Sony Blu-ray to use old Mpeg-2 format

By OrangeSoul
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Grand Master

OrangeSoul

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Old habits must really die hard for Sony: once more proving the divisiveness between their content and technology branches, Sony Pictures? senior vice president of advanced technology Don Eklund apparently said, ?Advanced (formats) don?t necessarily improve picture quality. Our goal is to present the best picture quality for Blu-ray. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, that?s with MPEG-2.? Quick backgrounder: the Moving Pictures Experts Group who created MPEG-2 later created MPEG-4 AVC (aka h.264), which is spec for both Blu-ray and HD DVD (as well as Microsoft?s VC-1, among other codecs) and was designed to be technically superior to MPEG-2, and to ultimately replace it. It?s no big deal that one movie studio is choosing not to use a standard, proven, hi def-centric codec, but how poorly does it reflect specifically on Sony that their SVP of advanced tech doesn?t get it that h.264 offers the same image quality as MPEG-2, but at lower bitrates, or offers a high def picture at the same bitrates as the old standard? Ultimately this isn?t a big deal since they?ll surely change their mind eventually, but it makes us a little uneasy about who?s at the wheel over there, to say the least.

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000293070178/

Grand Master

John Veteran

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Politic aside... what they said is true. Mpeg 2 Still provide the best quality at those high bitrate.

No it doesn't! Logically, newer codecs would produce the same quality image at lower bitrates than an older codec. MPEG2 is old by today's standards, and future technology should use the best technology of today as its base. Sony should have chosen MPEG4, plain and simple. There's no reason not to.

What's probably happening is that Sony is realizing the drives are going to be expensive, and they don't want manufacturers complaining about having to use (expensive) new drives and (expensive) new decoders, so Sony cuts out one of the expenses by using older decoders.

Grand Master

Doli

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I would think HD MPEG 2 would be eaiser to decode than HD MPEG 4. MY computer can play HD MPEG 2 files fine (HDTV Wonder) but HD MPEG 4 is a big problem along with WMV-HD. There is a lot of room so no HD movie should fill up a whole Blu-ray disc. I can get about 8 GB in 1 hour and that with 5.1 sound also.

Im sure that soon it will play both mpeg2 and mpeg 4 formats also, but that depends on the player

Grand Master

Miuku.

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Politic aside... what they said is true. Mpeg 2 Still provide the best quality at those high bitrate.

:rofl:

Most definitely it doesn't - MPEG2 has a very poor quality compression scheme compared to the H.264 (Also known as MPEG4).

Grand Master

Japlabot

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If they don't change their minds, Blue Ray is doomed. HD-DVD would probably win anyway - it's not backed by a single manufacturer, it's easier for manufacturers to upgrade current manufacturing equipment, it has the features that content providers want, it has a name that consumers can identify more easily (as a sucessor of DVD), and has more industry support (eg. Microsoft). Even if Blue Ray is technically superior in storage capacity, HD has the features.

Grand Master

chopyaedoff

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But do you know have hard it is even for quite a modern computer to render a HD h.264 (To just prove my point a few of the trailer on the apple website wil only run smoothly on a Dual-core Dual-processor Power Mac G5)so think about the commerical DVD players (Well Blu-ray players) their hardware isn't as powerful as desktop PC so most players would prob stutter and stall while trying to play HD h.264 films.

Grand Master

giga Veteran

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But do you know have hard it is even for quite a modern computer to render a HD h.264 (To just prove my point a few of the trailer on the apple website wil only run smoothly on a Dual-core Dual-processor Power Mac G5)so think about the commerical DVD players (Well Blu-ray players) their hardware isn't as powerful as desktop PC so most players would prob stutter and stall while trying to play HD h.264 films.

Erm, many of the 720p trailers that are encoded in h.264 at Apple Traillers run fine on my Sempron 2600.

Grand Master

KeR

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No it doesn't! Logically, newer codecs would produce the same quality image at lower bitrates than an older codec. MPEG2 is old by today's standards, and future technology should use the best technology of today as its base. Sony should have chosen MPEG4, plain and simple. There's no reason not to.

What's probably happening is that Sony is realizing the drives are going to be expensive, and they don't want manufacturers complaining about having to use (expensive) new drives and (expensive) new decoders, so Sony cuts out one of the expenses by using older decoders.

nope what iwod said in this case is correct.

Grand Master

Miuku.

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their hardware isn't as powerful as desktop PC so most players would prob stutter and stall while trying to play HD h.264 films.

You're talking apples (heh) and oranges here.

A set top box can destroy, and I mean totally obliterate, your PC in video, audio and other things because they have chips that are specially designed for the job - a good example is a digital tv (IPTV) box here that has approximately 100MHz "CPU" yet it can decode video/audio/transport stream at the same speed as the fastest PC you can get from the store.

isnt mpeg4 DivX and Xvid?

No, MPEG4 is a standard that defines other sub-standards such as Video, Audio, Subtitles etc. AVC/H264 is the codec that takes care of the video part of it.

DivX and XViD are not the same as H264.

Enthusiast

DeadOnArrival

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nice work orangesoul with more anti-sony postings.. let me see mpeg2? oh wait yes uncompressed meaning FULL 100% quality, no distortion, no nothing. They dont need AVC, or Mpeg4... Mpeg2 + HD Audio will make thing extremely nice, and that goes for the movie makers since they can just take there mpeg2 video from there hd edits and just save it to a blu-ray.

Also note, mpeg-2 already has HD standard formats that work nicely.. I think more of this story has to do with the movie companies wanting mpeg2 still since they can use existing equipment to do there work. Instead of having to update to mpeg4, which requires a lot more computer power to edit the film, and you cant sit there and tell me it doesn't, because my friends system with a x1800xt, amd 64 4800+, 2g of ram, and around 500g of hdd space, has many problems doing Mpeg4 (thats also including avc), anything above the normal 480, he starts to have stuttering, glitches, and it takes a good 8 hours to encode. While on the mpeg 2 side, he can encode a perfect 720p video in 2 hours and be enjoying it with full fps, quality, and everything.

Edited by DeadOnArrival
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etempest

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They should adopt a newer mpeg4 standard, h.264 is a good choice but there also some other good mpeg4 ones out there.

The other thing about mpeg2 is sony has a ton of patents related to mpeg2, so they profit from staying at mpeg2.

I would love to have Blue-Ray hardware and HD-DVD software slightly less restrictive anti-copy scheme.

Experienced

Shannon

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There is no such thing as uncompressed MPEG2.

My thoughts exactly. :blink:

Anyway, at these resolutions and bitrates, its unlikely there'll be any picture quality difference between MPEG-2 and 4, no? Eh, I'll just wait till both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD hit the market and see what the masses adopt.

Grand Master

MrA

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If they don't change their minds, Blue Ray is doomed. HD-DVD would probably win anyway - it's not backed by a single manufacturer, it's easier for manufacturers to upgrade current manufacturing equipment, it has the features that content providers want, it has a name that consumers can identify more easily (as a sucessor of DVD), and has more industry support (eg. Microsoft). Even if Blue Ray is technically superior in storage capacity, HD has the features.

Blu-ray is the one with the most support. Sony, Philips, Panasonic, LG, Pioneer, Sharp, Apple, Dell, and the list goes on. As for HD-DVD it's far less: Toshiba, MS, Intel, HP (which backs both) and a couple of others. With regards to features, both are pretty much teh same. The only major difference is with the interactive features. HD-DVD will be based on MS's XML format and Blu-ray on Java (and don't even mention Java's non-existant performance problems). Now as for Blu-ray disks being cheaper to manufacture, it's true and I can't argue there.

But do you know have hard it is even for quite a modern computer to render a HD h.264 (To just prove my point a few of the trailer on the apple website wil only run smoothly on a Dual-core Dual-processor Power Mac G5)so think about the commerical DVD players (Well Blu-ray players) their hardware isn't as powerful as desktop PC so most players would prob stutter and stall while trying to play HD h.264 films.

I can play 720p video perfectly (< 100% CPU usage and no frame-dropping) on my crappy 2.4 P4 with no hardware acceleration (stupid GF2). With a slightly better CPU or an accelerating GFX card, I should be able to plat 1080p with no problems.

As for commercial DVD players being able to handle h264, it should be no problem. The decoding chips in those players use specialized processors to decode video. They can run at a much lower clock speed and get better decoding performance than our general-purpose x86 or PPC chips.

isnt mpeg4 DivX and Xvid?

why having 2 and sometimes 3 names for the same codec damn

Yes, Xvid and DivX are MPEG4. Specifically, it's MPEG4-part 2. H.264 is MPEG4-part 10. Confused yet? Check out AAC and it's abundance of profiles.

Mentor

iwod

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Look. The most important aspect of a codec is somtimes not about its technology, but how much time people spend to tune the codec. Mpeg 4 may in theory be better, but mpeg 2 has been around for a long time and on a good encoder at high bitrate nothing bit it.

The same reason why Mp3 isn't doomed .. yet.

Mentor

1759

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I can play 720p video perfectly (< 100% CPU usage and no frame-dropping) on my crappy 2.4 P4 with no hardware acceleration (stupid GF2). With a slightly better CPU or an accelerating GFX card, I should be able to plat 1080p with no problems.

Yeah, but what codec? I can play WMV 720p video perfectly fine, with only about 50% CPU usage, but if I try the same with 720p H.264 QT videos, my PC really chugs.

Veteran

Boeing 787

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http://erg.abdn.ac.uk/research/future-net/...ideo/mpeg2.html

H.264, or MPEG-4 Part 10, is a digital video codec standard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264

The question is has anybody here sat below a $40,000 Runco Video Projector and compared HD MPEG2 versus H.264 ?

Edited by hardgiant
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