It’s all over the HD sites now. Let me quote a headline from PCPro that sums it best: “Last century codecs for next-gen Blu-ray.”
That’s right, Sony’s Blu-Ray DVDs will pack 50GB of data, all encoded with MPEG2. A side note for the tech un-savvy - MPEG2 is the codec that current DVDs are using. I did a recent comparison between Sony Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. I’m not sure what HD-DVD will be using but I think Sony’s making the wrong move here.
There are better codecs available. On paper, Blu-Ray supports MPEG-4 AVC (a.k.a. H.264) which allows much higher bitrates. Apple recently joined the Blu-Ray camp and has built-in support for H.264.
A race between MPEG2 and MPEG4 is like racing … [writer's block]… a red snail and a Ferrari. Between the two of them, the only common thing is that they’re both red … I mean codecs. MPEG4 is able to pack A LOT more info into a file size that’s equal to an MPEG2 file.
The discussion on why Sony did it still rages on. The only grain of truth that I see is that Sony has invested a ton of dough in coding machines that only do MPEG2. Also, their technicians (for lack of a better word ) are experienced with MPEG2 settings. After all their task is to makes the movies appear their best on an HD screen. Whether the file is 30GB or 45GB is not something that they to worry too much about. At least for the moment.
I fear come Peter Jackson’s King Kong (btw, King Kong trailer is out ) they’ll start feeling the pressure. I bet Peter has extras that will put the Lord of the Rings DVDs to shame. His production diary will take half a blu-ray easy!
As far as I’m concerned, I’d like to put a system together that will make it possible to take the 100MB rate from the Panasonic HVX200 and burn it to a DVD!
0 Responses to “Sony Blu-Ray goes with MPEG2”