HD DVD is officially dead

[randal]

I'm waiting on Super Mario Galaxy.

Is the game any good?

I see that a few people had made up their minds and gave it a 10 before it was even released.

[grinvader]

before it was even released.

Release date from another country, this is randal.
randal, this is release date from another country.

[DancemasterGlenn]

I'm waiting on Super Mario Galaxy.

Is the game any good?

I see that a few people had made up their minds and gave it a 10 before it was even released.

What does that have to do with HD-DVD? What does that even have to do with the ps1? Where did that come from?

[I.S.T.]

You're an idiot, randal.

I've got a stack of about 30 PS1 games I consider "must-have" titles. And I'm missing at least as many.




I'd like to know what the "one" game that makes a PS1 worth having is.
And it damn well better NOT be Final Fantasy 7.

Castlevania: SOTN. it's also worth owning a 360, psp or PS3, if you wish.

That WOULD be one of my stack.
Also: You forgot Saturn.

the saturn version has a fair bit of slowdown, so it is not included.

So does the PS one. Pretty much if you use mist, it slows down.

Saturn version may go a tad beyond "fair bit." I've never actually played it(but I'm building a comp RIGHT NOW that can handle Saturn emu!).

Only slowdown on PS1 version I saw was the effect that happens when you beat a boss and the HP Max Up is being generated.

Played through it two weeks ago.

[DancemasterGlenn]

I've experienced some slowdown when using the spike breaker in conjunction with mist... or maybe it was poison gas in the rooms filled with blood skeletons in the inverted castle. It was never bad though, sometimes slowdown makes games freakin epic.

[Panzer88]

the saturn version is a shitacular port, but it's got some interesting additions if you are a SotN fan

the 360 is OWNZ though because ZERO LOADINGZ and all that

hard drives FTW

[I.S.T.]

the saturn version is a shitacular port, but it's got some interesting additions if you are a SotN fan

the 360 is OWNZ though because ZERO LOADINGZ and all that

hard drives FTW

There's not a lot of loading in the first place. That's why they have the CD doors; it hides the loading.

[randal]

I'm waiting on Super Mario Galaxy.

Is the game any good?

I see that a few people had made up their minds and gave it a 10 before it was even released.

What does that have to do with HD-DVD? What does that even have to do with the ps1? Where did that come from?

The following spam post has absolutely nothing to do with the PS1 or HD-DVD either:

NICE.

[Deathlike2]

randal, can you please stop? You have not been contributing to any post as of late and mostly going off-topic. Please stop now or else.

[randal]

randal, can you please stop? You have not been contributing to any post as of late and mostly going off-topic. Please stop now or else.

or else what? i really dont give a f*** if i get banned.

[FitzRoy]

You aren't going to buy it just to have a Bluray player (I get the feeling that the dedicated player is doing a better job anyways.. I've seen the PS2 play DVDs in action.. and it was not impressive at all). I don't think the PS3 is a great "multimedia solution" at all...

DVD is interlaced material to begin with, so right away you've got the player's deinterlace hardware to worry about. Then you've got the decoding hardware that could screw up because CPUs weren't powerful enough to decode via software just quite yet. Blu-ray, in comparison, is native progressive-scan, and I believe the PS3 uses mainly software decoding that is easily updated with its internet connection. It also has perfect digital video output which the PS2 didn't. Overall, it just seems like a lot of the possibilities for something screwing up have been squashed this time around, which ends up making the PS3 quite comparable to stand-alones instead of the typical quality disparity you came to expect with DVD.

It's nice not having to worry about letterbox/anamorphic, that's for damn sure. DVD was a bit of a mess. I wish we could have finally ditched the DTS/DD nonsense and forced PCM, but alas, we didn't quite get it.

[Deathlike2]

I don't think Dolby's standards are going away anytime soon.. since they have the most penetration via the movie theaters and now viable consumer grade equipment.

[Gil_Hamilton]

DVD is interlaced material to begin with, so right away you've got the player's deinterlace hardware to worry about.

DVD is actually optional interlace. Progressive DVDs are available. Sadly, it's not usually indicated on the packaging.

Then you've got the decoding hardware that could screw up because CPUs weren't powerful enough to decode via software just quite yet.

How is a dedicated hardware decoder more prone to error than a software decoder?

Overall, it just seems like a lot of the possibilities for something screwing up have been squashed this time around, which ends up making the PS3 quite comparable to stand-alones instead of the typical quality disparity you came to expect with DVD.

It's more a case of Sony spending the time to write a decent player this time. The PS2 player was shoddy and incomplete and by the time they had it updated to a reasonable level, the damage was done.

It's nice not having to worry about letterbox/anamorphic, that's for damn sure. DVD was a bit of a mess. I wish we could have finally ditched the DTS/DD nonsense and forced PCM, but alas, we didn't quite get it.

Not a fan of lossy compression?
Kinda sad... a lot of international releases on DVD HAD PCM. But US was DD only, pretty much.

And BluRay and HD-DVD both support lossless compression(Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio). LPCM is certainly still an option, but it's not the best one anymore.

[FitzRoy]

DVD is interlaced material to begin with, so right away you've got the player's deinterlace hardware to worry about.

DVD is actually optional interlace. Progressive DVDs are available. Sadly, it's not usually indicated on the packaging.

Even so, you have interlaced and progressive content, interlaced and progressive players. Progressive DVD players with digital outputs weren't cheap and prevalent until very late in the format's life. The PS2 never really got updated to compete with these. The ability to output digitally and convert interlaced content to progressive would have added some kind of hardware cost that probably wasn't worth adding as the PS2 became positioned in the value segment.

Below is an interesting article that details some of the things that go wrong with interlace.
http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/volume_7 ... -2000.html

It’s important to understand at the outset that DVDs are designed for interlaced displays. There’s a persistent myth that DVDs are inherently progressive, and all a DVD player needs to do to display a progressive signal is to grab the progressive frames off the disc and show them. This is not exactly true. First of all, a significant amount of DVD content was never progressive to begin with. Anything shot with a typical video camera, which includes many concerts, most supplementary documentaries, and many TV shows, is inherently interlaced. (Some consumer digital video cameras can shoot in progressive mode, and a handful of TV programs are shot in progressive, particularly sports events.) By comparison, content that was originally shot on film, or with a progressive TV camera, or created in a computer, is progressive from the get-go. But even for such content, there is no requirement that it be stored on the DVD progressively.

DVDs are based on MPEG-2 encoding, which allows for either progressive or interlaced sequences. However, very few discs use progressive sequences, because the players are specifically designed for interlaced output.

Then you've got the decoding hardware that could screw up because CPUs weren't powerful enough to decode via software just quite yet.

How is a dedicated hardware decoder more prone to error than a software decoder?

It's not, but if there is a bug in the hardware, it's not as easy to update. Most players had no method of update, including the PS2. What you buy is what you get. The PS3, in comparison, is very easy to update. I'm sure decoding errors have already been found and fixed.

Overall, it just seems like a lot of the possibilities for something screwing up have been squashed this time around, which ends up making the PS3 quite comparable to stand-alones instead of the typical quality disparity you came to expect with DVD.

It's more a case of Sony spending the time to write a decent player this time. The PS2 player was shoddy and incomplete and by the time they had it updated to a reasonable level, the damage was done.

It wasn't all that bad compared to other players at the time of its release. But since progressive scan display technology wasn't really primetime yet, the spec wasn't really designed around progressive scan.

It's nice not having to worry about letterbox/anamorphic, that's for damn sure. DVD was a bit of a mess. I wish we could have finally ditched the DTS/DD nonsense and forced PCM, but alas, we didn't quite get it.

Not a fan of lossy compression?
Kinda sad... a lot of international releases on DVD HAD PCM. But US was DD only, pretty much.

And BluRay and HD-DVD both support lossless compression(Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio). LPCM is certainly still an option, but it's not the best one anymore.

No, I think with 50gb of disc space, the licensing and added player complexity that new DD/DTS formats adds is a mistake. It was confusing to have two formats on DVD, and now we have even more versions within this duality. There have already been authoring and player issues with all this added decoding to have to support. Enough is enough. I can't wait to see what gimmicks these companies come up with when the next format rolls around in order to justify their continued existence.

Microsoft's VC1 was not really necessary in light of AVC, but blu-ray pretty much had to support it because of HD-DVD, as dual format studios were quite fond of not having to do two kinds of authoring. The same could almost be said of the new audio formats that blu-ray supports. I think it's possible that Sony wanted to do all-out PCM for blu-ray. I expect far more PCM releases now that HD-DVD is dead.

[Gil_Hamilton]

DVD is interlaced material to begin with, so right away you've got the player's deinterlace hardware to worry about.

DVD is actually optional interlace. Progressive DVDs are available. Sadly, it's not usually indicated on the packaging.

Even so, you have interlaced and progressive content, interlaced and progressive players. Progressive DVD players with digital outputs weren't cheap and prevalent until very late in the format's life.

But cheap players with progressive ANALOG outputs were prevalent for quite a while before that.
And for most of it's life, component video was what was relevant.

The PS2 never really got updated to compete with these.

I think the firewire-less one was the first to have progressive DVD playback.

The ability to output digitally and convert interlaced content to progressive would have added some kind of hardware cost that probably wasn't worth adding as the PS2 became positioned in the value segment.

A digital AV port would've required a complete hardware redesign. As-is, it doesn't have digital AV points to tap. And by the time HDMI really became relevant, the PS3 was coming.

It’s important to understand at the outset that DVDs are designed for interlaced displays. There’s a persistent myth that DVDs are inherently progressive, and all a DVD player needs to do to display a progressive signal is to grab the progressive frames off the disc and show them. This is not exactly true. First of all, a significant amount of DVD content was never progressive to begin with. Anything shot with a typical video camera, which includes many concerts, most supplementary documentaries, and many TV shows, is inherently interlaced. (Some consumer digital video cameras can shoot in progressive mode, and a handful of TV programs are shot in progressive, particularly sports events.) By comparison, content that was originally shot on film, or with a progressive TV camera, or created in a computer, is progressive from the get-go. But even for such content, there is no requirement that it be stored on the DVD progressively.

DVDs are based on MPEG-2 encoding, which allows for either progressive or interlaced sequences. However, very few discs use progressive sequences, because the players are specifically designed for interlaced output.

I believe I said it was optional. So you just verified what I said.

Though... that quoted block isn't entirely accurate. There's TV content that's been de-interlaced for the DVD masters.

Then you've got the decoding hardware that could screw up because CPUs weren't powerful enough to decode via software just quite yet.

How is a dedicated hardware decoder more prone to error than a software decoder?

It's not, but if there is a bug in the hardware, it's not as easy to update. Most players had no method of update, including the PS2. What you buy is what you get. The PS3, in comparison, is very easy to update. I'm sure decoding errors have already been found and fixed.

I think the fixes have been in terms of updating it from 1.0 to 1.1.

The only big glitches I recall in DVD MPEG2 decoding were due to fucked-up mastering.

It wasn't all that bad compared to other players at the time of its release.

Yes, it was.

There was a whole slew of glitches and incompatibilities, well beyond everyone else's layer-transition crash.

It was bad enough that for a while, there was a running list of incompatible and compatible disks on GameFAQs.

No, I think with 50gb of disc space, the licensing and added player complexity that new DD/DTS formats adds is a mistake. It was confusing to have two formats on DVD, and now we have even more versions within this duality. There have already been authoring and player issues with all this added decoding to have to support. Enough is enough. I can't wait to see what gimmicks these companies come up with when the next format rolls around in order to justify their continued existence.

But.... most of that extra space goes to video. Even with the newer codecs, it's still pretty tight.

Now, they could've implemented, say, FLAC instead. But license issues didn't stop anyone on DVD. Hell, people regularly opted for DD over PCM, despite the lower quality and higher cost., even when there was plenty of room for PCM.


IMO, using uncompressed or lossy audio when you have options is just stupid.


One thing I really liked about HD-DVD was that Dolby TrueHD was a mandatory player feature. You could make a disk with JUST a TrueHD audio track, and be done with it.
BluRay has no mandatory lossless compression player-side. All disks must carry either a raw uncompressed PCM track or(more likely, based on DVD experience) a lossy Dolby Digital track.

Microsoft's VC1 was not really necessary in light of AVC, but blu-ray pretty much had to support it because of HD-DVD, as dual format studios were quite fond of not having to do two kinds of authoring.

Why does HD-DVD support both VC-1 and H.264, then?
I think both codecs had strong arguments for and against, so they put both in to let the market sort it out.

[FitzRoy]

I don't profess to know when or which models of the PS2 got updated or what the updates were, as there were lots of revisions. But compared to newer players, all initial DVD players suck, including the PS2. I think the PS2's issues have been largely exaggerated as every stand-alone had issues with certain discs as well. Poorly authored discs were rampant. Most review sites actually thought it did a good job when it first came out:

http://www.thedigitalbits.com/reviews/ps2/sonyps2.html

But it wouldn't be right to predict the PS2's change in fortune occurring on the PS3 as well, as the BD format itself does away with interlace, letterbox/anamorphic, analog output quality, hardware decoding bugs, non-updating firmware, etc.

But.... most of that extra space goes to video. Even with the newer codecs, it's still pretty tight.

Tight for a 25-30gb disc, but not 50. Transformers for HD-DVD couldn't even fit a losslessly compressed track on the disc because it was competing for space with bonus content.

I think the fixes have been in terms of updating it from 1.0 to 1.1.

Well, I don't know, there isn't really a way to know if they've done more. But I would expect the decoding for lossy algorithms like VC1 and AVC to receive slight improvements over time as MPEG2, DD, and DTS did with DVD.

The only big glitches I recall in DVD MPEG2 decoding were due to fucked-up mastering.

There were all kinds of color decoding issues, banding issues, etc with early players. The color red was particularly troublesome.

Why does HD-DVD support both VC-1 and H.264, then?
I think both codecs had strong arguments for and against, so they put both in to let the market sort it out.

I think HD-DVD was leaning VC1 and Blu-Ray was leaning AVC, and the formats supported both to appease every possible studio's "one-author" demands. Neither wanted to risk forcing these cost-sensitive studios to choose a side for that reason. Paramount was preferential to AVC and they were dual format at first. That's where most of the HD-DVD AVC releases come from. And surprise, the blu-ray versions of those releases are AVC as well. 86% of HD-DVD releases were VC1, though.

[sweener2001]

Transformers for HD-DVD couldn't even fit a losslessly compressed track on the disc because it was competing for space with bonus content.

transformers on HD-DVD is a two disc affair. all that's on the first disc is the movie, a commentary, and a HUD thing. the movie has three 5.1 DD+ tracks.

troy: director's cut (one of my free discs) is about 50 minutes longer than transformers, but has one dolby true HD track, and three 5.1 DD+ tracks. and special features all on one disc.

[Gil_Hamilton]

The only big glitches I recall in DVD MPEG2 decoding were due to fucked-up mastering.

There were all kinds of color decoding issues, banding issues, etc with early players. The color red was particularly troublesome.

I'm familiar with what you're talking about. A lot of it was encoding. The standard encoder for a long time on had a nasty bug in it that resulted in it alternating the progressive/interlaced flag every frame. This sent a lot of DVD players into fits. Several other mastering processes used or ignored the mode bits in varying degrees of retardedness.
The disks show no improvement from a newer player, except when moving to one that ignored the progressive flags and guessed what was going on by what it saw.

While this COULD be fixed by a firmware update, in practice firmware updates simply aren't done on video players. Not even if they offer the option(like the PS2 did). The PS3 is a unique blip in the pattern at this point.


The "red bug"... was a VERY long-running MPEG bug. It predated DVD, and lasted a good ways into DVD's life.
It is admittedly a decoder issue, and could have hypothetically been fixed by a firmware update to a software-decoder, but it kicked around for a very long time.
And as a trivia note... it actually affects blue and red equally, and doesn't touch green(since green is sampled with every line instead of every other line). But your eyes are FAR more sensitive to red than blue, so it's far more noticable on red content.

[I.S.T.]

Tight for a 25-30gb disc, but not 50. Transformers for HD-DVD couldn't even fit a losslessly compressed track on the disc because it was competing for space with bonus content.

IIRC, it was also a 15 gig disc.

[Gil_Hamilton]

Tight for a 25-30gb disc, but not 50. Transformers for HD-DVD couldn't even fit a losslessly compressed track on the disc because it was competing for space with bonus content.

IIRC, it was also a 15 gig disc.

WTF were they doing with a single-layer HD-DVD disk anyways?

Fucking idiots...

[FitzRoy]

Tight for a 25-30gb disc, but not 50. Transformers for HD-DVD couldn't even fit a losslessly compressed track on the disc because it was competing for space with bonus content.

IIRC, it was also a 15 gig disc.

I haven't been able to find any backing for this on google. I found a couple of review sites that talk about the set and they seem to believe that both discs are HD-30.

Indeed, I had the opportunity to attend a special 'Transformers' media event with Paramount late last week, and the question was asked almost immediately -- why no Dolby TrueHD or uncompressed PCM? The studio's answer was that due to space limitations on the disc, the decision was made to limit the audio to Dolby Digital-Plus 5.1 Surround only (here at 1.5mbps). Unfortunately, this confirms the long-held theory that the 30Gb capacity of an HD-30 dual-layer HD DVD disc has forced studios to choose between offering a robust supplements package (as they've done here) and the very best in audio quality.

Of course, an obvious question arises, but the only thing I can think of is that the bonus features on the first disc couldn't have been offloaded onto the second because they were dependent on the film material in some way (commentaries, PiP).

[sweener2001]

torrents suggest that it's a 30 GB disc.

just how big is a lossless audio track? the torrents clock in around 22 GB.

[I.S.T.]

It would depend on any number of factors, really. I believe the DTS lossless format is smaller, however, due to the way it works.

As for the excuse they gave... I don't buy it. A 30 gig disc is actually bigger than 99% of all blu-rays out right now(25 vs 30). Why would they have so much trouble?

[Gil_Hamilton]

It would depend on any number of factors, really. I believe the DTS lossless format is smaller, however, due to the way it works.

As for the excuse they gave... I don't buy it. A 30 gig disc is actually bigger than 99% of all blu-rays out right now(25 vs 30). Why would they have so much trouble?

Actually, I think most BR disks are dual-layer now.

[I.S.T.]

It would depend on any number of factors, really. I believe the DTS lossless format is smaller, however, due to the way it works.

As for the excuse they gave... I don't buy it. A 30 gig disc is actually bigger than 99% of all blu-rays out right now(25 vs 30). Why would they have so much trouble?

Actually, I think most BR disks are dual-layer now.

You are correct. I got that mixed up with something else blu-ray related.