the death of analog continues...

farewell VHS, you will be missed.

I have hated VHS ever since DVD came out. Since I'm not exactly an adult, that means I've hated VHS for a long time... =P

It's a really interesting question... I can see Blu-Ray becoming the next generation market king, but what I'm really interested is how Blu-Ray will be used. Will films have "Specially Special Effects"? Will games have "Amazingly Amazing Graphics and Extra-Long Long gameplay?" Or will people just use it for backupping?

Toiletman: HDTV... Upto 1920x1080 resolution, compared to the current NTSC-DVD resolution of 720x480 or PAL-DVD resolution of 720x576. That's almost seven times higher resolution than the current generation has, so to achieve even the same bitrate per pixel what current DVDs have, the bitrate would have to be increased to 7 times higher. Assuming that 5Mbps is the norm now, it means 35Mbps bitrate.

And considering that single layer Blu-Ray holds appx 25 gigs and commercial DVDs hold appx. 8.5 gigs, you can see that considering the maximum resolution and bitrate used for that one in both formats, that the "bitrate per pixel" is actually forced to drop significantly. Obviously it is not that simple, as MPEG encoding doesn't work like basic BMP image, but still illustrates that Blu-Ray, etc aren't exactly a huge leap forward in terms of how many minutes of video they can store, but rather maintains current status quo or even drops it slightly in terms of minutes, but improves the (maximum available) resolution dramatically.

Bit like "WOW, what we are going to do with DVD, as it can hold five full-length VCD movies, are people going to store just all of their VCDs on few DVD discs?!". No, that didn't happen. People just switched to a better picture quality, not (significantly) higher quantity per disc.

Wow, that's fascinating... 1920 x 1080 resolution.

At the moment I'm watching movies on a 720x480 and the picture quality is absolutely fine with me, and when I say fine, I mean no "jaggies" or "fuzzy" images. I need to get myself a HDTV =D

P.S. Do you think there would be any point of going higher than 1920 res? Hell, I think 1920 is practically perfect real life quality, so what would be the point of going higher if no one could tell the difference?

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Toiletman: Apparently the resolution they use for digital cinema trials, meaning that the whole process is done digitally, straight from the shooting of the movie, is called 4k, which is 4096 x 2160 pixels. So, still a lot of room for improvement -- and some sources say that the analog film camera's film resolution is nearer to 8k; 8192x4320 pixels.

Now, thats a high resolution. Once we reach that, what next? Obvious answer: remove MPEG encoding (which is lossy anyways) and use RGB24 instead. Now, take your calculator and come up with a bitrate for 8k video in uncompressed RGB24 format:

8192 * 4320 * 24 (bits per pixel) * 30 (frames per second in the US) / 1024 (to get bits to kilobits) / 1024 (to get kilos to megas) / 1024 (to get megas to gigas)

== 23.73Gbps which equals to 2.97 gigabytes per second... Now, next time you hear somebody questioning the idea behind the orange-violet ultra-beam laser discs coming up in 2009 holding 75 terabytes, you know that there are uses for it..

This is why I love math =)

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