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Engadget's recession antidote: win one of 100 Microsoft Windows 7 pre-order discount codes! {Engadget}
Jun 25th 2009 12:34PM ME ME ME
Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD demystified {Engadget HD}
Apr 26th 2007 9:42PM The zip file is a good analogy. Asking why use TrueHD & DTS-MA over LPCM is like asking why software is zipped before you download it. When it is uncompressed nothing is lost it is bit to bit identical to the original. If the original sound track was 011101010101010101010101011111101011101011010110 then after decompressing TrueHD you will have exactly 011101010101010101010101011111101011101011010110.
LPCM offers nothing over TrueHD except it takes about about 2x the space. Either your player or receiver needs to support TrueHD and DTS-MA though. The good thing about HD DVD is that every single player MUST support TrueHD decoding. In 10 years when there is a $40 Apex HD DVD player it will support TrueHD. With BD TrueHD is optional and if neither your player or receiver support it then you can't listen to it.
Engadget one point of your article is 100% wrong. All three HD audios (LPCM, TrueHD, DTS HD-MA) support the same resolution. On both HD formats all 3 go up to 192/24 @ 7.1 channels. LPCM provides no higher benefit. Actually TrueHD supports up to 192/24 with 24 channels but both Bluray & HD DVD "limit" it to 8 channels (7.1)
Sony's CineAlta 4K digital cinema solution coming May 1st {Engadget}
Apr 25th 2007 6:22PM "The data throughput to the projector/screen is amazing since it has uncompressed data. 300 gb per feature is highly compressed. Movies are 1-2 TB uncompressed a 90 minute feature would stream near 200-400 mb per second to the display. That is far beyond the standard DVI spec."
Not sure where you got your numbers from:
Dual Link DVI is 7.4Gbits/sec which >900MB/sec.
HDMI 1.3 is 10.2Gbits/sec which is more than 1 GB/sec.
Uncompressed 4K video is 4096 x 2160 pixels x 3 colors x8 bit/color = 26GB/sec
12bit color would be 40GB/sec. So a 120 minute movies would be 188-288TB /sec.
Sprint PPC-6800 (HTC Titan) in the wild {Engadget Mobile}
Apr 20th 2007 12:15PM I doubt WiMax is going to come that soon.
Sprint may be planning to roll it out to "select" cities in 2008 but likely that means sometime late 2008 and to a few cities. It will be late 2009 early 2010 before WiMax is an option for most users. By 2010 most users would be looking to purchase a new phone anyways.
Sony's BDP-S1 has landed, finally! {Engadget HD}
Nov 30th 2006 4:24PM Film is shot in 24fps but it is shown @ 72fps. The shutter in a theater is a triple blade so basically what happens in slow motion the drive gear advances the film stock one frame. The shutter opens and closes 3 times for 1/72nd of a sec each. The drive gear advances to the next frame. 24 frames * 3 "showings" each for 1/72nd of a sec makes up 1 sec of film. If the film was shown @ 24 frames per second some people would be able to see the individual frames. It would look like flashing images to them. Other people would develop headaches as the flashing is just outside their perception but the eyes would try to focus on the flashing image.
As someone else pointed out the problem with most HDTV is not them running at a frame rate higher than 24 it is that it is not a multiple of 24. This results in a compromise known as 3:2 pulldown. Most HDTV and all SDTV run @ 60hz. So what happens is that every other frame is show and extra time.
Like this:
Film: A B C D (each 1/24 sec)
HDTV: A A B B B C C D D D (each 1/60 of sec)
now the film has 4 frames and each runs for 1/24 of a sec so this segment is 1/6th of a second.
The HDTV displays 10 frames made up of the original 4 each for 1/60 of a sec for a length of 1/6th of a sec.
The problems is that some frames are shown "more" than others.
In slow pans on a complex background the film will "judder" or jerk as it displays some portions longer than others.
Remember each frame is only shown for a very short time so the problem is not obvious but it does detract from the film.
So show the original film is a good goal. However the problem with an HDTV is that you may want to show Video content which would look horrible @ 24fps. If you tried watching sports @ 24fps it would look like a mess. So the HDTV runs at a higher rate that is a multiple of 24 to avoid having "uneven" frames.
If it runs @ 48hz then it just shows each frame twice.
If it runs @ 72hz then it shows each frame three times.
If it runs @ 96hz then it just shows each frame four times.
If it runs @ 120hz then it shows each frame three five times.
The ultimate goal would be sets with 120hz displays and the ability to accept inputs @ 24fps, 25fps, 30fps, and 60fps.
120 would allow even (not 2:3 or any other conversion) of all types of input. Remember most video is either 30fps or 60fps. Games likely would want to run @ 60fps if possible, so would computer displayed on a HTV. PAL content is going to be 25fps and US Films will be 24fps.
Now we are not there yet but I imagine eventually top of the line displays will be 1920x1080 @ 120hz and handle full input range 480i/480p/720p/1080i/1080p @ 24/25/30/60fps.
Sony retracts 1080i fix statement, leaving customers in lurch {Engadget}
Nov 26th 2006 2:58AM To all the Sony lovers who are blaming the TV owners, or saying its not a big deal, or that it doesn't affect a lot of people are full of shit.
In 2005 & 2006 most HDTV are fixed panel displays (i.e LCD, Plasma, DLP, lcos, etc).
However HDTV started a long time ago. In 2002 the most common HDTV (other than some $7K Plasmas) was a CRT projection TV. Also most of this cost cutting System on a
Chip design had not come around yet. Most HDTV supported either 1080i (common for CRT) or 720P common for plasmas. Very very few supported both. Those that did were much more expensive.
However the FCC required that all Set Top Boxes output both 720p and 1080i so it wasnt that big of a deal. If u had a 1080i set u set your cable box to 1080i and it outputed all content (720p & 1080i) at 1080i. If you had a plasma then u set the STB to 720p.
Now almost all CRT HDTV supported 1080i over 720p. Why? well u can upconvert 720p to 1080i but if u had HDTV in 1080i to downconvert to 720p means a loss of resolution. The cheapest way to downconvert 1080i to 720p is to take 1080i and downconvert to 540p then scale up to 720p.
Those saying that the people who bought 1080i CRT HDTV (made by Sony among others) are stupid are foolish themselves. If nobody had bought those early $4K, $5K, $7K+ HDTV do u honestly think u would have a nice 1080P LCOS HDTV for less than two grand today.
The early adopters paved the way for mass market, better features and lower prices.
Blu-ray disc drive prices to be halved by 2008? {Engadget HD}
Nov 19th 2006 3:19AM To say this is a format war and not a movie format war is foolish. Who cares is PS3 games come of Bluray? Is they came on holigraphic cubes it wouldn't matter they still can only be played on the PS3. So PS3 pushing PS3 games for use only on the PS3 will not help the Bluray camp.
Now the PS3 will help Bluray movies sales some. The real question is how much. I personally don't think it will be the silver bullet. Looks like with the new reduced # Sony will have less than 400K PS3 available by end of the year. Toshiba has sold out of it's initial build of players (about 70K) and projects total sales of about 200K units by end of the year. Add in another 50K for clones and PC w/ HD-DVD so lets say 250K.
Now on paper it looks good for bluray 400K vs 250K. But how many of those systems will never be used for movies? How many are in households w/o HDTV? How many are in the "game room" or kids room connected by composite cable? I don't know but it will reduce the # of active bluray movie devices. Now every single HD-DVD addon drive for the xbox360 will be used for movies. Microsoft has already said it will never release games on HD-DVD so the player is only for movies.
So the deciding # are:
1) How many addon drives will microsoft sell?
2) What % of the PS3 will be used for movie purchases?
Currently HD-DVD in less than a year has a buythrough ratio of about 9:1. Thats nine movies for every device sold. Those are # that mean a lot to movie studios. If say the PS3 ends up with a buythrough ratio of 2:1 (or less if it is mostly used for games) then basicly one HD-DVD device is worth about 4 PS3 in terms of projecting the # of movies sold. So all # are not equal. To say well eventually there will be millions of PS3 so HD-DVD is doomed is foolish. You need to compare apples to apples.
Mission: Impossible III sets HD DVD / Blu-ray sales record {Engadget HD}
Nov 10th 2006 3:07PM Well if you look @ amazon sales figures then HD-DVD is doing much better than blurry.
Now before someone posts that amazon sales rankings are not exact it does give us a ballpark figure.
Mission Impossible - Ultimate Missions Collection [Blu-ray]
Price: $69.95
Sales rank: 3532 (#5 among Blu-ray)
Release date: October 30, 2006
Mission Impossible - Ultimate Missions Collection [HD DVD]
Price: $69.95
Sales rank: 499 (#7 among HD-DVD)
Release date: October 30, 2006
Superman Returns [Blu-ray]
Price: $23.95
Sales rank: 1597 (#2 among Blu-ray)
Release date: November 28, 2006
The ranking # is how popular that title is compared to all DVD (SD DVD, HD-DVD, and Bluray). Lower is better, higher is worse. #1 would be the highest selling DVD for that week.
Interesting place to get these figures is:
http://wwww.thedvdwars.com
Some interesting #s:
HD-DVD has more titles for purchase. (97 vs 65)
HD-DVD has more titles (when including presales). (148 vs 94)
HD-DVD has lower (better) avg ranking. (503 vs 2718)
HD-DVD has the best ranked HD title. (Batman begins - 157th)
HD-DVD has more titles in the top 10,000. (96 vs 26)
HD-DVD has more titles in the top 1,000. (10 vs 1)
HD-DVD has lower (better) rank when compared to same title on Blu-ray.
US Army builds a better night scope {Engadget}
Oct 10th 2006 5:32AM Couple of points.
Simple = better.
On battlefield complex junk breaks and 99% of the time right when u need it or don't have time to deal with it.
All those with "cool" ideas of wireless video links from goggles and the rifle have never had to be in combat. Goood inovations on the battlefield are often much more simple. For example replacing buttons with velcro on ammo pouches allow u to reload quicker and know the ammo pouch is secure.
Not sure what the author means by moving your head to avoid the recoil. The buttstock is pressed firmly against the shoulder and when the weapon is fired the shooters body absorbs the recoil. Durring the shot the shooters eye reamins fixed at the rear sight.
HD DVD and Blu-ray released on August 29th 2006 {Engadget HD}
Aug 29th 2006 1:41AM #4 it's easy
Every single BD movie released so far has been mpeg2.
Every single studio HD-DVD movie has been VC1.*
Note: a couple films from HD net were in mpeg2 and a couple music videos have been in mpeg2/H2.64. However th e mainstream hollywood movies have broken down into 100% mpeg2 for BD and 100% VC1 for HD-DVD.
