StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Darth Wong wrote:There is zero advantage of HD DVD over regular DVD other than the increased resolution.

Quibble here, there's also the new lossless audio options made available by the higher capacity of the media. That said, the audio outlay will probably be as much as a new HD display if you want a 7.1 system that will make the difference between DVD surround and Dolby TrueHD/DTS-HD perceptible, let alone appreciable.

You could use the term resolution for the sound as well. The higher number of audio channels is usually less noticeable than the image anyway. When you have 5.1 Dolby, 7.1 isn't that much of an improvement just as the extra visual lines aren't worth the expense.

If you were going from mono or stereo to surround, then it'd certainly be worth it.

Though, on the bigger HDTVs, SD content usually looks WORSE than it does on on an SDTV.

I can see why HDTV owners would want such a format, especially people with theater setup.

That said, as someone who hasn't bothered to buy a HDTV, I don't really care so much who wins.

Except now that I'm aware that Microsoft wants to get paid royalties for every disc with VC-1 encoding, and most HD-DVD disks uses VC-1, I'm sort of worried there.

Neither Sony or Microsoft are the type of companies I'd like to see win a format war. But I'd take Sony over Microsoft. Still, I've generally preferred HD-DVD to Blu-ray...

Aw, who cares. I don't care who wins anymore.

Praxis wrote:Though, on the bigger HDTVs, SD content usually looks WORSE than it does on on an SDTV.

Not necessarily - but OTA (since I'm too cheap for cable) looks pretty bad on my 720p display. OTOH, DVDs look pretty good (esp. with my upscaling and deinterlacing player).

Except now that I'm aware that Microsoft wants to get paid royalties for every disc with VC-1 encoding, and most HD-DVD disks uses VC-1, I'm sort of worried there.

H.264 and MPEG-2 also require royalties per-disc.

SDTV does tend to look shit on any large screen. The image quality is really no better on a decent HDTV than on pre-HD big screens. You're still blowing up a 640x480 picture to something a couple of times larger than the intended delivery size. I couldn't stand watching normal TV on my parent's HDTV, even though it was an otherwise great Sony Bravia. Now even they notice the artefacts on some channels, and that's saying something.

I've always thought SD looked fine on our large pre-HD SDTV. Looks better than on HDTVs of similar sizes, sometimes. No idea why.

Praxis wrote:I've always thought SD looked fine on our large pre-HD SDTV. Looks better than on HDTVs of similar sizes, sometimes. No idea why.

Pretty much because SDTVs are designed to display the low-resolution image well ... and HDTVs usually aren't.