TerryJ said:
Any 1080p television worth anything can easily deinterlace the 1080i signal from the Toshiba HD DVD player with zero image degradation. There simply is no difference. The 1080p vs. 1080i thing (for HD DVD and BD) is a myth.
First, I mentioned that the outputting problem is common with both formats the existing HD-DVD AND Blu-Ray decks currently on the market because the decoder chip is just not that great. That is why people are making a big deal about the upcoming Sigma Designs decoder chip that will come standard in both formats' second generation machines. Look it up.
And deinterlacing an input signal is not as good as the outputting device outputting in progressive scan in the first place. Do you want to argue that upscaling DVD players are just as good as the current HD formats while you are at it?
TerryJ said:
Sony has not stated any plan to use H.264 encoding. No studio has stated any plans for H.264 encoding either. It's either MPEG-2 vs. VC-1, and if you've watched anything on HD DVD, you'd know it's capable of amazing results. Compared to all available Blu-Ray discs, VC-1 beats MPEG-2. A better Blu-ray deck will not make the crappy MPEG-2 discs look better, because the problem is with the disc, not the player. Even when BD50 discs are viable (some day!), they'll still use MPEG-2. Warner, who has already released VC-1 encoded HD DVDs, will be releasing the same titles on BD in... you guessed it... MPEG-2.
Nobody is arguing that VC-1 does not outperform MPEG2. However, it is nowhere near as good as H.264 MPEG4. We know it, the SMPTE knows it, and of course in their dark hearts, Microsoft knows it too. The problem currently is that the machines on the market do not have good enough decoder chips - again, referencing the problems that will be solved with the Sigma chip hits the market - to decode the H.264 codec. But once the good chips hit the market, it is doubtful that the HD-DVD format will ever back H.264 because that would cheese off Microsoft. And the success of VC-1 and iHD is crucial to Microsoft's entertainment expansion plans. If HD-DVD dies, Microsoft loses out on both VC-1 royalities as well as iHD licensing and places the Xbox360 ultimately at a competitive disadvantage.
Just because Sony hasn't announced H.264 support does not add up to much. They don't even have their own player on the market yet. And until then - as well as the PS3 launch - I doubt they will announce support. After all, currently, Sony is only interested in Blu-Ray being viable for upcoming consumers; they really do not want us buying the Samsung player currently. So no, I (also) highly doubt your assertion that Sony will still cling to MPEG2 when the higher capacity discs hit the market. Furthermore, Sony already uses H.264 on their PSP UMD titles. Obviously, the reason why they haven't done likewise on Blu-Ray discs has to do with the decoder chips, not due to any sort of conspiracy or incompetence factor that you seem to be asserting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Media_Disc
Based upon the info on that link, it is apparent that Sony is no stranger to encoding using H.264 and thus there is no logical reason to conclude that Sony won't shift to using H.264 on all of their Blu-Ray titles once their own players and the PS3 ships.
As for Warner Home Video, they have a vested interest in making sure Blu-Ray does not succeed. Warner and Toshiba both make quite a sizeable fortune off the royalties from the DVD standard. They both want HD-DVD to succeed so they can maintain those royalities. Had Sony and the rest of the Blu-Ray Disc Association agreed to preserving the Warner/Toshiba royalities, there would not be a format war currently, and Toshiba would not have prostituted itself to Microsoft over iHD and VC-1.
TerryJ said:
Furthermore, iHD is apparently much easier to develop for than BD-J. That's one reason why there are already HD DVDs with interesting new features (like the "In Movie Experience" on Bourne Supremacy) vs. no new extra features for any BD discs, nor are there any discs announced with new (BD-J) features.
Can any other posters shill the Microsoft party line more? "They" said the Sony Playstation2 was "too hard" to program for versus programming for the Microsoft Xbox. Which platform won again? Which platform had the most third-party support? That's right, the "too hard to program for" Playstation2. The reason why there are extra features on the current HD-DVD titles has to do with the fact that they are using VC-1 and the Blu-Ray titles are using the space-hungry MPEG2 codec currently. There's no room right now on Blu-Ray releases for the "extras" you are bringing up. It has nothing to do with "how hard" it is to program BD-J.
Reminds me of how Warner Bros. people started the whole "Brandon Routh is so well endowed that special effects are having to be used to tone down his crotch for *Superman Returns*" rumor that was circulating in the trades and online months before the film debuted. It was a recycled rumor that Warners had used back before the release of the original *Superman* with Christopher Reeve to generate buzz for potential female viewers. Kinda like how you are recycling/repeating the "BD-J is too hard to program for" rumor.
Let us also remember that Apple sits on the Blu-Ray Disc Association board. They could have supported either format, but they chose Blu-Ray for some reason...hmmm... Kinda like how they chose Dolby's AAC format as their "next generation" audio codec instead of Microsoft's (tin can sounding) WMA audio format. That speaks volumes.
