WARNER SEES 'RED' FOR HIGH-DEF DVD

[Gregg Lengling]

 As technologists converged in Los Angeles this week to discuss the development of a next-generation high-definition version of DVD, high-ranking Warner Home Video engineers detailed to VB their own plans for such a format.

Alan Bell, senior VP of technology operations, and Lewis Ostrover, senior VP of new media applications and operations, outlined plans for HD/DVD-9, a technology that would encode up to 135 minutes of highly compressed HD data on the same "red-laser" DVD-9 disc now in wide use for standard-definition releases.

According to Bell, HD/DVD-9 also would be designed to work in the same players that will accommodate higher capacity "blue-laser" discs. Although its inherent lower capacity would limit the type of content that could be released in the format, Bell said HD/DVD-9 discs would use existing DVD manufacturing infrastructure and could be pressed far more inexpensively than those pressed by emerging blue-laser technologies.

"HD/DVD-9 would provide a low-cost option for those publishing titles with 135 minutes or less of playback time," Bell said. "But by no means does it encompass all program types. Longer playing times will require a higher-density blue laser. We'd like to see the capability for players not only to read blue products, but HD/DVD-9 products as well."

Bell said Warner does not foresee longer feature films being broken into multiple-HD/DVD-9-disc installments, citing consumer dissatisfaction associated with similar strategies employed on laserdisc.

Since consumer electronics manufacturers will have to include a red laser in future HD DVD product releases to make the machines backward compatible with standard-definition DVDs--viewed as essential for wide-scale consumer adoption--integrating the capacity to play both blue-laser and HD/DVD-9 discs would not prove cost-prohibitive, Bell added.

Further, the Warner technologists bristled at published reports that a red-laser technology such as HD/DVD-9 would not provide a high enough resolution (VB, 8-5). Bell said HD/DVD-9 is capable of a picture resolution as high as 1,080 x 1,920, in accordance with Advanced Television Systems Committee standards for HDTV broadcast.

"Warner Bros. has no interest in anything but the highest quality level," Ostrover added.

Warner is aggressively pushing for a next-generation DVD format that will use existing standard-definition DVD manufacturing operations and patents. Its parent, AOL Time Warner, enjoys significant positions in both.

Late last year, Warner proposed HD/DVD-9 to the DVD Forum, and the body of consumer electronics manufacturers charged with ultimately determining and developing the next-generation DVD standard adopted the format for development. According to Bell, a former IBM technologist and DVD Forum official, formal HD/DVD-9 specifications could be published by the DVD Forum as soon as next spring.

The DVD Forum is also considering the blue-laser HD DVD proposal recently brought forward by member companies Toshiba Corp. and NEC Corp. A separate blue-laser technology, Blu-ray Disc, is being developed by Sony Corp., Philips Electronics, Matsu****a Electric and several other DVD Forum members.

However, development of Blu-ray, a blue laser HD DVD playback and recordable standard targeted to reach Japan late next year, is being handled outside the jurisdiction of the DVD Forum.

The Warner technologists would offer no timeline as to when HD/DVD-9 would be introduced. Still, with engineers from Warner and other studios, consumer electronics companies and software developers converging at this week's Copyright Protection Technical Working Group gathering, the discussion about HD DVD was energetic enough for analysts to believe that HD DVD will happen sooner rather than later.

"Certainly, one of the goals is to get something going, perhaps as early as 2003 or 2004," said Richard Doherty, director of research for the Envisioneering Group, a consumer electronics research firm based in Seaford, N.Y.

"The reality is that [consumer interest in HD-capable TVs and monitors] has clearly emerged in the last year," said Gary Shapiro, president of the Consumer Electronics Association. "There's a tremendous interest among consumer electronics manufacturers in seeing prerecorded HD content in the marketplace."
 

[Matt Heebner]

Two very big problems with red IMHO...
First, the information in "highly"compressed. I have yet to see any good compression logarithms that can even be in the same ballpark as less compressed, or no compressed.
Second, no mention of the transfer rate. D-VHS transfers at 28 megs versus 10 for DVD. I dont think red lasers will be able to do this. I think that the next generation of movie watching is optical disk, but it had to be more advanced than optical tape that D-VHS is using.
AFAIK, blue is the way to go! It offers more capacity, higher transfer rates, and little to no compression. What Warner is offering is only sligtly better than DVD now.
Also...why is Warner even offering to do red laser? The claim it would not be cost prohibitative to include  red, but why not just do it with blue? They never really answered that question.
Matt

[This message has been edited by Matt Heebner (edited 09-17-2002).]

[tenth_t2]

Not a knock at all Matt, but 28 megs? what, per hour?  Or 28Mbps (computer talk here)?  Gotta do some research.

Since we don't have blue yet (despite what American Express thinks) are we stuck for the moment?

Arrrgh!

[borghe]

D-VHS is 28Mbps. That comes out to about 12.5GB/hour full bitrate including one Dolby 5.1 soundtrack. Therefore for a full 2 hour movie you will need at least 25GB to store it with MPEG2. Realistically, you will have to have discs capable of much more unless you want to run into flippers, and as a previous owner of a laserdisc, being limited to to either 1 or 2 hours PER DOUBLE SIDED DISC is not something we want to experience again. So we should be looking to hold at least 2.5+ hours of lowly compressed video and maybe up to 4 hours of medium-higly compressed video.

This 2.5-4 hour number is what will give the red format the most trouble. First, MPEG4 does an admirable job at compression. Same quality video compressed with MPEG2 vs. MPEG4, MPEG4 will ALWAYS have a smaller file size. However, the question here isn't whether MPEG4 is a better compression algorithm, it's whether it can compress a file well enough and still at D-VHS quality while being able to fit on an 8.7GB(?) disc.

7.4GB (after single DD5.1 track size) at full bitrate for 2 hours gives us a maximum bitrate of 8.4Mbps using CBR. Using VBR this means we could most likely hit bitrates of over 10Mbps maybe nearing even 12Mbps.

Now for true DVD quality with MPEG4 (IMHO), I have had to compress at a minimum of 3Mbps w/DiVx5. Now considering most DVD movies average about 6-7Mbps this would give us about 50% bandwidth savings. Doubling our available space bandwidth we came up with, a 7.4GB disc would give us the equivalent of a 17Mbps HD stream, for only two hours. This is as good as what 58 is showing right now, and with further compression, it could go over 2 hours, but it is still well short of D-VHS quality.

So using red format technology, you will be able to record broadcast quality video at or around 2 hours per side, but over two hours or at a quality comparable to D-VHS, red format comes up short and will need multiple sides. The only way it will work is if you started using two sides and "auto-flipping" like laserdisc. Just my two cents.