all i know is the 360 downloads look damn good for being "such low bitrates". its really quite sad how good they look compared to hd-dvd/bluray which you would think would be 3-4x better based on the filesize difference but there is very little difference.

maybe if this guy looked at the actual pictures being produced by the options he might change his mind. you can even look at the specs of hd-dvd and bluray where bluray should be better nobody can tell a difference.

Except h.264 and VC-1 are 2-3x as efficient as MPEG-2, especially at low bit-rates. So of course the PQ is not at Blu-ray standards but of course it is still noticeably superior to DVD.

Ou is a hack.

To be fair, what would you rather have - a compressed bitrate with "fake hd", or hours of wait time while your internet connection struggles to bring you a movie that would look almost the same at half the size.

[taylorwilsdon.com]

There needs to be some different designation, because highly compressed 720p is not in the same league as 1080p. Based on (admittedly, only a half an hour of viewing) what I have seen of the Apple HD download, it is not in the same league as 480p DVD's. This, along with the fact that people prefer to physically hold what they purchase, is why most of us say the death of physical media is greatly exaggerated. There will be a day when most people get their movies from the information superhighway, but it is still years away.

Downloaded "media" is crap, pure and simple. I'll have Blu and enjoy the best. Why do otherwise?

Going by the HD movies that I've watched from Xbox Live, the author does have a point. The movie is noticeably over-compressed with visible artifacts and in no way approaches the quality of HD-DVD/Blu-ray. Aside from that, it takes longer to download then the length of the movie. People watch movies in a large variety of ways, so I'm sure there is a market for it, but probably more for SD content then HD at the moment.

To a certain extent I can see the point of using numbers to compare video formats, but what is the point without another comparison that you can actually look at? Did Ou really watch a movie in all those formats an form an opinion or did he just look at numbers and make broad, general statements?

There is a notable difference between a blu-ray 1080p flick and the HD download on the 360 and on iTunes. Plus I'd like to interject that I notice that none of these downloads contain the "special features" that Mr. Lam was using to make his point in the HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray flame fest yesterday. I also agree with Monty on the idea that most average consumers prefer physical media, something portable like a disc, and when I can drive to the store and buy a blu-ray disk in less than half the time it takes to download a movie, I'll stick with physical media. I don't doubt we are moving towards downloaded and streaming content, but I don't think it's as close as some think and definitely not close enough to bypass physical HD content.

hey hey if M$$ & apple say its HD its HD OK, am just loving my apple tv right now, no subscriptions no waiting for movies in the mail, heck i won't even have to drive 5 miles to go to blockbuster anymore to find out the movie i want has been rented out or not available, just turn apple TV when ever i want to watch something and that it. Nice

The issue with the lower bit rates in h.264 media arrise in transitional "b" frames. When you are watching a movie with a varriable bit rate, when its those low calm scenes of basically still images, you can get a good image at a low bit rate. But, watch something like 30000 birds take off at once in the flick Planet Earth, and you will see that the predicitive frame of the codec cannot compete with the change and you get some made macroblocking and tearing. So yes, watch your Grays Anatomy download in 720p and it will look pretty good, seeing as how most of the cameras do not move, nor do the actors. but, watch something that has high contrast and high action, and you will see where the quality suffers.

Isnt there a feature in there Giz, grab some screenshots at full rez from all the relevant media and stick it up. Then we can see, especially for us Non-Americans who cant download any Apple HD at the moment. Dunno how easy it is to screencap from Blu-Ray or the like though!

"and even Apple TV?"

You guys post as if Apple's shit doesn't stink.

The HD movies for XBOX 360 look damn good. As for Apple TV, who knows. I am just watching them play catch up.

I agree with his statement, but not his method of just looking at bit rates. Xbox 360 HD downloads look drastically worse than a plain old dvd. While resolution is very important to photographs and video games, I really think that true color, and a lack of artifacts is much more important than resolution to a movie.

Personally I thought the 360 Video Marketplace HD download of "300" looked on par with the HD-DVD version.

i have never seen the point of download movie anyway i have bought one thing off apple itunes video store i can do nothing with it, it sits on my hard disk i have watched it once. it was good. but i like the physical aspect of owning media , it makes me warm , i can show a nice selection of discs to my friends and i feel i have bought something that transcends the software file. also where are the extras ??? I have a psp and i rip my dvds to it and thats fine, digital downloads are not the future even if they were hd quality as a blu ray disc

This is the same reason I don't buy music as mp3. The same scenario will play out, too.

Give me 44.1kHz/16-bit stereo on a CD. I rip the songs and I have a free archive. Ditch the jewel case and liner notes and stuff the CD's in a cakebox.

In 10 years when there is a leap in compression and capacity, I can re-rip.

And don't tell me that the music and movies will be reissued in a better format. I do audio, and the majority of the current recordings by major studios are still done at 44.1kHz/24-bit in Protools and the analog recordings are as good as they are going to get in current release. It could be better, but not noticably.

it really doesn't matter because you can't tell the difference. also, have fun spending 2 days downloading a full HD version of 300. i'll take the slightly gimped version, thank you

are you actually going to take anything Ou says with a grain of salt? The man is an idiot.

I think this is the same "purist" dillema which was discussed when LPs turned into 1s and 0s. Yes there is loss but 90% (pulled # out of my ass) of applications (or people) cannot detect it. I believe convenience outweighs purism in this sense. Until everyone has a dedicated fiber-optic to their TV, can't see 50GB instantanously floating in it at a push of a button. Yes, media to the purists, downloads to the convenience-whores, and neither to people who don't give a shit.

Physical media and full quality ftw.

The HD Downloads on the XBOX360 look amazing. You might be able to tell a difference between the formats if you have a hdtv larger than 50"

There aren't any HD streaming services. Even Xbox live doesn't go any near to BD;

It's all a big lie. And if you happen to have an lcd bigger then 20 inches you'r screwed.
Cinescopic TVs kinda do the job.. but still, they are not the future.

I've edited and distributed video for a living for a total of about 3 years. I can tell you confidently that video bit-rates can not be taken as no "bottom-line" for a variety of reasons; all of the discussed compression algorithms are of the "lossy" kind and there is not a perception or a definition of what constitutes a "sufficient" bit-rate for any of them, let alone any "golden-ratio".
From experience it is the average of about 6.5Mbps for an SD-DVD, and 0.8Mbps for H.264 in the same resolution. I did not however get the chance to work with HD back then so at these resolutions I can only guess.
But one thing is certain — the ratio of "sufficient quality" for MPEG-2 encoded HD video stream to same for H.264 will be about the same.
So quit bitching. I also was disgusted of how "HDV" cameras suddenly did not actually capture video in HD-DV but in HD-MPEG2, sacrificing quality while upping the resolution.
There isn't anything that I could, or wanted to put myself through doing about that.

Picture quality of 720p with modern codecs and 480i with MPEG2 in equal bitrates should compare well. Certainly it's not as good as on disc, but with controlled encoding and good post-processing there should be no artifacts to be seen. I guess the main things you'll lose on downloads are finer details, color depth and audio quality.

They can always use the old trick and throw in tons of film grain at post processing and no one will notice! :-P

@Monty: Apple's HD downloads haven't even been released.

You just got caught talking out your ass.

Ya think?!?!? I mean, what took people so long to figure out that studios won't stream good quality content, with attempts to be cheap on bandwidth.

Anything streaming ain't no true HD quality--and keep in mind, the definition of HD quality is a broad one, too broad....I mean anything above standard definition qualifies as HD, regardless of how crappy it is.

"And even Apple TV?" Oh please. Let's take a service for HD that's hardly out of the box, with an anemic 1000 titles available sometime in the next 2 weeks and "assume" that the quality ... mixed with bandwidth demands ... is not going to run up against the same constraints as other, more established and developed systems. Then we'll take their word for the bitrates ... . Add all this up to write "And even Apple TV" as if it had set some sort of standard. In video, it hasn't. Even.

@tutelary:

Physical media.
Gross.

With real time encoding using current broadcast H.264 encoders it wouldn't be possible to get the kind of bitrates Apple is talking about, but these are improving all the time, with manufacturers claiming 6-7Mbits for 'broadcast quality' HD with their next-gen units. I've not looked at the quality of multi-pass encoding with these systems, but if you can manage broadcast quality with a single pass (and it didn't look far off to me), then I don't see why you won't get 'DVD quality' with multiple runs.

In the end, You have to look at the video. The numbers don't really mean anything (for example, if you run an SD encoder at the bitrates typically used for broadcast HD, to my eyes at least, the picture quality is superior. But "High quality SD video" isn't as easy to market to someone as "HD video").

I wonder what the 1080i over-the-air bit rates are at. All I know is that the signal I get on my bedroom Tivo S3 with the HD antennae looks noticeably better than the compressed signal of my living room Tivo S3 with TimeWarner CableCards and seemingly as good as some of the Blu Ray movies in 1080p (at least when the 1080i action is slow).

I don't know about your country, but the stuff I work on would be around 12Mbit/s for easy content like movies (VBR), going up to 20Mbit/s FBR for sports. It will depend on the delivery system I guess, as that will impose limitations on overall available bandwidth, so they'll want to balance bitrate to number of channels

that's why I watch movie in theatre

1080p = 1920x1080 resolution i.e. 1920x1080 pixels per frame
and usually we have 30 fps, a movie easily goes 100 minutes long

an remember another thing, to have a colorful scene, you need 32bit depth to represent the color

assume uncompressed 100 minutes movie

1920x1080x30x60x100x32 bits = 11,943,936,000,000 bits = 11.9 Tbits

assume you have Giga ethernet ... it mean 1G bits per second
it approx.. requires 11943 seconds to transfer, which is 3.3175 hours to download to watch just an hour and half long movie... ridiculous... and above, I didn't count the audio ...

so the solution would be compress, and high compress ratio... we sacrifice the video quality.

Not sure if my theory's right... I'm not a encoding/decoding pro.

@ Everybody knee-jerk reacting to "even Apple TV": did it like occur to you that maybe the reference was made in that fashion because (a) it was just announced, and (b) Apple made a big deal about it being "HD"??

But nooooooo. It has to be because Gizmodo staff are biased Apple fuckin' fanboys and therefore they blindly believe that Apple services are inherently superior to everything else out there. Yeaaahhhh, that's it. I'm gonna go do some bashing now!

This frustrates me. the files are compressed, but so is HDTV that you pay so much for...

also, you can't compare MPEG2 and h.264 because h.264 is so much more efficiant than MPEG2. so saying online HD downloads are closer to DVD than HD is a huge reporting error.

I still like DVDs. Hard copies are always better.

"Hard to argue when he has numbers." WTF?

He hasn't done any research at all!

In other news: car reviewer decides car A handles better than car B because the engine is larger. Has not driven car.

If you want to argue about compression not maintaining HD resolutions throw up some zone charts, trumpets and real testing aparatus to see actually provide numbers on what effective resolution is being delivered.

I could throw up a DVD and an HD download in H264 or WMV and play them side by side and I don't think anybody would be confused which is which.

@sparkrainfire: Just remember that the term 'HD' just defines the resolution. There is no such thing as 'HD picture quality'. However, the term 'DVD picture quality' also takes into account the typical bitrates used to encode at SD resolutions on standard DVDs, so it's a useful benchmark.

To get 'DVD quality' at HD resolutions for downloaded content would be impressive and probably worth the money Apple are charging. Looking at the numbers it's conceivable that they can achieve that kind of quality but if I'm honest, I'm expecting it to be a little worse than DVD.

@sparkrainfire: I love h.264 and use it for every video I encode for my clients. My only complaint with it? The reds seem "blocky" to me. Even at higher bit rates...I've always wondered why.

Either way, Apple loses me on the rental for one reason: Having to watch the movie within 24 hours of starting it. I think they should just give you a month for the whole thing.

Im a profesional post producer and i concur with SPARKRAINFIRE, we shoudl have to wait and see...

i dont know how many people have watch a hddvd or bluray movies with a 1080p tv but all these so call hd downloading services cant compared the quality to these true hd format. at the momment the price is high because we havent got a uniform format yet. the reason y people download stuff is because is free.. who wants to pay an inferior quality u can get these h264 format movies on the net for free..

His numbers are screwy.

1080p = 1920x1080 pixels
FPS = 60? (Nobody is going to encode movies at 60fps, but let's go with it.)
Color Depth = 24 (Deep Color and shit like that sounds nice on paper, but it's not what's on your Bluray or HD-DVD discs.)

That gives 1920x1080x24x60 = 2.78Gbps


Now, no idiot is going to encode a 24fps movie at 60fps, so let's redo that.

1920x1080x24x24 = 1.11Gbps

Also, for those of you working out how big that download is, don't forget that's in bits. For bytes, we divide by 8.

142.4 MB/s

Without tipping my had, lets just say I work on delivering and rendering HD content on the PC, video quality on the PC is part of my job. I know video.

The offerings on Live are way better than DVD, but in some cases the bitrate is too low, I agree. But it is still HD, and it compares favorably with broadcast, often surpassing anything I've seen on ATSC or, even far worse, DirecTVs 3rd generation compressovision.

I have not seen Apples offerings so will not comment.

However, the 1080p/24 HD rips I've seen off bit torrent are excellent.

MikeVan: films are 24fps. Not 30. FYI. I can pull down an H.264/VC1 encoded 1080p/24 file in about an hour on my fios connection. VC1 and H.264 FTW.

Sparkenfires assertion is pretty spot on. It's all cmpressed. Nobody at home watches uncompressed HD content. H.264 and VC1 are far more effecient than MPEG2, so of course the bitrates will be lower, that's the point of using those formats.

@CircusSeal:

Who on Earth would deal with uncompressed HD outside of the studio? Throwing uncompressed datarates around it pointless.

umm... hello!

some of us DO have download limits!!

im glad for compression
when were you last disappointed that someone created the zip archive?

compression kicks ass

I will use D/L for movies not worth the $20-40 the Blu-ray disk will cost me (depending on the deal of the week). For movies I plan on watching more than once or really want to keep I will buy the HD disk. Apple TV D/L will hurt Blockbuster and Cable on Demand more than anybody. I was at Macworld and the Apple TV content I saw was good enough for my casual movie needs when nothing is on. I spent quite a bit of time looking at it using a normal viewing distance. I noticed quite a few people standing 2' from the screen evaluating the image on the 50" flat panel, sheesh.

I've rented several SD and HD movies on the 360. the HD movies are absolutely better looking than the SD ones. I'm not sure what this guy is shouting about, but I've got an eye for compression artifacts and I've seen FAR worse coming from PLENTY of other places.

Yeah, the movies are only 720p, but they're still decent.

In the end, however, I'd rather spend $2 less and just rely on the 360's upscaling (via my VGA cable) to make it look somewhere in the middle ground.

It's not about compression or no compression here. It's about the amount of compression. Some of you should know that that some Blu-Rays and HD-DVDs use VC-1 and H.264 but at higher bitrates.

Since I have a native 1080p display, 720p will not cut it for me firstly. If you do the math, you are looking at 3x the pixels of DVD with 720p and since it is claimed that H.264 is 2-3 more efficient than MPEG-2 we are at DVD quality or lower at that (substandard) resolution.

Anyway, this is not for people with full 1080p projectors that can get a 120" image. The artifacts would be visible especially in high motion scenes.

Blu-Ray at 1080p is what someone with a 1080p projector wants, some half-assed, over-compressed download. When we have 100mbps connections, and 5TB hard drives are common then maybe downloading decent 20-30GB 1080p movie files will be feasible.

But I did factor in the improvements of MPEG4-AVC (AKA H.264) or VC-1 over MPEG-2. At best, MPEG4-AVC and VC-1 have the advantage of being able to use 33% less bandwidth to achieve the same PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio). That doesn't ever justify using 1/2 or 1/8th the bandwidth like these Web download guys are trying to push you.

For all of you attempting the math.

A 1920x1080 movie is encoded at 24fps and at 16 bits (4:2:2 colorspace). Not 24 bit, not 32 bit, but 16 bit. Its easier to think in terms of bytes so lets convert that 16 bits to two bytes (8+8)

1920x1080x24x2 = 99.532800 MB/s (thats bytes per second)
or if you prefer bits it is 796.262400 Mb/s

But that is not really important since we are talking 720p not 1080p.

1280x720x2x24 = 44.236800 MB/s (less than half of a 1080 show) or in bits it is 353.894400 Mb/s

Compare this to DVD at 720x480x60 (fields) x 2, or 720x480x30 (frames) x 2 which is 20.736000 MB/s uncompressed or roughly half of a 720p data rate.

so uncompressed:

1080 = 99.5MB/s or 796Mb/s
720p = 44.2MB/s or 353.6Mb/s
480i = 20.7MB/s or 166Mb/s

DVD compression is around 5.5Mb/s on average for a high quality movie for a compression ratio of around 30:1

Comparing to DVD compression using MPEG 2

1080p would require 26Mb/s
720P would require 11.7Mb/s using MPEG 2

h.264 (and VC-1) are between 20-50% more efficient at compression, so cut those numbers by the average of 35%

1080p would require 16.9Mb/s
720P would require 7.6Mb/s

In my experience, a 720p movie at 7Mb/s encoded with a high quality codec is going to be "broadcast" quality for all but the highest motion content. At 5Mb/s there are going to be many, many compromises and its going to look crappy. Apples downloads if they are really at 5Mb are going to have problems. I believe that Apple will have further problems because of the limitations in playback capabilites both of the Apple TV and the apple h.264 implementation as it is today but we will just have to wait and see. Of course most people will happily listen to crappy 128kb mp3s so maybe they won't even notice.

@scuba_steve:
"...but if you can manage broadcast quality with a single pass (and it didn't look far off to me), then I don't see why you won't get 'DVD quality' with multiple runs"

multi-pass means much less with h.264 and VC-1 than it does with MPEG-2. All of the better advanced codecs have entropy prediction (look ahead) and feedback loops (look behind) effectively creating multi pass scenarios in real-time. The next generation 'best' hardware encoders will have 'parallel pass' in addition to the other tools, trying different scenarios and picking the best ones on the fly. With h.264 and VC-1 what you see in the first pass can be improved with a second pass but by a very small fraction compared to what can happen in multi-pass MPEG-2. The algorithms, the toolsets, even the standards themselves are so complex and so comprehensive as to have done most of the work up front and doing more passes is not as much of a requirement.

hd steaming?

@k2snowboards88: They look drastically worse that standard dvd? Are you on crack? The detail is absurdly better than standard dvd. If you're standard dvd looks better then an HD download then you have cable/connection problems or something else interfering with you signal.

As for all of the readers stating people will always want physical media, I say "Negative." With Blu-Ray and HD-DVD discs at such an expensive price point, I'm going to be renting for quite some time. Why would I go through the trouble of waiting for one to come to me in the mail or worse yet, drive five miles to a store and deal with traffic, crowds, etc. to rent a movie?

Downloadable content is the solution - present and future.

Who freakin cares what bit rate it uses. As long as it looks better than DVD quality, does it really matter? Besides, who needs to watch P.S. I Love You in full 1080p 50Mbps quality?