HD-DVD and Blu-ray, what's the point when there are upconverting dvd players?

A 480p DVD upconverted to 720/1080 can't even touch the picture quality of a true 1080p source which is what HD DVD/ Blu Ray are. Not to mention the significant boost in audio too.BlacKJaCK2290

Don't take this the wrong way, but do you have proof?  Can you possibly provide me with a link?  Pics would help as well too!

Aren't those DVD players just upscaling the 480p signal? It's like taking a picture and zooming it in like 4x, doesn't look pretty.  It probably looks like **** compared to real 1080p

Screw it, I'll just buy a ps3 and pay an additional $20 on movies I already own.

Damn money hungry companies and their fancy electronics. :evil:

j/k

The color depth available in HD is lightyears beyond

345,600 pixels- NTSC, standard DVD

2,073,600 pixels=1080, HighDef

You can't get more resolution than you start with, all the upscaling DVD players are really doing is skipping the digital to analog back to digital process. Your TV will always upscale to its native rez(assuming you have a plasma or LCD) anyway, and if you didn't buya junky one, it'll do it just as well.

here's a good link. You can mouseover the images for small versions, and then click the image for the standard def upscaled, then click again for the HD version

I especially recommend shot 6. Click the image to see the HD capture

And remember, this isn't even close to what the home video formats can do, these are all heavily and on the fly compressed for broadcast images.

http://www.cornbread.org/FOTRCompare/FOTR_Compare6_DVD.html

Screw it, I'll just buy a ps3 and pay an additional $20 on movies I already own.

Damn money hungry companies and their fancy electronics. :evil:

 

 

j/k

CB4McGusto

Just so you know, its not $20 extra. 

BR catalog titles are in the $24-29.99 range. New titles are 29.99-39.99 (the same as DVD was, after inflation) with first week prices in the $20-$30 range.

Maybe these will help change someone's mind. Also note, some DVDs don't look that bad, but most do, and if you have a 50inch tv, even 720p makes a huge difference, not only in resolution, but better compression, no artifacts, just a more perfect picture overall. So even a movie at DVD resolution on the new format would look better than the regular DVD thanks to the better compression.

PREPARE TO SCROLL, FULL 1080P SLICES VS DVD UPSCALED TO 1080P:

Happy Feet

http://other.toonguru.com/hd/SDHD_001.jpg

I'll post each seperatly so no one can quote this all at once

http://other.toonguru.com/hd/SDHD_002.jpg

More Brothers Grim:
http://other.toonguru.com/hd/SDHD_003.jpg

That Disney Wild movie:
http://other.toonguru.com/hd/SDHD_004.jpg

 Black Hawk Down
http://other.toonguru.com/hd/SDHD_005.jpg

At best, DVD maxes with source material at 480p.

HD-DVD and BluRay both are reference spec'd to have material encoded at 1080p to begin with.

Yea, fiscally it doesn't make much sense now, which is why I'm personally waiting until there's at least one good player/drive that can read (and potentially write) to both.

And for what it's worth, most BluRay/HD-DVD movies I've seen are not that much more expensive than existing DVD's. Nobody would buy into them if the average DVD movie was $20 and the HD/BluRay was $40. But I figure they have to keep the prices low considering most people that buy the HD-DVD/BluRay player would basically blow whatever they would have had on just the player.

When one gives up, you lose forward compatibility and are limited to the lifetime of that player

When one gives up, you lose forward compatibility and are limited to the lifetime of that player

Kodai_kun

A long shot, but it would be cool ifafter a format loses the war that the studios would offer discounts or total replacement of a movie you bought on the dead format with the winning format version. I know I can always disect my Toshiba HD-A1 to get the PC NEC HD-DVD drive out of it and get it to work with pc, rip the hd-dvds and eventually reburn them to blu-ray, but I hope that doesn't happen of course :)

 Or maybe Warners new combo format will take off with other studios so you have HD-DVD on one side and Blu-ray on the other, costing no more to produce than the single format one. That way it won't matter.

Or maybe Warners new combo format will take off with other studios so you have HD-DVD on one side and Blu-ray on the other, costing no more to produce than the single format one. That way it won't matter.TimothyB

Or maybe Warners new combo format will take off with other studios so you have HD-DVD on one side and Blu-ray on the other, costing no more to produce than the single format one. That way it won't matter.

It costs a lot more. Another $8-10K for authoring, plus the massive number of coasters. Test runs have been reported to be in the 40-50% range for bad discs. That's double the number DVD-18 was doing at its worst, and even the levels for it now are unnacceptible. Combined with the fact that no one likes flipper discs, and the huge additional expense, and the ever shrinking market for HD-DVD, it's not going to happen.

And I seriously doubt anyone is going to be offering a tradein program. It's completely antithetical to how big studios work.

Oh, and I seriously doubt you're ever going to be able to get those rips to play on a BR deck without serious recompression and messing with it. They're encoded with audio and visual copy protection markers that are part of the image, and if it doesn't see a machine stamped watermark on the disc and hits one of those, it'll puke on it.

Or maybe Warners new combo format will take off with other studios so you have HD-DVD on one side and Blu-ray on the other, costing no more to produce than the single format one. That way it won't matter. Kodai_kun

It costs a lot more. Another $8-10K for authoring, plus the massive number of coasters. Test runs have been reported to be in the 40-50% range for bad discs. That's double the number DVD-18 was doing at its worst, and even the levels for it now are unnacceptible. Combined with the fact that no one likes flipper discs, and the huge additional expense, and the ever shrinking market for HD-DVD, it's not going to happen.

And I seriously doubt anyone is going to be offering a tradein program. It's completely antithetical to how big studios work.

Oh, and I seriously doubt you're ever going to be able to get those rips to play on a BR deck without serious recompression and messing with it. They're encoded with audio and visual copy protection markers that are part of the image, and if it doesn't see a machine stamped watermark on the disc and hits one of those, it'll puke on it.

On costs, I think I was only quoting an article on the Warner format.

On the trade-in, that was mostly a dream.

I only mentioned the ripping because of hearing about the copy right protection being broken, I have no idea what format it will be in after and if it would be compatible or in need of complete reencoding ( which in that case I'd rather rebuy the film). Though, seeing how that idea started with taking apart my player I paid $500 for probably isn't going to happen.

Screw it, I'll just buy a ps3 and pay an additional $20 on movies I already own.

Damn money hungry companies and their fancy electronics. :evil:

 

 

j/k

CB4McGusto

Or you could get new movies on BD:

Norbit, Ghost rider, Bridge to Terabithia, Black Snake Moan, Dreamgirls, Happily Never After, Catch and Release, The Fountain, Apocolypto, Stomp the Yard are all examples of new titles releaseing this month and next that are releasing side-by-side with their DVD counterparts.

And according to Amazon, the average Blu-ray price is around $2 higher than DVD. Not 20. 

[QUOTE="CB4McGusto"]

Screw it, I'll just buy a ps3 and pay an additional $20 on movies I already own.

Damn money hungry companies and their fancy electronics. :evil:

 

 

j/k

AcidTWister

Or you could get new movies on BD:

Norbit, Ghost rider, Bridge to Terabithia, Black Snake Moan, Dreamgirls, Happily Never After, Catch and Release, The Fountain, Apocolypto, Stomp the Yard are all examples of new titles releaseing this month and next that are releasing side-by-side with their DVD counterparts.

And according to Amazon, the average Blu-ray price is around $2 higher than DVD. Not 20.

 Though, on release retail stores will often have the DVD on sale for $14 while the HD version remains full price, making them $10-$15 on average.

First off, if people in this thread could please check their sigs, someone is running some kind of script that makes my browser eat 100% CPU. You shouldn't be running anything in sigs

Secondly, the same thing happened with DVD. HD-DVD is subsidized, so you're seeing bigger spot discounts (like Best Buy got with Departed, where it's something like 50% of SRP first week). Second, HD titles simply don't do the volume yet that gets the big discounts. The few retailers that sold DVD a year into it barely discounted them at all. The more people with decks, the bigger, and more common the discounts because it's all about volume.

An upconverter, trust me, waste of money. I bought an upconverter from frys and I could not see a difference from DVDs played on my 360. So I took it back. I then bought a HD-DVD add on for the 360 and what a difference. Just put a regular version on king kong in an upconverter and compare it to the HD-DVD version.

If you have a 720p tv or less, yeah dropping $500 on a player that will hardly give you any noticable improvement in image quality is pointless. But blu-ray dvd's are 1080p which is 1920x1080 @ 60 FPS, if you've spent a couple thousand bucks on an HD-tv then it's stupid to cheap out on the dvd player. upconverting dvd players are enlarging a 720x576 image at best, yes the hardware will touch up the enlarged image a bit but even so there is a vast difference in quality between 1080i and 1080p.

But i don't see it as a choice between HD-DVD and Blu-ray if you're going to spend the money. Back when they were at war as to what the new standard was going to be for HD media HD-dvd seemingly lied or was painfully mistaken. HD-dvd had said that Blu-ray would be a wash out because HD-dvd discs would work in existing players so there would be no cost of having to buy a new player which would make people over-look the fact that blu-ray discs have nearly twice the data storage.

 Also, is the fact that both formats allow for higher quality sound tracks, which is kind of bridging the gap between vinyl and digital quality. But even so, at this point with so few titles out for both formats, i only consider it worthwhile to buy a Blu-ray burner for your PC.Even that is still a bit early on to buy when the discs cost something like $10-15 for a 25gig single layer and $30-40 for a dual-layer each and take 30-60 minutes to burn at best with the same high likely hood of being coaster that the original dvd-r were plauged with. But still, PC burner at this point is still worth considering, if you want a stand alone player get a PS3 because i'm almost positive that's actually the cheapest way to get a blu-ray player at this point...and  that way it comes with a PS3 =P.

If you can look at an HD-DVD or Blu-ray movie playing next to a standard DVD that's upconverting and don't see any difference then 1) you're blind, 2) you're deluded and 3) you don't deserve to own one anyway.

HD-dvd had said that Blu-ray would be a wash out because HD-dvd discs would work in existing players so there would be no cost of having to buy a new player which would make people over-look the fact that blu-ray discs have nearly twice the data storage

HD-DVD never made that claim. I think you're confusing the ability to retool existing disc stamping lines to HD-DVD easily with compatibility with older players. It would be impossible as their output circuits are SD only, and they lack the internal processing horsepower for HD

If you have a 720p tv or less, yeah dropping $500 on a player that will hardly give you any noticable improvement in image quality is pointless. But blu-ray dvd's are 1080p which is 1920x1080 @ 60 FPS, if you've spent a couple thousand bucks on an HD-tv then it's stupid to cheap out on the dvd player. upconverting dvd players are enlarging a 720x576 image at best, yes the hardware will touch up the enlarged image a bit but even so there is a vast difference in quality between 1080i and 1080p.

But i don't see it as a choice between HD-DVD and Blu-ray if you're going to spend the money. Back when they were at war as to what the new standard was going to be for HD media HD-dvd seemingly lied or was painfully mistaken. HD-dvd had said that Blu-ray would be a wash out because HD-dvd discs would work in existing players so there would be no cost of having to buy a new player which would make people over-look the fact that blu-ray discs have nearly twice the data storage.

 Also, is the fact that both formats allow for higher quality sound tracks, which is kind of bridging the gap between vinyl and digital quality. But even so, at this point with so few titles out for both formats, i only consider it worthwhile to buy a Blu-ray burner for your PC.Even that is still a bit early on to buy when the discs cost something like $10-15 for a 25gig single layer and $30-40 for a dual-layer each and take 30-60 minutes to burn at best with the same high likely hood of being coaster that the original dvd-r were plauged with. But still, PC burner at this point is still worth considering, if you want a stand alone player get a PS3 because i'm almost positive that's actually the cheapest way to get a blu-ray player at this point...and  that way it comes with a PS3 =P.

If you can look at an HD-DVD or Blu-ray movie playing next to a standard DVD that's upconverting and don't see any difference then 1) you're blind, 2) you're deluded and 3) you don't deserve to own one anyway.

Poeticinsomniac

HD DVD is also 1080p.  The HD-A1, XA1, and A2 players are 720p/1080i, but the A2-0, XA-2 and 360 add-on (with VGA or HDMI) are 1080p

If you have a 720p tv or less, yeah dropping $500 on a player that will hardly give you any noticable improvement in image quality is pointless. But blu-ray dvd's are 1080p which is 1920x1080 @ 60 FPS,..................................

Poeticinsomniac

 720p even at 55inches makes a huge difference in HD over DVDs. Sometimes on the new 60inch 1080p sony I have I might not notice the difference at all moving from 720p to 1080p on the average film.  Also, both HD formats are 1080p at 24fps, not 60fps, the players might output at 60hz, but they have to convert from 24fps using 2:3 pulldown, creating a jitter by not duplicating the frames evenly. That's what's going to be nice with 120hz tvs, if you have a player that outputs direct 1080p24 to one of those new tvs it can be divided into 120hz 5 times perfectly, creating a smoother sharper picture.