Quote:
Originally Posted by
Tom Monahan 
I know that the HD DVD will have that "In movie experiance" but I could care less about that or extras as only video quality and to a lesser extent audio quality interest me. Do you think the HD DVD will look and sound the same as the Blu-Ray?
Thanks,
Tom
Tom,
it will be bit for bit the same encoding (just the metadata attached to the video stream will change - eg. 3:2 pulldown flags).
The only potential difference will due to your playback hardware - but comparing the output of my XA2 (NEC decoder) with my PS3 (software decoding) and Panasonic, Pioneer/Sony (both based on a Sigma SOC) BD player I would say in general differences in final output quality of VC-1 streams are VERY small indeed - arguably Sigma based players provide "the best" performance.
Sound will be equal too - the TrueHD track has just the potential to sound as good as the native PCM stream on BD (which is the original source signal) - assuming postprocessing filters like Warner's always enabled "Dialog Normalization" flag have no negative impact on the quality of the final TrueHD output.
Advantages of the HD-DVD version: IME (BD provides these clips as extra features) and Internet connectivity (downloading of some additional content - like they couldn't just have stored these files on the disc
). If you enjoy these go with the HD-DVD release.
