Brian's Brain

Last Thursday morning, I attended a briefing in San Francisco by the HD DVD Promotion Group. Now granted, this organization isn't exactly an unbiased information source, but what I heard from them jived both with what I'd already come across at places like AVS Forum, and what my subsequent research has corroborated.

First, let's review what I've already shared with you:

1) The Samsung BD-P1000 excessively softens MPEG-2 as part of its video processing algorithm. VC-1- and H.264-based content aren't similarly affected, but the vast majority of Blu-ray material out there right now is MPEG-2 encoded. And, although Samsung has stated that a firmware update will correct this flaw, it hasn't yet been released.

2) The PlayStation 3 doesn't currently up-scale red laser DVD material to 720p, 1080i or 1080p, nor does it output 1080p at 24 fps, although Sony has stated that a future firmware upgrade will fix both shortcomings. It also doesn't up-scale 720p material to 1080i for compatibility with 1080i-only displays; Sony initially touted a firmware fix for this, too, but later backed off, leading to subsequent widespread industry speculation that this particular flaw isn't fixable in software alone (i.e. a hardware rev will be required).

Now for the latest news. I mentioned two weeks back that my wife was even more wow'd by HD DVD's slick user interface, in comparison to DVD, than she was with the relative image quality. Part of that slick user interface is the picture-in-picture feature, which Universal (for example) brands as 'U-Control'. I'd wondered why I hadn't heard of a similar feature on any of the currently available Blu-ray titles. According to Kevin Collins, a Director in Microsoft's Consumer Media Technology Group, that's because none of the first-generation standalone Blu-ray players (the $799-and-up BD-P1000, Sony's finally-shipping BDP-S1, or still-not-available players from companies like LG and Pioneer) includes the requisite secondary video decoder, and Blu-ray players won't be required to offer this feature until mid-next year. Given the amount of processing power the PlayStation 3 offers, I suspect but don't know for sure that the PlayStation 3 is capable of implementing picture-in-picture. In fact it may already support the feature, but if so that's a moot point; there's no Blu-ray content yet available to show it off.

Another part of that slick HD DVD user interface is the pop-up menus that overlay on top of the currently-playing film. Kevin pointed out something that I'd actually noticed a while back; HD DVD employs the Microsoft- and Toshiba-developed iHD format to implement these features, in quite a speedy fashion regardless of what hardware it's running on. Blu-ray, on the other hand, relies on Java. And on a standalone Blu-ray player, Java-based menu navigation is molasses-slow. On Sony's Blu-ray inclusive Vaio computers, on the other hand, it's acceptably speedy, which reflects in my mind a cost-driven design decision to put an anemic processor in the standalone players. Again, I haven't seen how robust the menu performance is on the PS3, although I suspect it's tolerable.

If you're going to pay a premium price for a player and media, you want not only premium video (see MPEG-2 note above) but also premium audio, right? Wrong, as it turns out, if you choose Blu-ray. Advanced lossless audio codec Dolby TrueHD is optional in the Blu-ray specification, and is not currently supported in standalone player hardware. In contrast, Toshiba's sub-$250 HD-A1 HD DVD player, with its latest firmware upgrade, natively decodes 5.1 channel Dolby TrueHD and sends it to a receiver as uncompressed PCM over HDMI, as DTS over S/PDIF, and over a six-channel analog audio connection.

Out of fairness, I should point out that DTS-HD Master Audio is optional in both the Blu-ray and HD DVD specifications, and that both camps' standalone players currently support it in an incomplete fashion; its bitstreams are backwards-compatible with conventional DTS decoders albeit at reduced (lossy) fidelity. Since the PlayStation 3 supports latest-generation HDMI v1.3, it has another potential means of supporting both advanced codecs: by passing the unprocessed bitstreams to a connected A/V receiver for decoding. I don't know whether or not it currently does this; until HDMI v1.3-compliant A/V receivers appear, along with Blu-ray media that supports Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio, this potential PS3 support is meaningless, anyway.

Here's a telling sign of how the Blu-ray vs HD-DVD tug-of-war is currently playing out; I opened up the Best Buy circular in this past Sunday's paper, and staring at me was a $1949.97 high-end PC with a 22" widescreen LCD....and a HD DVD-ROM drive. This from HP, a company that just two years ago was pledging its wholehearted support for Blu-ray. There are no Blu-ray inclusive systems in HP's product line, by the way.

Followup: Gizmodo has a nice writeup on what HD DVD's picture-in-picture capability delivers. Pretty cool stuff....

Continued with 'HDMI and the Xbox 360'....