[amirm]

Hello everyone. New to this forum. Was prompted to post something here, by Felix's great post and "Talk's" reply back. First a bit about me, and a bit about Talk.

I manage our HD DVD development at Microsoft which includes our VC-1 video compression among other things. I usually hang out in AVS Forum with the same alias.

"Talk" is Bill Sheppard from Sun Microsystems whose primary and only interest is the BD-J (Java) subsystem in BD format. To best of my knowledge, he has no knowledge of video compression or really video technology. I don't even consider his knowledge to be at enthusiast level let alone expert. So his comments below are quite surprising.

Originally Posted by Talkstr8t

I have to take issue with a number of your assertions here.

Fancy finding you there Bill

Sorry, this is simply incorrect. None of the currently-released BD titles have any BD-J content. Therefore, any sluggishness of the BD-P1000 has nothing to do with Java.

True. But I don't know why you would volunteer saying that the BD-J subsystem is not used in BD format, when its competition, iHD is used in every disc from major studios in US for HD DVD. So not only is BD losing out functionality wise here, it also has poor performance with even its basic menu system. If the Samsung can't render simple menus fast, one wonders how it will handle BD-J. Or maybe the performance of BD-J is so poor that studios were told not to use it? One wonders, no?

You seem to be pointedly avoiding discussion of H.264 High Profile, which wasn't part of the original tests but is considered by most to be at least as good as and probably capable of better than VC-1, and which is in both specs.

Bill, you know you have no expertise whatsoever in matters of compression formats. So repeating talking points like this doesn't advance the topic. H.264 with HP profile is in use on HD DVD titles in Japan. Yet they universally underperform VC-1 used in US.

The HP profile does improve the quality of AVC/H.264 and that is why it was hastily added to AVC after it lost out VC-1. Indeed, one of its techniques, adaptive block size, was taken from VC-1. The same technique was thought to be ineffective during the standardization of AVC!

As I have posted extensively in AVS Forum, the softening effect of the AVC "loop filter" causes it to have lower effective resolution on HD encode than VC-1. This is the reason all three US studios, after extensive testing, chose VC-1 for their primary codec in HD DVD.

Most titles currently-released will fit fine on a 25GB disc if encoded in VC-1 or H.264. Yes, it would be at the cost of either including lossless audio or including lots of HD bonus content, but in the short-term it would definitely solve the comparative PQ issue.

So now, we have a situation where the format the supposedly had a capacity advantage, is being justified as being "good enough" with lower capacity than HD DVD-30, and at higher cost? Boy, how far BD has come down from the mountain .

You're ignoring the fact that by all credible analyses Toshiba is losing nearly $200 per player, which a)makes the prospect of a $300 player difficult, and b)reduces the incentive for other manufacturers to jump into the market.

Interesting that BD companies seem to think they have “incentives” to enter that market, when there is a game console with BD playback at $500 but you somehow think that having a player only at that price, is more of an issue in HD DVD. And what are the losses for Sony again here on PS3? Besides, no one really know if Toshiba is losing money or not. That is not a factual statement but a guess form some company with no insight into what the real component costs may be to Toshiba.

Further, the fact that Toshiba had to throw a very high-powered CPU into the HD-A1 (a 2.4GHz Pentium 4) further suggests cost reduction will be difficult since typical systems-on-a-chip have far less CPU power.

The Samsung BD player uses a very similar architecture with a secondary co-processor and lots of RAM. Both designs are as they should be for 1G players: capable of quick modifications rather that cost optimized.

Of course, the Toshiba has far more advanced signal processing at half the price of Samsung. Its cluster of 4 DSPs for example, lets it decode advanced audio codecs such as TrueHD, and DD+ in addition to full base management as compared to very limited version in Samsung BD player. So once again, you pay more for BD and get less in return.

I don't disagree that feasible manufacturability of BD50 is probably a requirement for BD's success

If you want to add to people’s understanding of the situation here, you could volunteer some data on yields and cycle time of BD-50. Since you agree this is key technology for the, your silence here is very telling.

There will be at least five major brand BD players on the market within the next few months (Samsung, Pioneer, Philips, Panasonic, Sony) plus the PS3.

As I have noted, the highest volume players this year by far will be the Toshiba, PS3 and Xbox 360. The other players will be at noise level due to their high cost and currently poor performance. With 75% of people on AVS Forum returning their Samsung and 90% happy with their Toshiba player, there is very good data that my predictions are right so far.

This equals far more retail availability, more advertising, and more features.

Not really. How much do you think these companies will advertise for an expensive player that sells a few thousand units, versus a Plasma/LCD TV that has sales up to 100X higher? Economics will play a strong role here eventually.

The $500 or $600 PS3 certainly does reduce the price gap with HD-DVD

PS3 will have to duke it out with our console . That should make their hands full. BTW, we just demoed our 360 playing HD DVD content at DVD Forum meeting. To my knowledge, no PS3 has been shown to play actual BD commercial titles. Isn’t that amazing after so much talk about PS3 and BD capability?

and the number of titles will likely catch up and surpass HD-DVD simply due to the far higher studio support.

“like” and “will” are two different things. While all three US HD DVD studios are humming, producing HD DVD titles, BD studios like Fox and Disney are MIA. This has given us a commanding lead in HD DVD that will continue for a long time. In addition, it is not the count that matters, but the quality. HD DVD titles are far more mainstream titles with Academy Award Winners such as The Million Dollar Baby.

Amir