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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And here, after all of this, is where we arrive at the other reason why Blu-ray stumbled in its initial outing: early Blu-ray discs did not use MPEG-4 Part 10 as the video encoding standard, but MPEG-2 at HD resolution; this was particularly true of Blu-rays released by Sony itself. The results were very mixed. MPEG-2 HD was superior to MPEG-2 SD, but it was still prone to wildly inconsistent results depending on how complicated the information in the frame being encoded was. MPEG-2’s biggest liability as an encoding standard comes with scenes of fast motion, or particle effects like snow or rain.

It is very possible to pop in an early Blu-ray disc (the most infamous was the 2006 Blu-ray version of The Fifth Element, but any visually complex film will do) and find a transfer that went from acceptably HD to surprisingly soft and low-resolution in the space of a few scenes. Macroblocking and compression artifacts were everywhere. The visual result of an inefficient MPEG-2 transfer was exacerbated by the tendency of early Blu-ray discs to feature uncompressed audio for the soundtrack, which ate up even more precious disc space. The additional demerit here is that many early Blu-ray discs lacked any of the special features included on their DVD counterparts; there was just enough space on a single-layer Blu-ray disc for an uncompressed audio stream and a movie in MPEG-2 HD.

HD-DVD, by comparison, went straight for AVC/H.264 compression, as well as a Microsoft-backed compression standard called VC-1. The difference in quality between the same title on first-generation HD-DVD and first-generation Blu-ray is noticeable, considering both formats had access to the exact same codecs. In addition, HD-DVD discs rarely (if ever) possessed a space-hogging uncompressed audio track, relying instead on high-bitrate versions of the Dolby Digital and DTS compressed audio tracks that DVDs had possessed for years.




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A dedicated audio enthusiast with a bleeding-edge system might have noticed some difference between an uncompressed Blu-ray audio track and Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD audio, but the three were very close in terms of audio quality. Even if the same could be said about the video (that only a dedicated enthusiast would notice the difference between an MPEG-2 HD transfer and a VC-1 or AVC transfer), HD-DVD pulled out a decisive win based on the storage space taken up alone, and movies released on HD-DVD usually had all of their special features intact (and sometimes also in HD).

Another personal note: Being a fairly hotheaded young individual who was willing to go to great lengths to ensure adherence to a director’s original creative vision, the qualitative difference between Blu-ray and HD-DVD was one of my two preferred arguments to start with Best Buy employees at the time - especially considering that Blu-ray, quite frankly, had the better marketing campaign. The other argument involved/involves the implementation of TruFilm, or TruMotion, or MotionFlow, or whatever ridiculous version of frame interpolation that HDTV manufacturers started sticking into their models and turning on by default, in a misguided attempt to cater to the misguided consumer who was concerned that movies didn’t look smooth enough in motion. I may still have my blood angried up about that one.


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