vivarey

Anyone else listen to the interview? It was very interesting to hear directly from someone on the inside. A few important things were cleared up (that have been rumored): the cartridge format of Blu-Ray will be dropped for the US release, and most likely, all Blu-Ray players will be backwards compatible with current (red laser) DVDs. Compatibility is hardware dependent, though, since the manufacturers have to license the formats they incorporate in their players.

I was disappointed that the recent Justice Department's probing of future DVD standards wasn't discussed. Apparently, there is some speculation that some members of the DVD Forum acted in a way to impede the technical progress of the group. The implication is that Blu-Ray wants to halt competing formats so it can get a headstart on the HD-DVD market.

Also, Fiddler practically admitted that Blu-Ray was locked into the outdated MPEG2 format (I think he called it a "mature" format). Since Blu-Ray recorders/media are already available, they can't bail on the codec. It's too late. Can you imagine cross-compatibility issues within the same format?

Anyway, it was a good listen. Thanks Geoff. Now how about an interview with someone from the AOD (DVD Forum) camp.

Other HD-DVD related threads:
Dell and HP side with Blu-Ray
DVD Forum chooses AOD (Toshiba/NEC) technology, passes on Blu-Ray
Rebuying our movies in HD?

speedy1961

I liked it but most people won't listen to it due to lack of pictures

jough

How is MPEG2 "outdated"? It's the format that DVD uses.

Now, if you said it wasn't the best compression method available today, I'd agree. But that was true when DVD launched, too. A high bitrate and little use of compression will make the codec pointless, anyway. A pixel is a pixel at some point.

vivarey

A pixel is a pixel, but compression is a necessity. In order to maintain the 1920x1080 resolution, Blu-Ray will have to run at close to 36 Mbps. MPEG-4 can achieve superior picture quality to MPEG-2 at data rates of only 10-12 Mbps. Thus, it will take a LOT more disc capacity to store the same (or inferior) PQ quality on Blu-Ray when compared to competing formats.

For our current DVDs, Mpeg-2 works just fine. Sure, you can hardly fit a Superbit transfer on 1 disc - let alone have room for extras. But it does the job. And Blu-Ray will have lots of capacity (50GB) to store data. But it's codec is inefficient and inferior to the competition. Plain and simple.