Video Asylum

Posted by oscar (A) on November 08, 2007 at 06:26:36

In Reply to: RE: Then why are the majority of Blu-ray titles on BD-25s? posted by Jack G on November 08, 2007 at 05:39:48

And a lot of them were fairly mediocre in PQ; some because of the learning curve (e.g. DVD production values are no longer good enough for HD video), the use of less efficient MPEG2 and probaby less than ideal bitrates.

The best Blu-ray movies for PQ are on 50G discs which constitute the majority of the recent releases.

And as I was saying, the biggest discriminator between Blu-ray and HD DVD is the absence of lossless/uncompressed audio tracks with HD DVD (<15%). The vast majority of Blu-rays without lossless are the Warner releases who probably didn't want the Blu-ray version to upstage the HD DVD counterpart. It's not just storage (notice even the 25G Blu-rays have lossless) but bandwidth which is a likely cause; the studios have to allocate the available audio/video bit rates between video and audio and the video is the higher priority. I.e. Better to dump the lossless audio than let significant compression artifacts plague the video. In contrast, lossless audio is basically a freebie (i.e. no impact on available video bandwidth) for Blu-ray for 5.1 24/48 PCM.