February 19th, 2007
Lower Res HD-DVD Intro’ed …
By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews
It’s been a hard next-gen DVD format battle, and honestly, no one’s won yet … but over the weekend Doug Carson & Associates (DCA), makers of DVD mastering software, announced that the first 3X DVD-ROM was mastered over the weekend … this “new” format will only play on HD-DVD players, using standard red-laser DVDs. The disc will still support HD DVD’s UDF 2.5 file structure as and AACS copy protection.
The transition to 3X will not come without sacrifices, however. In order to burn HD content to a 3X DVD-ROM disc, manufacturers will have to encode using VC-1 or AVC and lower their HD resolution from 1080p to 720p—something that may rub videophiles the wrong way. However, HD movies and TV shows from Xbox Live Video already come encoded in VC-1 at 720p, and appear to be helping the service succeed relatively well. Whether or not 720p movies will take off in HD DVD form will depend highly on the pickiness of HD DVD’s early adopters, but we don’t think that anyone will be cheering on 3X DVD anytime soon. Source: Ars Technica
We Say: More complication for end users, but I really don’t see it attracting a lot of user excitement with that lowered resolution. In terms of studios, since the belief has been that Blu-Ray has better DRM, I don’t see a change from studios either.
David Johnston says:
Considering that it will support 720p, I think this is a pretty good move. Very, very few people have 1080p televisions and even fewer have devices (including TV’s and set-top boxes) capable of transmitting data in 1080p. Many “1080p” televisions don’t actually have the ability to input a 1080p signal.
February 20th, 2007 at 2:00 pm