Grand Prix on HD DVD: Showcase Picture, So-So Sound

Last weekend's raindrops motivated me to stay indoors and watch a few HD DVDs. I'd never seen Grand Prix before and really enjoyed it, particularly the images. I was amazed at how clean the HD DVD transfer of this 40-year old movie (yes, as old as me) looked, and more generally what a compelling visual experience it was to watch. I was reminded, as I saw it, of one of my favourite IMAX movies (and DVDs), Super Speedway.

The sound, unfortunately, was more of a hit-and-miss experience. I appreciated how the studio remixed the two-channel original audio track into a fairly immersive 5.1 channel surround presentation. But occasionally I detected lip sync issues….the sound was a fraction of a second behind the picture (i.e. the lips would move, then the sound of the person's voice would begin), enough to be noticeable. A scene or a few later, everything would be ok….then sync would fall apart again….back and forth. Very strange.

Googling about, I discovered that the Grand Prix HD DVD uses Dolby's TrueHD lossless audio codec, whereas most HD DVDs today use one of the other two audio codecs included within the HD DVD spec, Dolby Digital or Dolby Digital Plus, both of which are lossy compression schemes. Further googling about uncovered evidence that I'm not the only person who's noticed the sync issue. And I don't know why we're all only noticing it on portions of the movie.

Microsoft's already released one update to the HD DVD software in the Xbox 360. It looks like they've got a bit more work to do in fine-tuning the TrueHD transcode-to-Dolby Digital process. These sort of ramp-up issues aren't atypical, of course. And fortunately, the Blu-ray and HD DVD players, including the PS3 and Xbox 360, all have network connectivity built-in to simplify the firmware update process. Forcing consumers to:

1) burn a DVD with the new firmware image

2) put it in the player, and

3) execute a complex pattern of remote control and/or front panel button presses in order to kick off the update

was such an unappealing strategy back in the early DVD days….