today for you.

IIRC (at 1 in the morning): In the days of "TV Film Islands" a frame of film in the gate was shown 2 times, then the next frame was "Pulled Down" and shown 3 times, then the process repeated. Modern telecines moves the film at a constant speed under the scanner.

This is a trick question mainly because we non-insiders are not allowed to answer in this thread! :eek: I'll do it nonetheless as an exception this one time, cause you explicitly asked.

I believe many think 3:2 pulldown and inverse telecine are identical. But actually 3:2 pulldown is the opposite of inverse telecine. 3:2 pulldown means converting a progressive source to 3:2 interlaced. Inverse telecine reverts this process. Now what price did I win? Do I win a free wish? Then I wish for CUE free decoders! :p

Does the presence of Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD logos on the PS3 mean that it can output the audio streams over HDMI 1.3, or does it mean that it can also decode them? Also DTS had different logos for DTS output and DTS decoding so does anyone know if the same is true for the new audio codecs?

David, I can't find your post but I think you had asked if Sony could put out video from the BD burner over HDMI. I am sure no one is going to answer your question here :). So thought I should mention that it would be against their AACS license to output digital signals without copy protection.

Amir, could you elaborate on with what configurations burners can output analog signals, digital signals?

Assuming that at some point there are tools at the more prosumer level that allow for authoring with VC-1, what pc configurations are going to be required?

I am coming at this market primarily from the non studio stand point, there is an significant about of interest on the part of people in this market space in VC-1 authoring and Burners using HD DVD can you offer any timeframe when these tools/configurations might be generally available?

Sony is just starting to push AVCHD on standard dvd's with a new line of hd consumer camcorders. supposedly gathering support from a number of the other camcorder manufactueres. Issue is that the only devices to play then are BR players/ pc's or PS3 officially. There is interest in being able to play these in HD dvd devices and xbox -360 either nativeily on the DVD drive or on the optional HD DVD drive. Is this something that looks feasible and likely?

There is significant interest in taking HDV footage, editing it and creating VC-1 HD content with a broader ability to play back on not only the pc, and hd dvd devices, and as mentioned above X box 360 but also standalone DVD players. With some of the players adding in more support for upconverting to HD etc, is there any activity to add vc-1 hd support for consumer generated content in standalone dvd players?


Again I really appreciate your time and effort

John

Insiders,

Thanks for all you discussion. I'd like to bring up HTPC's as they have not been discussed much. With the HDCP enabled video cards just starting to show up on store shelves I'm curious as to how Dolby TrueHD/DTS-HD will be handled on the PC. I saw a Realtek slide that showed without "content protection" audio will be downsample/mixed to 2ch 16/48. Does this mean in addition to a HDCP video card, us HTPC users will require a soundcard that supports "content protection" in order to listen to TrueHD/DTS-HD? Furthermore, these HDCP compliant video cards only have SPDIF passthrough, so even if Intervideo or Cyberlink HD-DVD/Bluray software decoded the TrueHD/DTS-HD soundtracks into 5.1 LPCM, how do we get the 5.1 LPCM to our receivers? SPDIF doesn't support 5.1 LPCM as far as I know.

Also, is there any ETA as to when we may see HD-DVD or Bluray PC drives?



Thanks again.

The In Movie Experience on Warner discs and The Total Experience on Uni discs is a combination of sub video & audio, subtitles, graphics (animated and still), and iHD to control it all. The sub video is compressed at several resolutions at or below full-res D1 (720x480). However, each of the supported resolutions is either 480 or 240 high, so no 720x400 for a 16x9 IME like Dukes' IME was.

For your second question, it's very debateable. The bitrate of just the video is around 1-2Mbits ABR for at least the Warner IME. The TE for Uni could have it higher or lower. The bitrate of the sub video can be higher or lower as necessary, but it has a much smaller buffer than SD main video to facilitate the secondary video decoder. The audio is normally at 192Kbps DD+ or possibly lower. However, the internal mixer is controlled by iHD and lowers/raises the feature audio to accomodate the sub audio. The subtitles are just another regular subtitle stream that includes the IME's dialog in it.

The graphics subsystem supports several formats. These graphics can be loaded at one of 2 times. A) Before the feature starts during any element with low enough bitrate to support muxing up to 64MB of material and the A/V/S of that particular element. B) During the feature replacing an element in the 64MB buffer. That content must be muxed into the video at specific points before it is needed. However, it can be loaded at whatever bandwidth is left in the feature, so if only 20Kbits exist, then the graphic will be loaded at 2.5Kbytes per second, or if there's 1Mbit left, then it'll load at 125KBytes per second. However, 2 necessary graphics can't/shouldn't overlap each other in that part of the mux. So technically, the graphics loading has no definable "bitrate" in either case as it could range from 1Mbit to 29Mbits since the max mux rate is 30.24.

The iHD control is Javascript commands that tell it the X/Y coordinates and the scaling of the element(s) including the video, audio mixed levels, subtitle location, graphic location(s), and fadeins and outs. It's exactly never when an element is actually shown at full 720x480 since that's 1.50 aspect video. It's shown at 640x480 or stretched to 854x480 or below for 4x3 and 16x9, respectively. Most of the time, the scaling is in the 60% range.

I hope I answered your question.

Cjplay.

The HDMI supports multi-channel to the receiver according to Sapphire's press release. Therefore, you probably need an HDMI receiver with video pass-through/output. But, there's always the analog connections on an Audigy or M-Audio card. It works for the Toshiba.

Sapphire PR for HDMI card

Cjplay.

Tom, thank you for your reply. Please allow me to dig a bit further...

Does your BCM7411D chip (used for video decoding in the Toshiba HD-A(X)1) support NATIVE 24p decoding and output if CE companies choose to use it? Looking at the product brief at your webpage does suggest otherwise (1080i output). And it is my understanding that the Samsung BluRay player has to use an extra deinterlacing/inverse telecine chip in order to provide 1080p output with your chip.

Please understand that this is a real issue - it is not just about displays that don't do proper 1080i "deinterlacing". It is also about all the new and upcoming displays which support/show 24Hz content at its native rate (or a multiple of it like 48Hz, 72Hz,...). I cannot think of a single one of them that does proper inverse telecine -> if you feed them 1080i/60 (as the BCM7411D based Toshiba does) they will show it at 60p -> with 3:2 pulldown judder! But if the input signal is 1080p/24 they will show it at a multiple of its native rate -> judderfree! And you will agree with me that THIS is a real revelation and the only way to go.

As much as some people try to make us believe that the 1080p BluRay argument is pointless marketing buzz - in reality it isn't because proper 1080i deinterlacing and inverse telecine is more an exception than a given in the market place today. Even if some day our display devices and video processors would support proper processing - isn't it just the most natural thing to decode and output progressive 24Hz content at its native rate? "Word is" that the BCM7411D chip is not able to do it.
"I cannot comment on how CE companies use our chip in any given product. But if they want to achieve 24P that is possible" -> Does this mean that CE companies have to implement tricky 24p->60i->60p "solutions" like the Samsung in order to provide progressive output with your chip?

Tom, can you confirm that it is in fact a hardware limitation of the chip and can therefor not be "fixed" by a firmware upgrade? If true can you confirm that this shortcoming is being worked on and a "native" 24p decoder chip will be available from Broadcom in the future?

Thank you very much for your time and sorry for the uncomfortable questions asked!

Amir,

I'm very puzzled and somewhat disappointed about the lack of initiative I see from Microsoft as THE PC company regarding HTPC HD-DVD playback solutions. You are pushing the xBox360 addon while deserting your basis (HT)PC market. I guess there are definitely more PC users out there waiting for a proper HD-DVD playback and drive solution than xBox users -> especially among those really concerned about PQ (-> which is the HD-DVD key market).

The big questions remains - and I know you refuse to answer it - will the HD-DVD xBox360 addon be compatible/usable as external USB2 drive with PCs???
Given the expected price point of the addon it is a pretty safe bet that it will take the HTPC market by storm -> considering that the cheapest BluRay PC drive will be about three times its price. This would be huge!

Amir, when will we know? Does MS take the HTPC market seriously (products like the Media Center Edition suggest so) and can we expect the same level of commitment and efforts in order to bring HD-DVD solutions to starving HTPC users as we see in other areas.

PS: Cjplay, nice to see you so interested in HTPC HD-DVD playback!

Yes, of course.

I am having that datasheet fixed. It doesn't say "we don't support 24p". What it says is that "we support 1080i". There is a difference. The people who put that there weren't attuned to the 24p sensitivity requirement when they wrote it. They were thinking old-television, rattled off the basics, and moved on. We can do 24P no problem.

Which "P" are you talking about? Above you were talking about 24P, but here I think you may have switched gears. It would help me if you specified the frame rate. Thanks.

We (the Blu-ray and HD DVD group in Broadcom) totally agree.

"The word" is totally inaccurate. Think about it: decoding a progressive frame and outputting is easier than decoding and trying to output while fiddling with interlace nonsense. Doing all the 3:2 stuff is actually *MORE* complex and potentially more memory bandwidth intensive that just doing the basic 24P thing for film content.
No Prob.

I should add a few more things:

Depending on which blue-laser Standard you favor, there may be differences in how the video gets processed after the video decoders but before the HDMI connector. While the main program film content is *always* progressive (to answer another question on this list), the PiP channel may in fact be interlaced (unfortunately). This creates a situation where the player must comingle progressive and interlaced streams (not to mention presentation graphics etc.).

There is no easy way out of that box - once you introduce interlace, with it's spatial and temporal screwups, you're dead meat. And if you want to output progressive after that, you *must* deinterlace. Harsh reality.

pip and "features" comingled with primary 1080p video streams should *always* be converted to the primary feature's frame-rate prior to merging. IMO all playback hardware... HD DVD and BD... should be designed this way regardless of disc-encoding strategy.

If I select 1080p24 output from my HD box, that's what I should get when watching a 1080p24 movie... regardless of the pip mode for Peter Jackson's commentary.

I'll answer a few more posits on this list while I am awake:

* All film content is progressive. 10+ bit film data may get stuffed into an interlace "container". But if that is done properly (and consistently) it is easy to undo in the player and/or at the display. So it is inherently 24P, and easily extractable and reconstructable, but some people confuse that with interlace on this list. It is progressive content, but it is stored in an interlaced world.

* All new display technologies are progressive. While they may be able to eat an interlaced source (and/or undo 24P content as per the above), if fed properly they are more likely to produce a better picture. So there is no reason to send them interlaced pictures any more if you can avoid it (unless your source can't deinterlace properly, but that is a separate subject). This belongs to a negotiation between the player and display hookup.

* All new video cameras are progressive in the sense that they capture a whole frame at once in their silicon sensors, even if some of them serially scan out the charges in their photon-receptor cells. They still sample "reality" all at once in a 2D array (Craig Todd's so-called "splat scan"). In many cases the fact that the information is sent out in odd/even rows of pixel samples is irrelevant. It is reconstructed into a progressive frame at the other end before you need to know about it.

* Unfortunately, a few broadcast networks and some old content are interlaced and that content may find it's way onto discs. This means that either the blue-laser player must deal with the issue if you have a disc with interlace or the authoring company must de-interlace prior to emission on the format. Add potentially-interlaced PiP into the mix and you may require a chip (or IP core) that does deinterlacing before progressive output to the display. What do your customers want and what features do you wish to offer to the marketplace?

* SoC companies building designs that universally support both Blu-Ray and HD DVD must address all of the above (as well as supporting both BD-J and iHD).

So question to HD DVD insiders and/or compressionist's, Does the PiP channel video have to be interlaced? Can the original video to be used for PiP be converted to match the feature's 1080p/24 format during authoring before going unto the disc? In other words, can extra work done during authoring, help avoid problems for users (videophiles) who try to use 1080p/24 output from the player or for laptop users who are using 72 Hz display frame rate?

Bob

Edit: I took so long typing my question, that I see that it was already somewhat answered by Tom. :o

As I am a member of both the Blu-ray and HD DVD communities, and I attend both sets of meetings, I will not (can not) take sides. But I hear what you're saying.

The only thing I can suggest is that you lobby your respective Studios and authoring companies. You might also consider joining the respective organizations and participating in the authoring Guidelines activities. That could result in a recommended mode where the PiP channel (and presentation graphics and interactive graphics and subtitle) were all computed/downsampled to 24P before combination with the main program stream for final 24P output.

(If it were up to me I would omit all the PiP and interactive crap and just do great video and great audio on these discs and leave it at that!)