Everything HD Part II: HD in a Can
posted Monday, July 17th, 2006 by Andy Gore
In Part II of our continuing series, The Geek Beat asks the question: Does HD content have to be live to be fresh? Although the options are few and there is at least one major standards war brewing, it still true that some of the best HD available in what you can buy on a disc or record on your own.
Blu-ray Vs. HD DVD: Betamax all over again? If you’re looking for ways other than live HD to feed your HD addiction, there is a new option that’s just hitting the market this summer: HD discs. Just like DVDs, HD discs contain movies, TV shows, commentaries, etc. The difference is that HD discs can store massive amounts of data – up to 10 times more than a standard DVD – allowing a single disc to easily contain a full HD movie. (An hour of HD resolution content using MPEG2 compression can take upwards of 8.5GB of storage.)
The first generation of HD disc players are arriving on the scene even as we speak. These players have the ability to reproduce video images up to the HDTV standard’s max – 1920 x 1080 pixels. And the quality of the first handful of titles is nothing less than amazing: incredibly sharp, vibrant and, some would argue, better quality images than what you can see in the best movie theaters.
No surprise, the price of first adoption is high – a minimum of $500 for a basic player. But even more nerve-racking for consumers is that players are coming out based on two incompatible standards – HD DVD and Blu-ray. Each standard is supported by very powerful (and very entrenched) committees: one led by Toshiba and the other by Sony. This has brought about inevitable comparisons to the Betamax versus VHS standards battle of the early ‘80s.
For those of you who might not remember, with the advent of the first home video cassette recorders, two standards were introduced: VHS, supported by a consortium of consumer electronics companies; and Betamax, supported by Sony. Beta, while technically superior, also cost more than VHS. And we all know how that war ended.
HD DVD. Both HD DVD and Blu-ray utilize a blue-violet laser to read and write discs. The shorter wavelength of the blue laser allows for more dense data storage, resulting in storage capacities much larger than a standard DVD. A typical single-layer DVD stores about 4.4GB of usable data. An HD DVD single-layer disc will be able to store about 15GB (Blu-ray will be able to store 25GB on a single-layer disc.)
HD DVD is being developed by The DVD Forum, the same folks who brought us the DVD format. The standard is backed primarily by Toshiba, one of the largest consumer electronics companies in the world. One of the key advantages of HD DVD is its utilization of existing manufacturing processes to record discs. The companies that currently press DVDs will not need to retool to press HD DVDs. This should keep costs down and availability up for HD DVD titles, versus Blu-ray, which does require disc publishers retool to produce their discs.
This manufacturing advantage has attracted some big-name studios – Paramount, Universal, and Time-Warner, to name a few. It’s unclear at this time if those studios’ commitments will be exclusive, and it’s likely they’ll wait and see which standard gets the most traction. If Blu-ray does well, you can bet these studios will jump standards and start pressing Blu-ray discs as fast as they can.
Blu-ray. The Blu-ray standard is backed by the aptly-named Blu-ray Disc Association, and is also backed by a long list of members including Dell, Hitachi, Panasonic, Sharp, H-P, Pioneer, Phillips, Samsung and, of course, Sony. The BDA doesn’t boast quite as many media companies among its members as the HD DVD consortium does, but the ones that have signed up include Disney (and Pixar), MGM, and, of course, Sony Pictures.
The Blu-ray standard does require the aforementioned manufacturing retool. However, with that retool, the standard offers 40 percent more storage capacity, with a single-layer disc boasting 25GB of storage and dual-layer discs offering a whopping 50GB. This increased capacity is of great interest to game developers. That, combined with the fact that the Playstation 3, expected to ship this fall, will include a Blu-ray drive, pretty much guarantees broad adoption in the game market.
At this point there is no clear winner in the battle of the HD standards. And there is still a chance that a showdown can be averted by second-generation players that play both standards. (It’s worth noting that both Blu-ray and HD DVD are backward compatible with and can play standard DVDs.) This is supposed to be “technically difficult” to achieve, which is another way of saying another year of R&D may be necessary to get us there. In the meantime, with the sides so evenly matched, the result may be a delay in overall adoption of both standards, at least until a dual-format player arrives or one of the standard-bearers agrees to join forces with their rivals. A joining of hands is what ultimately ended a stalemate between Multimedia CD and Super Disc, which merged to form today’s DVD standard.
Recording HD. There aren’t a lot of options out there for recording HD. As mentioned in Part I of this guide, you can get a satellite set-top box that also offers HD recording, although these boxes rarely have the huge hard drive capacity necessary to record more than a dozen hours of HD quality video. Most cable companies offer similar set-top options, although here you may need to rent the set-top box and, again, it’s not likely to have a huge amount of storage.
TiVO, the inventor of time-delayed digital recording, has yet to introduce its long-anticipated HD digital video recorder. The only way to record HD using TiVO’s interface is with DirecTV’s recorder, which only works with DirecTV service.
If you want to record OTA HD, and you’re not afraid do a little “hands-on” work, there is another option: Your PC. There are several HD PCI cards out there that will accept OTA HD signals and work with TiVO-like TV recording applications. There are even a couple of HD cards that can record unscrambled Cable HD stations, although these solutions don’t currently work with third-party recording applications. Instead, they depend on proprietary applications that leave a lot to be desired (see related review, Beyond TV 4.)
Our next installment – Everything HD Part III: Getting the Big Picture – will be available this Fall when we expect a new generation of big screen TVs to hit the market.
