I watched both versions and the differences in Live Free or Die Hard were not worth worrying about. The movie did not suffer with the PG13 edits and I really have to question how a movie that violent gets a PG13 with some minor blood and curse word edits. Our priorities are really screwed up. As far as Casino Royale I haven't seen the extra 22 seconds, but I think I will be fine with the US version.

South Park - Fun With Weapons? I know its not a retail disc and was given away, but I think that one might be 720p/1080i only....someone here would have to tell you as I threw away by outer slip and put it in a custom HD DVD case.

You actually have that backwards. There is a very serious distinction between discs encoded as 1080i and those encoded as 1080p. If a disc is encoded interlaced, each successive field comes from a different frame than the last. Thus it is not possible to fully reconstruct those original frames with all of the correct data.

A 1080p transfer, however, has all of the original data from every frame. This can either be output in whole 1080p format, or interlaced to 1080i. If the latter, you still get all of the original data, just transmitted differently. Each pair of interlaced fields come from the same frame and can be easily reconstructed.

There are a number of porn titles, such as Pirates or Camp Cuddly Pines, that are 720p because that's the format they were originally shot in.

If you were to grab a single frame from an HD title, what would it be. 1920x1080. Right? It's a 2,073,600 pixel image, whether it's 1080i or 1080p.

If you say a High-Def title was recorded in 1080i, it still has the same information. The data is the same. It's just how it's processed. So, once again, we're back to how your processing equipment handles the info.

Porn titles won't surprise me as being 720p, so I'll take your word for it--and I'm sure we have amateur HD documentaries which are as well. But for the mainstream movie industry, it will be very very hard to find a title that does not have a 1920x1080 resolution.

1080i is transferring data at twice the speed of a 1080p signal. Interlaced images must be processed quicker because they are processed every other data line.

I have a hard time deciding if you really believe what you say sometimes or if you just keep arguing incorrect points in the hope that the other person will just give up.

Despite the resolution of a single "frame", 1080i is very different from 1080p. And while it's true that the hardware handles it differently, the hardware is handling it differently because there isn't as much picture information per every two frames.

That's cool. Maybe I misread it. All I was saying is that it is possible for a studio to release a 1080i release, but unlikely that they would do it unless by accident.

The Masters of Horror Blu-rays are 1080i, which is how they were broadcast.

Despite the resolution of a single frame. Oh, ok. Let's just take that out of the equation.

"There isn't as much picture information per every TWO frames.": That's the reason a 1080 image is processed at 30fps versus an interlaced, which is processed at 60fps. But hey, believe what you want. The faster a group of images are introduced and taken away by the second in front of you, the less you notice the "gap". It's called motion picture. After a certain speed, you don't notice any difference.

If you want to argue 1080i signal has less data information than a 1080p signal, feel free to present evidence supporting your claim.

Anyway, I didn't intend to get in a 1080i vs. 1080p debate here, so I'll stop and bring it up in another new thread of its own if necessary.

You're still confusing 1080i transmission with 1080i encoding. A disc natively encoded at 1080i doesn't have whole 1920x1080 frames. It only has 1920x540 fields, each successive field taken from a separate moment in time than the last. If you were to combine 2 of those fields for display on a 1080p TV, you'd get 1920x1080 frames, but the frames would be contructed out of fields from separate moments in time. This can lead to jaggie artifacts, because the information in those fields won't line up perfectly.

This is like the difference between "film" encoding and "video" encoding on DVD. "Video" encoding requires motion-adaptive deinterlacing, which will analyze the fields to pair up data points that look the most similar, to help reduce jaggies.

This is an entirely different issue than 1080i transmission. If you start from a 1080p source and then interlace it for 1080i transmission, you're transmitting field pairs that come from the same original frame and thus can be easily re-assembled.

I happened to find an HD DVD encoded in 1080i, Chronos, and was reviewed here by you (on DVD Talk):

In this review, you're saying the two different encodes have the same amount of detail (i.e., resolution I talked about above) and will deliver the same quality and only how it is delivered (i.e., processed) might it be different if the delivery is not the same.

I will agree however, different encoding can result in different visual quality if the encode is inferior in some way. But that's a different discussion.

I guess I should have responded to the original post differently. Again, I apologize for dragging this out when what I wanted to basically say was, Casino Royale had a very very slim chance of a 1080i encode being it was such a recent movie and rather big-name production.

Now I'm really getting OT, but did you by chance happen to view the Blu-ray version of Chronos and compare both versions? I would imagine the 1080p version would look slightly better, but only if had a rather large display.

What I wrote in that review is misleadingly worded, and if I still worked here I would edit it. What I'm telling you now is correct.

If you read the rest of that review, you'll see that the Chronos HD DVD was a 1080p transfer all along, and the R&B rep was mistaken about the difference between the two formats (and persists in being rather belligerent about it). The Blu-ray uses the same encode.

So, we all agree, right?

Casino Royale is unlikely to be 1080i and (everything else equal) 1080i provides a poorer picture than 1080p.

The USA Blu-ray release of "House of Flying Daggers" is the cut US theatrical version.

HK releases are the same region as US releases, right? If so, there's hope of getting an uncut Blu-Ray release of House of Flying Daggers (and maybe even the extended cut of Hero).

Correct. Hong Kong is Region A, the same as North America.

Both of those movies are distributed by a studio called Edko in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, Edko hasn't yet expressed any interest in Blu-ray.

Has the situation changed? If so, where can I find reviews of the discs and the discs themselves?

Edko has started releasing blu-rays but no announcements yet about Hero or House of Flying Daggers.

Thanks, dkny75.