Looks like Sony’s been busted for using a really old codec for its next-gen Blu-ray format. For its first Blu-ray movies, Sony will encode with MPEG-2, which is the same codec used for today’s old-fashioned DVDs. Don Eklund, senior vice president of advanced technology for Sony Pictures, has gone on record as saying:
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.
Wowee, I say. Now, isn’t Blu-ray supposed to support the MPEG-4 AVC, also known as H.264, which enables content to be encoded at much higher bitrates without huge increases in file size? I mean, isn’t this kind of the point? But the biggest surprise may come to Apple, which actually has native support in its latest OS for H.264.
