Intermittent Issues:
HD and the Format Wars (2002-2005) Part 2

By Ben Gruchow

July 27, 2015

This battle is not as close as you might think.

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Unfortunately, Blu-ray wasn’t being produced in a vacuum. HD-DVD’s manufacturing process was identical to existing DVDs. This meant not only a far lower incidence of manufacturing errors, but almost nonexistent read or compatibility errors with HD-DVD players. It also meant that the first wave of Blu-ray discs were single-layer, in order to avoid adding an extra data layer on top of one that was already problematic - not at all an indictment of the 25-gigabyte storage space still available, but a nullification of the Sony talking point that Blu-ray discs had more room to play with than HD-DVDs. In point of fact, HD-DVDs were being produced with dual layers from day one, and so had more usable storage space than a Blu-ray.

The entire storage-space talking point was sort of empty as an asset, anyway; Sony even admitted in the early days of Blu-ray that the majority of films weren’t going to need more than 25 gigabytes of space. HD video takes up more room than SD video, but not exponentially. In addition, video compression techniques and codecs had progressed a long way since the introduction of DVD. There are two main types of these techniques: lossy, to indicate that the compressed video is of perceptibly lower quality than the original; and lossless, which indicates that the compressed video looks identical to the original, even if it has been compressed and re-encoded.

MPEG-2 is the codec used for any and every DVD produced, and it’s a lossy one. The flaws in MPEG-2 encoding are most noticeable in the very early days of DVD; if you ever remember seeing swarms of blocky pixels on a DVD, particularly in darker areas of the image, you’re remembering a common MPEG-2 liability called macroblocking - the unsightly result of the codec being unable to properly handle the amount of visual information in that part of the video. Any subsequent video copies derived from that MPEG-2 would be even worse. Macroblocking and compression artifacts were common in early DVDs and still make their way into some newer DVDs.




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MPEG-2 was unsuitable as a format for any original or master copies, but it was an acceptable format for the early days of DVD, when the majority of content was being played on SD screens. Once TVs started to grow in resolution and in size, the limitations of MPEG-2 encoding began to reveal themselves. The answer to this was something that I guarantee you all are intimately familiar with, even if you don’t know it yet: MPEG-4.

Developed in the late 1990s, MPEG-4 was conceived as a way to package higher-quality video in a smaller container; it was this format that the DVD Forum initially investigated for applying HD content to standard DVDs in 2002. MPEG-4 is a method of compression with multiple “faces” and manifestations, but the reigning king of all of them is the Advanced Video Codec, also known as AVC, also known as H.264. AVC/H.264 is everywhere now, but that’s a topic we’re going to save for Part 4 of this series. In 2002, AVC/H.264 went by a much more technical term: MPEG-4 Part 10. There’s a tremendous amount of technical data that we can go into to explain how this video coding standard is able to do what it does, but the broad strokes really tell the story of why it became relevant: by utilizing a different method of frame-based compression, MPEG-4 Part 10 was able to produce video quality comparable or superior to MPEG-2 at a substantially lower bitrate, with a far lower incidence of macroblocking and other compression artifacts.


Continued:       1       2       3       4       5       6       7

     


 
 

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