HD Quality Movie Trailers v. DVD's

[frankm007]

I've been wondering, why is it that i have yet to see a tv (plasma or otherwise) with the quality of a 1081p HD apple trailer playing on my imac?

Is it that I simply haven't seen a tv with those capabilities (1081p) and/or the dvd player/dvd themselves are limiting the quality?

I'd love to watch some flicks on a 50 inch tv with that very impressive quality. What does it take?

 

[xlosltove777]

To play at true 1080p resolution a HD DVD or Blu-Ray player is needed. An upconverting DVD player can only get 1080i(I think?) , which I would expect not be as nice as the Apple Full HD trailers. I believe regular HD TV shows(which is not available for all channels and usually cost extras) only transmit in 720p also. And along with the fact most of these HDTV's only support 720p in the first place, many of the more reasonably price don't support the full 1080p.

 

[gkarris]

Source, output, and display in a nutshell...

This whole HD thing requires capable equipment down the whole line.

For full HD, your source has to be 1080p, which means 1920x1080. Then there's the whole 1080p24 vs 1080p60 which is the frames per second. The way the movie was encoded also comes into play.

You have to be able to output to the right connection and your input has to match. Non-matching connections can cause the new HD disc players to downscale the output and then your display then upscales it back, thus loosing quality.

Your display has to either be of high quality that does great scaling, or be native at 1920x1080. I have an Epson projector at 1024x768, but the salesperson said that the scaling capabilities of this brand is really good. I can confirm this as I bought the HD-DVD drive for my XBox 360 and the nice HD movies on it look stunning.

Note for HD programming, it had to be recorded in HD, or remastered from the original film to HD. Using DVD or Laserdisc or old film masters don't cut it...

I was online at Amazon and a videophile guru rated the new HD disc players he's tried as follows:

1. Pioneer Elite Bluray
2. Toshiba HD-DVD
3. Sony Bluray
4. Panasonic Bluray
5. Sony PS3
6. Samsung Bluray

 

[bigbossbmb]

1080p televisions are definitely available...

Mostly in DLP form, but there are some LCD's as well (Westinghouse, Sharp, and Sony for the LCD's). The Westinghouse 1080p tv's are surprisingly inexpensive compared to other manufacturers (37" 1080p for like $1400). Can't wait for Blu-Ray to come down in price so that we can watch some 1080p material other than trailers from Apple.

 

[Erendiox]

An upconverting DVD player can only get 1080i(I think?) , which I would expect not be as nice as the Apple Full HD trailers.

Nope. DVD players can only manage standard 640x480 resolutions.


Like everyone has said, the only way you're going to see full 1080p quality is with a 1080p TV and either HD broadcasting or HD DVDs/Blu-ray. DVDs may look nice on a bigscreen tv, but you're still only getting standard resolution.

 

[xlosltove777]

Nope. DVD players can only manage standard 640x480 resolutions.

From what I understand thats incorrect. According to wikipedia this is the DVD resolution:

The typical video resolution for an NTSC disc is 720 × 480, while a PAL disc is 720 × 576.

640 by 480 is what the videos on iTunes are, which are marketed as near DVD quality(I hadn't realized the difference existed until recently).

HDMI-equipped DVD players can upconvert the video to higher definition formats such as 720p and, more rarely, 1080p

And in fact I saw one of these 1080p upconverting players in BestBuy today. I'm sure the quality is nowhere near a true HD-DVD or Blu-Ray disc but still better than a regular DVD player hooked up to an HDTV. The upconverting is done through interpolation and that's about where my knowledge ends of it.

 

[bigbossbmb]

DVD resolution is 720x480 with a .9 pixel aspect ratio (NTSC standard)...this is the same resolution (and pixel aspect) as your television.

Computer monitors have square pixels. So 720x480 with .9 pixels converted for square pixels will be 640x480. So when you have DV footage from a camcorder on your computer, it will look slightly stretched too wide because it is showing you all 720x480 pixels without compensating for the difference in pixel aspect ratio.

My mom has one of the upconverting DVD players for her 1080p television and I don't really see a difference with it. I bought it for her mainly because of the other features on it, like having a memory card reader on the front and its ability to play divx files. The upconversion is just hype...your TV "upconverts" the video anyway or else it wouldn't fill the screen. The interpolation may be a little different, but not really noticable.

 

[balamw]

DVD resolution is 720x480 with a .9 pixel aspect ratio (NTSC standard)...this is the same resolution (and pixel aspect) as your television.

Minor quibble, since NTSC is an analog standard there are really no pixels on a standard TV per se, just scanlines. The 720x480 DV/DVD digital standard is a good compromise between 4:3 and 16:9 content, which is one reason it was adopted.

B

 

[Erendiox]

I think the reason iTunes markets their videos at "Near DVD Quality" is because of the encoding scheme. Videos off of iTunes are encoded more heavily, in comparison to DVD encoding, to keep the data size down.

 

[balamw]

I think the reason iTunes markets their videos at "Near DVD Quality" is because of the encoding scheme. Videos off of iTunes are encoded more heavily, in comparison to DVD encoding, to keep the data size down.

It's also due to the fact that for widescreen videos you will get 640xXXX instead of 720xXXX where XXX is determined by the actual aspect ratio. For 4:3 there really is little difference. Since they are (hopefully) encoding from raw video the difference between codecs will only mean that different kinds of compression artifacts will be introduced, even though the bitrate is quite a bit lower for H.264 than MPEG-2...

B