We need that protein based gel that diff linked an article to. :DQuote:
Originally Posted by Dolemite
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We need that protein based gel that diff linked an article to. :DQuote:
Originally Posted by Dolemite
No its not.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dolemite
The Web Archive Project is using like 50 terabytes and its a nonprofit organization. What could a private company with a profit motive do? Five years ago, a 40 gig hard drive was excessive. Now what, 500 gigs is almost common.
It's the future. It's not there yet, but neither is shitty Blu-Ray or nearly-as-shitty HD-DVD.
http://www.moviebeam.comQuote:
Originally Posted by Shin Johnpv
moviebeam seems like an awesome idea, especially with the content they have available (of the 100 movies, they have most of my downloaded movies in my queue waiting ot be watched), but I really doubt it'd be quality in execution.
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Originally Posted by stormy
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MovieBeam makes movies come to life with its superior digital quality. Plus, there's always a selection of movies in glorious High Definition*, widescreen, and booming Dolby 5.1 sound so that you can realize the full potential of any home theater setup.
Not all the movies they are offer are in HD, Widescreen or with 5.1
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Will all movies be in High Definition (HD)? Why not?
Only a select set of movies on MovieBeam are available in HD.
then there's this
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The player also comes pre-loaded with 100 movies, with up to 10 movies updated each week using MovieBeam's digital signal. Customers automatically receive the new movies via the small indoor antenna that accompanies the MovieBeam Player. Movies are then stored digitally on the player.
from the sounds of it the unit has a hard drive built in and stores a set of movies that you can pick from at that time to watch. Plus if it's holding 100 movies at a time on it internally, for it to be DVD quality then it needs to have a 400 - 500 gig hard drive in it. Since they're selling it at 100 - 200 bucks I highly doubt it does, and would guess that the movies are bassicaly xvid style 700 meg dvd rips. Which is OK quality but not great and certainly not worth giving up dvd for.
Unfortanetly the site doesn't give any info on Codecs used, bitrates, or any of the other really important stuff
It's not the first of it's kind though, my friend used a similar service that worked with your PC, but again the movie files were highly compressed and much lower quality than DVD.
Offering a few hundred movies for download at lower than DVD quality is much different than offering a few hundred movies at HD and in high quality.
As usual the pr0n industry is way ahead of mainstream Hollywood.
A better example would be several pr0n sites, like www.videosz.com (which is NSFW obviously), that has hundreds of movies, close to a thousand (or maybe over, I cant remember the exact), split up by scenes, in multiple quality levels. It adds 5-10 movies a week. I dont think even the best quality is up to DVD (~350 megs or so for a 15 minute scene), but as a proof of concept it works well.
here's an interesting comparison done by Rowlander on AVS forums
It's a comparison between the Pirates of the Caribean DVD and a quicktime HD behind the scenes downloadable movie that included some shots of the original movie in HD
The behind the scenes stuff was encoded in H.264 but with a 10mbps or so bitrate, which BR and HD-DVD will over even higher bit rates
720p:
http://img95.imageshack.us/img95/48/sdvshd018sh.th.jpg
1080p:
http://img154.imageshack.us/img154/4...hd021bc.th.jpg http://img154.imageshack.us/img154/7...hd030ka.th.jpg
I wasn't pimping moviebeam or anything, just pointing out that services have begun to pop up similiar to what you described (but obviously technologically below par). And like i said before, it failed pretty hard thier first time out and they went through a relaunch which isn't going well either as far as i know. I've seen those boxes getting cleared out for as little as $50. The company is a child of Disney though, so this isn't some little startup trying to create thier niche. I'm wonder how long they stick with it.
another bad review for Blu Ray
this was posted last month but I just happened upon it now
http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=22593
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Blu-ray Video Quality
Let's get right to it: how do Blu-ray discs look? To be blunt, the first couple of discs I watched looked like crap. No, I'm not kidding or exaggerating for effect; they look pretty bad. Among the titles that Sony Pictures Home Entertainment elected to launch the format with are The Fifth Element and House of Flying Daggers, two beautifully photographed movies that ought to make excellent showcases for High Definition video. Fifth Element in particular is often cited as a demonstration quality disc on standard DVD, so you'd expect it to pull the same duty here. Sadly, not so much. I'll go into more specifics in my individual reviews of the discs themselves, but for some reason Fifth Element was mastered from dirty, scratched-up film elements in much worse condition than their older Superbit DVD edition. Both titles, especially Flying Daggers are excessively filtered and compressed. Neither looks anywhere near as good as an average HD DVD release. The decision to encode the movies with MPEG2 compression on single-layer 25 gb discs also cluttered by space-hogging PCM audio has obviously resulted in a serious sacrifice of picture quality. Needless to say, this is a very bad start for the Blu-ray format.
The next two discs I watched were The Terminator (from MGM) and Terminator 2 (from Lionsgate). Both were better than the Sony titles (especially T2, which isn't burdened with PCM audio), but they both still exhibit obvious digital compression flaws. The first Terminator I had trouble telling apart from its regular DVD edition, and even T2 looks at best like a mediocre HD DVD. Nothing I've seen so far has risen to the level of the better-class HD DVDs such as The Last Samurai, The Phantom of the Opera, or The Bourne Supremacy, all of which demonstrate nearly artifact-free video with amazing levels of detail and vibrancy. Blu-ray has certainly not put is best foot forward with these first releases.
Given that there is currently only one Blu-ray player available, it's hard to pinpoint exactly how much of the disappointing video quality is the result of poor disc mastering and how much is actually the fault of poor decoding by the player, but it's worth noting that the BD-P1000 uses the same Broadcom decoder chip that has produced such excellent results in Toshiba's HD DVD players. Perhaps Blu-ray is more complicated to process or Samsung has not configured the chip correctly (the company isn't exactly known for making high quality DVD players), but if I had to speculate I'd be inclined to place most of the blame on the discs themselves. The technical limitations of these first discs are well known, and many of the problems seen are familiar MPEG2 artifacts the likes of which are found on many poorly-mastered DVDs.
More debatable is an issue seen in all of the initial Lionsgate titles that have opted to include regular DTS audio instead of PCM. When you choose the DTS soundtrack, the video becomes noticeably jerky, a problem that goes away if you choose Dolby Digital instead. Until we get a larger representative sample of players from other manufacturers, I can't say whether that's a flaw in the Samsung BD-P1000 or the disc, but there's a good chance it's the player.
there's more to the article than just that part but I thought that was the main part
Sony really needs to get their shit together with their encoding, from everything I've read over at AVS forums that seems to be the source of the main problems. Sony's absolute refusal to move away from MPEG-2 even though they can only get Single Layer BR discs going right now. Panasonic has an encoder out for H.264 for BR that is said to match the PQ and bitrate of VC-1 (used in HD-DVD). Only those movies being manufactured by panasonic are going to use it though, anything still manufactured by Sony is going to use Sony's VBR MPEG-2 encoder. I really don't think BR was ready to ship yet and that everyone involved was too scared of what would happen if HD-DVD got too far of a head start. I think this is turning out worse for them though the amount of negative press it's been getting through the media is going to stick with them alot longer than the actual problems causing this negative press will. Initial impressions, especially with consumer products are the hardest thing to change, and if Sony and the rest of them don't get their shit together soon then no matter what they do they are going to be labled as the more expensive but inferior product by the consumer.
It also seems that triple layer HD-DVDs should be mass production ready in a couple months, that would give HD-DVD 45gigs to work with putting it only 5 short of BR's 50gb DL discs (if the dl disks ever come out for BR)
We're starting to sell HD-DVD now... no one seems to give a shit about Blu-Ray.