Industry Insiders Q&A MASTER THREAD [separate thread for Xbox/Add On & PS3] - Page 29  

And remember, supporting the downloading of subtitles is definitely a networked content scenario. Even if publishers aren't ready to make the Portuguese subtitles yet, you can at least suggest they make sure titles are ready to download subtitles at a later date.

Fully agree. I have put that request into Xbox team already. I will keep pushing them to deliver .

I noticed the same thing. Also the PS3 reported 7.1 PCM, is that correct? PCM sound was amazing, if you have the space I don't see why you'd use Dolby TrueHD or DTS MA. More titles with uncompressed PCM are welcome, I prefer to let the receiver do any post processing to LPCM audio.

To all insiders, I don't agree that DD + or DTS HD core sounds comparable, give us more uncompressed PCM or lossless audio tracks on these formats.

Yes, I can imagine how your knowlege you're hearing uncompressed over losslessly compressed would help you enjoy the exact same bits ever so much more .

Receivers won't be doing the post processing to PCM in the future, since that means you 'll only be getting a single audio track, which is what you don't want.

Decompressing audio in the reciever makes just as much sense as decompressing video in the reciever...

It turns out the 360 VGA still does not work at 1080p with Sony SXRD XBR2 RPTV's. Can we expect this update with the DD/DTS update as well?

I've also viewed the VGA output on several displays and the picture does seem washed out on most. I would be dissapointed to get 1080P output and not be be able to select video output levels.

Please get the team Xbox team to fix the VGA output.

Think you misunderstood, for me, the Pioneer Elite receivers apply THX post processing, speaker eq, and room correction on LPCM just fine, so I don't mind not getting all the benefits of TrueHD 5.1 dialog normalization or dynamic range control. I don't see why you think receivers won't be supporting this in the future, this is a highly desired feature, just take a look at this Amp/Receiver forum thread . TrueHD is pointless anyhow on the 360 today as we can't transport the decoded TrueHD (any plans on changing that!?).

BD has the space for uncompressed PCM, so why should they encode with TrueHD or DTS MA, regardless if it is bit for bit the same (I get that, been listening to MLP audio for years)? What other reasons are there besides space?

I am sure BD titles are saving some pennies on royalties using PCM, and given the reported higher replications costs I am sure it helps.

There is an audible difference with the same DD track@640kpbs and uncompressed PCM at 4+ Mbps. Even a non enthusiast can tell the difference at the same SPL levels.

In general I think audio was poorly planned for the new formats with the CE manufacturers. Having to mix software menu audio (and whatever else BD-J or iHD features) in the player creates this limitation of having to decode in the player.

This was not the industry standard for DVD except early on. I see a similar trend with the new HD formats, but what you are suggesting, and what has been reported thus far is that if you want all audio options, decoding in the player will continue to be the case as these format matures. I don't like having that limitation forced on me.

But it seems the industry believes most people actually watch all the extras today, and will buy the same titles with interactive features tomorrow that requiring mixing in the player.

I agree, I would not want a receiver decompressing video but I wouldn't put video in the same category as audio, as most receivers are built primarily for audio decoding and video switching. Furthermore, if my receivers components where better than the players, wouldn't you want to decompress in the receiver?

With that said, I'd take bitsream audio over iLink any day from a transport device to a receiver.

I just want the best video and audio presentation "."

No frills.

Perhaps next time the HD DVD trailer rolls into town a demo can be done of DD/DD+ and uncompressed PCM from the same sountrack. It doesn't sound the same to me.

Admir thanks for all your timely feedback and your passionate recap of what HD DVD has done and plans to do. It helped some of us HD owners who are feeling somewhat apprehensive about where we are going. I wish Universal had your passion that could be seen on the AVS forum and came to speak with the members here.

A lot of the apprehensive us HD DVD owners have not only came from the Universal no show but from the effort owners put in over the pass 4-5 months emailing non HD DVD major studios to support the format and allow us consumers to decide the winner. The effort we put in I don't believe was recognized by these studios, nor did they recognize the momentum and strong number of users we have to date. So our only hope at this time is the strategy the HD members have laid out at CES. If we don't have a large enough base of HD DVD owners in place by 2007 Xmas to persuade these non HD DVD studios over, than other options need to be considered providing it's not too late.

Admir I'm not sure if someone has asked or if you can give an opinion on this but it might be time for MS to consider the impact of owning a studio and competing with Sony/Blu-Ray on an equal footing. Would this move be something that MS would consider or even possible? Please get Disney and if you can afford it buy Fox as well.

ONKYO's AV product isn't cheap.But the Blu-ray's entironment is more better than HD DVD.I think a costly HD DVD player will be difficult to sale.

So, why ONKYO support HD DVD? Anybody know that?

There are SD DVD players that cost 10 to 20 times more than BD players. If someone can charge so much for a DVD player, why do you think they can't do the same for HD DVD?

Reasons which motivate these companies are:

1. HD DVD's reputation for a/v quality. Yes, BD has improved but HD DVD has nailed this. Indeed, many of the above companies sell their expensive SD DVD players by showing that they can upsample The Fifth Element and have a better picture than BD version of the same movie! After such demos, it would be hard for them to turn around and sell BD players .

2. Ease of building HD DVD players. As you know, many of these high-end companies innovate above the core DVD stack. With HD DVD/BD being far more complex, and their volumes comparably low, it is very hard for them to get into market without help. And help they got in the form of Microsoft+Broadcom reference platform. We do the basic functionality, letting them innovate above that.

3. We are keen on helping them as we don't see them as competitor. There is no equiv. company to us in BDA.

4. Open arms. Frankly, we work much harder to bring people to HD DVD, than BDA. We know high-end products as enthusiasts and that matters to these companies.

I could go on but hopefully you get the picture.

Is Onkyo actually going to build a player or just joined the HD DVD group?

They are also members of the BDA (and also have no product to show for it)

They are building a player...

Amirm, humor me for a minute...lets just say that we had a truce and everyone decided to put thier films on HD DVD and thier games on Bd....would this not be a fiscally sound and attractive solution for the principles involved?? I am asking your opinion here....not if this has been ever talked about..or has it?

Hey, I am game. Where do I sign?

Really, the strength of HD DVD is in movie mastering. If we standardize on that, then we are cool with BD being used for recording and proprietary things like PS3 games....

For those interested, see my (perhaps politically-incorrect) response to Amir's earlier "all's well with HD DVD post" in the Format Battle thread here.

Is it perhaps intended to be a universal/dual format player?

you said "Hitachi showing 200GB BD-ROM discs playing back on current hardware#

Do you mean Blu-ray movie players?
Can current players play that or would it require firmware upgrade.
Does this mean that in the future we can\\will? see movies on disks bigger than 50GB. Imagine Lotr with a seamless branching

More infomation would be welcome.

Didn't the hitachi have a modified laser/hardware component as well? If I remember right, that was the unit that was shown in the plexiglass shell with the display above it indicating what Layer it was reading?

I think you're conflating the issue of codec and transport (which is pretty common - HD DVD and BD have a very different high-end audio mode than DVD).

The output of a player is going to be identical between a PCM and a TrueHD track - they both get decoded to the exact same bits in the player, and (ideally) transported out via PCM, or if if there isn't HDMI, through what the player does support.


BD uses PCM because it doesn't have a mandatory lossless audio codec, not because there's an actual difference in audio output between lossless and PCM. Lots of BD titles have had compromised video quality due to space constraints.


Well, yes, but there's a wide range of options on HD DVD between DD @ 640 and PCM. You have TrueHD, of course. And DD+ @ 1.5 Mbps is extremely high quality, supporting >16-bit for example. There are certainly scenarios where DD+ will provide a more accurate version of a high-bit master than PCM @ 16-bit would.


It's a paradigm shift, not a limitation . We decode audio in the player for the same reason we decode video in the player - no-latency compositing. It's the simplest, offers the most flexibility, and the most predictible quality.


Can you proivde some more clarity on what limitations you're getting on that?

And can you contrast that to the limitations having the video decoded in the player doesn't cause?

But it seems the industry believes most people actually watch all the extras today, and will buy the same titles with interactive features tomorrow that requiring mixing in the player.


decompression is decompression - there's really only one correct way to do it. Now, audio processing (like room correction) - that's the domain of the receiver, and that's where it ought remain. But there's no problem applying it to the muxed audio output from the player.

It would have been nice if the capability to decode was done before the paradigm was shifted.

We've seen with both formats that decoding isn't done at all or added incrementally via firmware (2ch TrueHD originally for the A1/XA1, increased to 5.1 later via firmware, neither format currently does DTS-HDMA, the 360 add-on will never get these formats out, etc). That both formats are behaving similarly makes me wonder if there is some ulterior motive to this (if not collusion). This could have been a great talking point against the other side except both sides suspiciously embraced the same paradigm shift for their own format.

If I take my tinfoil hat off, I don't see that both formats are all that far apart, though, but it still makes me do a Spock-style eyebrow raise.





Heh, sounds like some of these industry people are trying to justify their work (& continued existence). Speaking for myself, the deleted scenes are what I use the most, though I would prefer if all/most could employ seemless branching for integrating them in the main title (I understand this is made difficult by the necessity to rescore, etc, though). A good commentary track with the primary actors and director/creative types is my most personally desired feature, though. Everything is far distant in use, if not desire. I hope there will be an off button and/or that I can readily ignore most of this interactivity, as I currently do with IME/U-Control/Blu-wizard/etc after maybe the first full main title viewing (when I play around with special features).

The implications of this interactivity is either far more ominious (especially if I'm wearing my tinfoil hat) or annoyingly irrelevent (especially given all the emphasis). Are the primary purposes really customer enjoyment or instead are these interactivity features aimed at advertising and/or microtransactions of some sort, if not an incentive to couple an abstracted additional layer of DRM?

Is it possible some folks are thinking of changing the trailers at the beginning of a title (unskippable for some studios, and not succeptible to the same DVD-style tricks to skip them) to current releases, for example?

Occam's Razor would suggest that these are new formats, with codecs being added incrementally . And for the 360, it's got TOSLink out. And, again, audio decode support and audio transport support are completely different axes. You can get PCM convered to AC-3, or AC-3 converted to PCM. They're two different line items on the feature lists, and ought not to be confused or conflated.

I'm not sure what the ulterior motive would even be hear. The advantages of getting audio decode and mixing into the players are obvious, and the disadvantages theoretical edge cases at best.

Perhaps someone who disagrees with this approach could suggest what their alternative would be? Any other way to do it I've thought of is dramatically worse.


Ah! There you go. Commentary tracks win huge with the new audio paradigm. Before, you got a pause between switching commentary on/off - now it's seamless. Before, the background audio in the commantaries was much worse than without it - now they're the same. Before, lots of bits had to be used on commentaries so that the background audio would sound better - now they don't. So, it'd be completely feasible to add a dozen commentary tracks to a movie, with fewer bits than 2-3 would have taken before, with a much higher quality audio experience.


Commentary is a type of interactivity. Live menus are a type of interactivity. It's all the same code underneath. It's like building a web site - just because banner adds are possible, doesn't mean that HTML was designed purely to deliver banner adds.

We've got hundereds of HD DVD titles on the market now, and every one from a major studio is using the "HDi" advanced interactive features for user interaction, and there hasn't been any overbearing advertising stuff like you talk about above, which is a pretty definitive proof in my mind that it's there to make a better movie experience.


As as consumer, you should tell them not to do unskippable trailers, if that's important to you.

How is that communication supposed to take place?

I wonder if the insiders might comment on this article (I know, I know, it's Charlie on the Inquirer): I'm not allowed to post the link (too few posts), but if you go to theInquirer (dot) net, there is an article titled "Blu-ray, HD both doomed as pr0n industry twiddles thumbs".

Specifically:

Is it true that Sony or the BDA can revoke a license because of content? How about the DVD Forum?

Charlie makes some claims about prod/master/replication costs. Are these even close to accurate?

(Of less importance) Is it true that Disney pressured Sony on the whole porn thing and BR?

Thanks,
Mike

Using the same method could this be applied to give us multiple languages on the same disk at little cost in bandwidth.

ie. have a high quality track of the music and other language independent features, and then mix it in with the appropriate language track that only has dialog...

How many audio tracks can you decode at once

Is this the article? http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36942

If so, seems like he did pretty good research. And this is high praise, coming from us who usually get beat up good by Inquirer .


We (DVD Forum) certain do not. And I am sure BDA would say the same thing. DVD Forum has RAND provisions for its technology which stands for Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory licensing. So one can not withhold a license for this use.


Pretty close.


We have also heard that rumor. At the same time, we have also heard of core BDA companies chasing this business and offering free equipment and such in the past. So it is hard to rectify the two rumors. Maybe one won over the other in recent times.

What is not hard to rectify is that brand name companies will not replicate such content. Today's alternative content on DVD is produced by specialty replicators. The same firms can easily upgrade their lines to do HD DVD and produce such content at very reasonable cost since no price subsidy is necessary for HD DVD. All of these forces are driving non-adult content creation, especially in Europe for HD DVD.

Good point, but banner ads, tracking cookies, spyware and adware are what we ended up with. Is it feasable to have a sort of "HDi firewall" to get the stuff we want and not the stuff that we don't? The intent seems quite nice, but we've seen seemingly innocuous intent turned to advertising purposes before...

One area I do think HD-DVD leads on significantly is the "smooth" factor of their menus (sliding up/down, etc). With BD they're more abrupt and "pop" in or out. It's a small thing, but something I do appreciate on my HD-DVD's. So kudos to everyone involved with HDi for that.



I'd love to. How?

Cool, they all make sense. Is there a mandated time parameter (for example studios must offer MC for at least 2 years from production-firsts shipment)? I can imagine a small indy studio that might be OK with MC, but the idea of keeping the service available 5 years down the road for a movie that sold 10k might be a bit much. If there is a mandated period, how long is it?

Right here, if I am succesful in getting cjplay back. Hopefully one day, we get reps from other studios too beside Sony.

For now, rest assured that the Microsoft insiders who answer questions here do push the studios on your behalf on such points. We don't pretend to know their business mind you . But we do speak on your behalf to them.

You know I don't know for sure. Regardless, there may be "clearing house"/service organizations that pop up to provide such support for smaller companies. And they can provide such support long term.

OK, this has been bugging me

When did "iHD" become "HDi", and why?

To Talkstr8t

I'm new here, and I've been reading yours and Amir's and Ben's posts. What I don't get is your signature. If you are a Blu-Ray Insider why dont you speak for the BDA?

Moreover, I would not advertise that particular post as it makes you look churlish and combative over Blu-Ray, which you say you aren't speaking for but are an insider of?