Industry Insiders Q&A Thread: only Questions to insiders please - Page 9  

thanks Amir. As opposed to just charging the HD-DVD audience a premium for COMBOS... do you think the studios will ever target DVD buyers specifically (who don't yet own HD-DVD players) for the COMBO discs? Day and date new release combos replacing stand alone DVD SKUs to seed the market.

I'd imagine most of us thought they'd target the "fence sitters" or DVD owners with the COMBO too, not just charge HD-DVD early buyers $5 more.

Amir,

thank you for all your great insights and for playing sort of our spokesman to the studios. ;)

Can you please shed some light on bobbed titles? I mean, FMJ, TPS and The Fugitive are pretty much confirmed, but what about Enter The Dragon and Lethal Weapon? There seems to be a lot of contradictory information and opinion regarding these titles

Thanks once again for all your support.

Amir, I posted this also in the news thread but I think I'll ask the question here even though I know you have some difficulty answering Xbox addon related questions (out of your division)

ATI's H.264 video decoder chosen by Microsoft for Xbox 360â„¢ HD DVD player

Does this imply that decoding can occur on the addon drive and be sent thru the 360?

Amir,

I have been interestet in codecs and such since your interview with Gary Reber in WSR issue 87 - August 2004.

As said in post above H.264 was chosen for Xbox360 HD DVD player.

That make me look into that interview again. In the interview Gary is asking you about H.264. I know the article is almost 2 years old - but what are you saying today?

I have to say I was wondering why...

Thank you for time in this forum. It's great to have you here! :)

Your last statement is what it showed. That is, they would pay $5 for a disc that was backward compatible.

No worries at all. Keep the questions coming :).

It is actually more specific than that. Each studio has their own preferred replicator that they use for their large volume of DVDs. As such, even if replication ability exists elsewhere, they rather wait until their shop can do it. And inded, when we first heard about this, we offered to connect them with other shops and they said no.

Indeed, MemoryTech has been able to produce these for a long time. But US studios would not want to send them the business.

I don't think the retailers will accept too many variations. As it is, they have to carry BD and HD DVD beside SD-DVD.

My hope is that we eventually get to this place. It will be a win-win all around as studios get to quickly migrate users to new formats with better copy protection and we get a nice, backward compatible format.

But I suspect it will be a few years before we get there...

Actually, my group is writing the Xbox player. So the activity is inside my group but the PR/marketing is not and hence the reason I can not disclose much about it.

In this case, the software was licensed for us from ATI.

No. The decoding is all in software. What we get from ATI is GPU accelleration for MPEG-4 AVC. Similar to what exists in the PC today. As I have noted before, MPEG-4 AVC is a lot more MIPS hungry than VC-1 and MPEG-2 so the best path is to utilize the GPU for it.

I don't really know the business logic behind it. So I can not explain it. Next time I meet with the right folks, I will discuss it with them and see what I can share here.

Amir, could you confirm that 30.24 Mbps is the maximum data rate for the HD DVD-Video format? Cjplay mentioned this a while ago and I have found a few documents which seem to confirm it.

Amir,

Adding onto Richards questions, the site www.lookandsoundofperfect.com states user rate at 36.55. So is it 30.24 or 36.55?

Also, has there been an official filing to get TL45GB media into the specs or is that even not necessary, presuming that all the HD DVD spec lasers can read the TL45GB media as is?

Thanks,
Robert.

Amir,

Does the HD DVD movies in store currently support MMC? I mean does the disc contain a URL for the clear house? Or could that MMC clearance be added to the disc later? I just want to make sure before I purchase Syriana.

Thanks.

You should talk to the folks at Image Entertainment. They distribute for Bandai Visual USA who has all their work done at MemoryTech. All of their authoring and replication is done in Japan for titles sold in the US.

This is really a fantastic thread.

Amir, how would you characterize the possibility of 45G HD-DVD disc:

1. Not technically possible
2. Technically possible but cost prohibitive
3. Neither 1 or 2 but will never happen for business reasons
4. Other (please explain :) )

Thanks for any info!

30.24 Mbps is the maximum mux rate (the total of all the streams plus muxing overhead). 36.55 Mbps is the transfer rate from the disk into the track buffer.

This is analogous to DVD where the maximum mux rate is 10.08 Mbps and the transfer rate from disk to the track buffer is 11.08 Mbps.

Ron

From my understanding, in addtion to the server address info, each disc is required to have uniq ID, maybe provided by BCA. Are all HD DVD discs currently released have BCA or such to support MC?

Close to 3 :). 45 will be more expensive than 30. It will probably be cheaper to put in another DVD-9 or even DVD-15 in the same box than to do 45. So economically, it makes little sense to have it.

If studios had applications for it (e.g. must have everything on one disc), then it could be brought to market. And hence the reason I am not saying (3). Currently interest level is very low in 45 gig from content owners (no doubt due to logic above and the fact that they find 30 big enough).

Note that there is competition for 45 from hard disk storage. iHD and HD DVD system allows extra content to be downloaded to persistent/permanent storage and played from there, in sync with the main content coming from the disc itself. As such, one can go way beyond 30 gigabytes using digital downloads. You get the high-def movie in the box, and the rest comes refreshed from the web…

Can the current HD DVD players now on the market read TL 45 disks?

There is only one data point on this: me asking the engineers in charge of HD DVD whether the current drives can be firmware upgraded to read TL 45. The answer was YES. Others have doubted this but without any data point of their own, other than thinking it must be impossible....

Amir, care to relate the story behind the love triangle of iHD, Disney and BD? :)

Hmmm. I have to go home and eat dinner :). Can I answer after that?

Oh, and can we find a way for Bill/talkstr8t to close his ears while I tell the story? :)

Amirm, I've read a number of your posts and have really appreciated your contributions. You have an elegant way of taking tech and making it easily digestible, understandable, and concise. You openly expose your bias from work affiliation (the source of your knowledge) and do as good a job of trying to be unbiased as I think it's possible to do. You are doing a really good job that I don't think any logical person could find fault with and I've gotten my mind around a lot of the core issues in the competing technologies as a result of your posts. So thanks again and keep up the good work. For what it's worth, I don't find myself often giving compliments but I am not shy about doing it when I feel they have been merited.

Com'on, you are in the Green Zone here. Having said that, there is no harm putting on a flak jacket 1st. ;)

Thanks Amir

And for the rest of you other "Industry Insiders" ... come on in ... the waters fine... we like you too...

Amir -

Are you at liberty to say what functions correlate with the 3 segments of the HD-A1 F/W version?

Is one of them for the iHD build, if so are there any iHD enhancements planned?

In another thread you alluded to a feature that permits content providers to effect changes to previously released titles by embedding instructions in later releases. Can you provide details on such features. Perhaps a certain studio could raise the audio baseline on certain titles or eventually auto-skip a disc intro that is getting a little old.

Wondering when you expect the first titles to be authored with web interactivity built in.

Kudos to you and your fellow insiders for taking time to enlighten us consumers.

Not even for Return of the King:EE? :)

Does the cost of 45G negate the cost advantage of HD-DVD over BR, or is it just more expensive than 30G?

Dan Miller (Marantz),
What are your company's plans for making an HD-DVD or a BluRay (or a combo?) player going forward? Is it something we can look forward to enjoying hooking up to our VP11-S1 to watch Christmas movies on this year? ;)

Depending on how clean that master his, we should be able to fit it on HD DVD-30, sans extras. The extras could then go on a second disc.

I don't have exact cost estimates for TL 45. My sense is that it is close to BD-25 and mabye a bit higher, but cheaper than BD-50. In other words, it is half way between the two.

Yet, we also have this post from Keith

Depends on who you talk to?

Gary