Industry Insiders Master Q&A thread IV: ONLY Questions to Insiders - Page 157  

Thanks Amirm A little initial financial support might be helpful in convincing studios to try this out for a few titles. Just curious, what barriers or hesitations do you think studios might have against this idea?

To any insider (HD DVD or Blu-Ray): the following questions may sound naive, but I would be grateful to anyone who answers them. Please, also bear in mind that I am
format neutral and love both HD DVD and BD. So, don't flame me!

1. Is there any new contract which binds Warner to Blu-Ray? If yes, between Warner and what corporations?

2. Is there somewhere, in all the contracts which bind a studio to a given format, a
set of clauses which make the contracts void if the format ends up being unable to deliver certain features at certain dates (for example, easy manufacturing of BDs with PIP)?

To any insider. Does an entire layer have to be used exclusively for HD DVD or DVD on a twin disc? Could the first 1 and 2/3 layers be used for HD DVD (25 gb) and the last 5 gb for DVD? Seems like a waste of the potential of the second layer just to use it all for DVD.

Thanks,

Grant

When playing back high def media, how much better would content appear with an LCD HDTV with LED backlighting? How many LED backlights would there be in an average 1920x1080 HDTV? Would an LCD TV with LED backlights improve the black levels and contrast levels of a TV that was displaying a starfield with thousands of bright tiny stars against a totally black background, and if so, by how much?

For such displays, would it be a lot better if HDM was stored with >8 bit colour depth?

Yes, and an interesting idea, but 99+% of consumers wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a 720p product and a 1080p product on todays screens at normal viewing distances. Also, I think having two SKUs on the shelf would cause consumer confusion, especially if there were price differences. If they just did a really well-encoded 720p SKU, called it HD and didn't tell anyone, most people (except perhaps those on this list) wouldn't know the difference.

The suggestions about the using the twin disk is more about the possibility that hd dvd could have been published as ONE SKU that plays in every dvd player, high def or standard. More about reducing consumer confusion with one SKU for all players.

So could hd dvd studios pass on a modest savings difference to consumers by introducing HD as a feature addon to standard DVD sold as a standard SKU? Is the cost savings on a TWIN hd dvd replication that close to standard dvd?


My experience with the 720p content from XBLM vs the many hd dvd and blu-ray disks I own suggest the same thing to me. For 720p vs. 1080p for instance I download 720p trailers from XBLM and 1080p trailers from PSN. The PQ difference is slight even on my 70" JVC lcos or 120" dlp projector.

I'll take the 1080p when available but not much is loss if I go with the 720p.
Is this as bKilian suggests more a marketing issue where 1080p is the industry wide marketing push? A tangible feature like the fact that a fine 720p encode could be added to a standard dvd for complete compatibility with all dvd players then becomes irrelavent?