And He Blogs

Mark Cuban has lots of ideas. His best one was back in the late ’90s when he decided to create a webcasting business that was ultimately sold for millions of dollars to Yahoo! Cuban may well have another great idea to save Internet video, but I’ll leave commenting on his ideas to a possible future post. Mark should know something about HD video. He is the Chairman of HDNet, a cable television network that broadcasts exclusively in high definition (HD).

HDNet is one of the few networks that has original HD programming, and by that I mean an independent network broadcasting exclusively in HD. HDNet’s Dan Rather Reports is an example of original HD programming. Depending on who your cable provider is, you may or may not have HDNet available to you. Without getting into the sordid details about why, you likely will have either HDNet or a network known as Mojo available with your cable or satellite provider, or with fiber-optic systems such as Verizon’s FiOS, or AT&T’s U-verse.

So Mark Cuban started a business and is one of the leaders of a company that produces HD video. It is with that knowledge that makes this statement so confusing:

100pct (sic) of the internet video that you see offered on the net as HD, is not HD. Plain and simple.

He then offers the following definition (of sorts):

What is HD video ? HD Vidoe (sic) is video you can watch on a screen of ANY size and say…”that looks good, almost as good as it can get “.

My purpose here is not to picks nits, but if that is his definition of HD video, then by who’s standard do we define “looks good” and “as good as it can get”? Look, there are lots of sites, services, and networks trying to distribute HD video on the Internet, or at least what they self-define as HD video. I should also point out that high definition video on the web is mostly a buzzword, and Cuban’s definition doesn’t help.

Here, let me define HD video. It is digital video that is represented by the minimum dimensions of 1280×720 pixels (720p). Now was that so hard? You can also take a look at the Wikipedia entry for high definition video for many more details. Having tendered those definitions, it should also be said that like all things digital, there is a quality factor that can affect how good HD video looks.  It is generally represented by what is known as bit rate. It is also something that most directly relates to the fudge factor that gets used on some supposed HD video sites. Again, the details start to get way too complicated in terms of what makes good (and bad) HD video, so let’s just stop before we hurt ourselves.

What makes Cuban so wrong is that there are good, and successful, attempts at providing HD video through the web. The screen grab at the top of this post is from one of these Internet TV networks called Revision3. The show is called Tekzilla, and by every measurement that I know of it is high definition. The basic specs of the video are, 1280×720 pixels (again 720p), h.264 video codec, AAC audio. It’s video quality that I’ve raved about before.

There’s a great way to check out more HD content by using software called Miro. It is similar to iTunes, but geared toward online video, and it provides good quality HD programming. If you check out their Miro Guide, you can check out some of the HD choices. I use it on my home theater PC which is connected to my Pioneer Plasma and it looks good, almost as good as it can get. Oh, sorry. That definition is taken. So what’s with Cuban’s 100% not HD statement? Is it because it’s not Blu-ray quality? Well, it will be a while before we are downloading 20GB files to watch on our HDTVs. Is it because it isn’t the same quality as HDNet? Well, no, Tekzilla probably doesn’t use XDCAM HD (cameras that still sell for over $20,000). However, it looks as good as a lot of the broadcast HD content out there, because it not further compressed by the cable or satellite company. All of this technology (do I have to say it?) is constantly improving. Codecs are being developed that will surpass what we have today that will deliver higher quality at equivalent bit rates. Cuban’s standard sounds like something that we may never achieve, and when it comes down to the basic definition of HD video, he’s wrong.

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I’ve been reading and hearing a lot lately about new video products now that NAB is going on. NAB is the National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas. I’m always interested in the new camcorders that get introduced. What is gaining in popularity are the h.264/MPEG4 AVC based solid-state memory card cameras. The format that they use is what is known as AVCHD. This relatively new MPEG4 format is being used in a wide variety of ways from DirectTV’s HD compression, to Blu-ray’s new HiDef disc technology, to cell phone video. The advantage of using h.264 (or any of those other names that get used) is that it results in a high quality picture in a smaller file size. For example a video using an MPEG2 format (as in a standard DVD) will require a file that is about twice the size of a file using h.264, at the same quality.

Now you’ve heard me blather on and on about that “other” MPEG4 codec known as DivX. It remains a popular format for online movies (legal, and well, not so legal), and a popular format that is include on many DVD players. Where it hasn’t caught fire is with web video, despite my excitement about it in the past. I had hopes of it being the Yang to Flash (FLV) video’s Yin, but it means a separate plugin to play DivX encoded video. Wouldn’t it be nice if a high quality format could be supported, along with Flash video, in one player/plugin.

Ever since last year, when Adobe announced the beta Flash player that supported not only FLV format, but also h.264, I had this “ideal” situation in the back of my mind. Now, as I’ve been working with video so much in the past few months, I’ve wished for a bit of consolidation. I was almost on to it when I discovered YouTube was encoding a high quality version (h.264) of their standard (FLV) video. I’ve also been wondering what format the “high quality” versions of the Great Lives videos would be, and what format would be used as the “archive” format. Finally, there was the question of how would I implement this on a website? The answer was right there. H.264!

The Jeroen Wijering Flash player is everywhere. Actually, it’s a media player, but it’s referred to as the FLV Media Player. Maybe that’s why it took me so long. It isn’t called the FLV/h.264 Media Player. So how easy was it to use? Well, thanks to Jeroen’s Setup Wizard, it was simple to do some testing. What source material to use, was the next question. How about the best looking video on the web, Apple’s Movie Trailers. I saved the trailers on my hard drive and then uploaded them back to my server, then I plugged the URL of the file into the Wizard. Wow! Gorgeous video! Alright, let’s get this into a blog post right away. So which plugin uses JW’s player? There are plenty including the WordTube and Anarchy plugins, but WordTube isn’t quite what I’m looking for because it is geared toward displaying a playlist of videos, and Anarchy uses the FLV Media Player, but not for h.264. It uses QuickTime. Don’t get me started on the crap that is QuickTime for Windows. No, the best choice for ease of use is the Viper’s Video Quicktags (VVQ). I made one modification to the Javascript code to give fullscreen capability and then produced a post using the FLV button. I filled in the URL to the h.264 video, supplied the width and height, and it was up and lookin’ good. Thanks to Jim Groom, VVQ is working in WordPress Multi-User, allowing anyone at umwblogs.org to take advantage of h.264.

The point here is that the h.264 video acts just like FLV. The file extension can end in .MOV or .MP4, as long as it is an h.264 encoded file, it will work in the FLV Media Player. I even did a test using Hi-Def content (another movie trailer). The file is 1280×544 pixels, weighing in at 85MB, but it does prove the concept. The whole scenario does require that you install the latest Flash Player plugins (version 9.0.115.0 or 9.0.124.0) on your system, but it’s available for PC, Mac, and Linux. Conceptually, if you have a beefy enough system, and a display to go along with it, you can watch videos that are 1920×1080 pixels. On other words, true 1080P HiDef. It’s a breakthrough that’s been around for a little while, but it holds great promise for having Home Theater quality video playing from a little old blog.

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I AM a “New Breed”, baby!

Watch Now:

 Rush HD [0:31m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Flickr photo by orangeacid

When I was a kid it was looking for TV shows that were “in living color”. Now finding shows that are in high definition (HD) are the golden ticket. One of my favorite websites, Engadget HD, posts about communities all across the country that are upgrading their cable service or adding more HD channels. Well, now more HD channels are coming to Fredericksburg, VA.

Here are the channels that will be added:

• CNN HD
• Versus/Golf HD
• TBS HD
• Food Network HD
• HGTV HD
• TLC HD
• Discovery HD
• History Channel HD
• Science Channel HD
• Animal Planet HD
• NHL Network HD
• Travel HD
• Cinemax HD (East)
• Comcast SportsNet HD

What this means to me is more hockey in HD with NHL Network and SportsNet. I can almost smell the Budweiser (US) or the Labatts (Canada) in the cool arena. Hopefully this also means cycling in HD on Versus, plus exotic locations, animals, home improvement, news, science, and food, all in wonderful HD. It’s getting harder and harder to tolerate standard definition (lifts nose into air).

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It’s a deal I can’t pass up. $30 plus tax for the complete set of Planet Earth in hi-def! “But Andy”, you are saying, “Isn’t HD-DVD that dead format?” Yes, it’s dead. Gone the way of the dodo. Gone the way of Betamax, but wait. It’s not betamax. It’s a digital format. I’m stating the obvious, or maybe I’m not, but it’s an important point to be made now that HD-DVD is dead, dead, dead. I recently picked up something that can help. It’s an LG GGW-H20L Blu-ray burner. It also reads Blu-ray and HD-DVD discs. OK, so no, I will not be transferring my HD-DVD discs to Blu-ray discs. It’s possible, but my time is much more valuable than that. I can, however, place the movies on my hard drive. Just like there are programs that can get the video files off of standard DVDs, they also exist for HD-DVD (and Blu-ray). Now, legally, you can only extract (rip) the video files from un-encrypted discs (copyright is a separate issue). That would eliminate all of the commercially produced DVD, HD-DVD, and Blu-ray discs. Exceptions have been made, but the fact remains that just breaking the encryption of these discs is illegal.

Now that HD-DVD is dead, the DMCA/encryption issue is less of a worry to me. Nuff said. My plan is to play the discs from the existing player that I have, a Toshiba HD-A1. However, I also have the LG drive in a computer that is hooked into my home theater system, so I essentially have a combo Blu-ray/HD-DVD player. In a previous post, I predicted that once the war was over (it is), combo players might be the way to go. It’s looking more like HD-DVD will just vaporize. So back to the digital nature of the HD-DVD format, these movies can be played from your hard drive using the combination of decryption software and player software such as Nero Showtime or Power DVD, and it’s certainly a convenient way to watch movies. So my Planet Earth disc will play, in the near future, on my HD-DVD player(s). In the distant future, the digital file of Planet Earth will play from whatever storage device is current. Terabyte hard drives will be cheap and new storage technology is just around the corner that will be capable of storing hundreds on HD quality movies as digital files. Check out the TeraDisc and the Holographic Versatile Disc for some of the possible successors to DVD and HD-DVD data storage.

Boy, that was a long justification for buying obsolescence.

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Bad things are happening at a rapid pace to the HD-DVD camp. Rumor, or not, it appears that a rotund female will soon commence her vocalizations . . .

Toshiba to drop HD DVD, sources say

UPDATE:Services will be held as early as next week!

Photo by Bobasonic

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Netflix announced today that it is going Blu-ray exclusive. It was the same day I ordered one of these.

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It is interesting to watch this story unfold, but this video encapsulates the situation so well. Bill Hunt, by the way, is one of the editors at Digital Bits which I don’t read. I prefer Engadget HD’s coverage. Today they remind us not to forget that the porn industry still needs to weigh in on this

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Even with Apple’s Leopard and its more then 300(!) new features, Blu-ray playback isn’t one of them. Yet. Macworld is this week and rumors are starting about Apple launching into the high-definition disc fray. Will it be Blu-ray only? Apple is firmly in the blue camp. Will the combo drive now be a Blu-ray reader and the super drive be a Blu-ray reader/writer? Will HD-DVD be added for compatibility or will Apple ignore it in light of the beating the reds are taking recently? Am I going to answer any of these questions?

Well, I’m at the point of being totally unimpressed by speculation or even actual product announcements, whether it’s at Macworld or CES. Tell me when products are shipping first of all. As I mentioned previously, it was announced at least year’s CES that HD-DVD burners would be available in early 2007. So how many can I buy now at the beginning of 2008? Still ZERO!

P.T. Barnum, I mean Steve Jobs, will take the stage on January 15th and whoop the Apple fanboys faithful into a frenzy with something that is over-hyped and over-priced. I think it borders on criminal that a DVD burner is not standard equipment on all Macs at all price points. Now will we just have the Blu-ray version of this scenario? I’m trying to remember the last magic gizmo that Apple announced that was reasonably priced.

UPDATE: And the answer is . . . nope! Though Apple did update the Apple TV, and in doing so lowered the price ($299 to $239) and offered to current owners a free upgrade to the new features. Who says they’re not about value It looks to me as though Apple feels the future is in HD downloads and not Hi-Def on physical media. Though it appears that there are more restrictions than discount airfare tickets.

Photo by ::stromberg

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I’d like to elaborate on my first post of the year, which is now relegated to a placeholder for my first lie of the year. My purpose here is to put forth some facts, perspective, opinion, and some predictions. This was probably going to be that first post, but I was still suffering from the New Year hangover. No, not from alcohol, but from the same hangover that any parents have after surviving a Christmas season with a 5 year-old and driving almost 1500 miles. So here are my thoughts on this "format war".

I’ll first disclose that I went with HD-DVD, and I also wrote about this before and proclaimed that HD-DVD will triumph. Well, I’m now ready to switch my vote, at least to the extent that Blu-ray can win this war. Obviously something or things have swayed me to see the blue camp emerge as victor. Was it the announcement that Warner (and with it, New Line Cinema) has decided to go Blu-ray exclusive? Partly. However, there are other writings on various walls that help the decision along.

Here’s the real news. It’s really no big deal, at least not for average consumers, who are NOT caring in droves! Obviously they will care at some point though, and that point is getting nearer with HDTV’s going into more and more homes. But, to their credit most consumers have been waiting, and Blu-ray or HD-DVD players have not been coming home along with the HDTV’s. Now that I’ve called the consumers smart, let me say that they have come to this smart decision to wait, with faulty logic. They are looking to that all too familiar historical format war, VHS vs. Betamax and saying "I’m not getting stuck with a loser." Well that’s wrong when it comes to this war. The losers will be the companies, and not the consumers, that back the losing format, or rather the one that gets absorbed.

Absorbed? Que? What I mean is, unlike the VHS vs. Beta situation, the losing format’s discs will just move to another player that is compatible, and it’s already happening. The LG company is leading the way in this aspect of the battle. They were one of the first to come out with a dual-format player that played both discs. You see this format war is much more akin to the DVD+R vs. DVD-R war. You remember that one right? It was in all the papers. OK, maybe not. It was resolved rather early on. In case you missed the distinction, DVD "plus R" and DVD "minus R" are two incompatible formats of writable DVD media. Both camps touted their strengths and abilities. But somewhere along the way somebody built one of those drives, and eventually a writable drive, that supported both. War over.

Now originally I went with HD-DVD because I was betting against Sony, who has proven that they can screw up, a lot (read my post from July 2006 for the list of abandoned Sony formats). What I didn’t weigh as much were the other backers of the Blu-ray format, Panasonic (who beat out Sony in the VHS/Beta war), Apple, Dell, Samsung and Pioneer. All of them are going up against, essentially, Toshiba and Microsoft. Intel and HP are in there too, but HP is hedging by including Blu-ray drives in their PCs. HD-DVD support also includes movie studios such as Paramount, Dreamworks, and Universal. Now, one of them, Warner/New Line, has defected to Blu-ray, and that is big. Paramount did support both, but they made an announcement of HD-DVD exclusivity (that’s when people thought the war was won by HD-DVD. Silly isn’t it?). That’s not as big news as a defection.

I also went with HD-DVD specifically because of the Stanley Kubrick films, The Shining, A Clockwork Orange, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, were all coming out in HD-DVD only (they are Warner movies). Many others that are desirable to me, like Blade Runner, are available on both formats. Another of my desired films is The Fifth Element, and that is Blu-ray only. I was waiting for either Blu-ray to fail miserably as this is a Sony Pictures release, or wait for it to come out on HD-DVD after Sony ran away with its tail between its legs. Not a very likely scenario from the outset, and even less likely now.

What’s the history behind the war? Well I won’t go into details, but in many respects it was a mini-war between Sun, who wanted Java-based code included for interactive features, and Microsoft, who wanted their code to be used. To get more info on the war and the specs take a look at the Wikipedia articles on HD-DVD and Blu-ray. I’ll have lots more to say about high definition video (including what exactly it is), and the formats that are being used to bring it to us, in future posts.

I’ll leave you all with a few facts, opinions, suggestions, and general wisdom(?).

• Blu-ray has always done the better job of acting like the superior technology. There is no perceptible difference between HD-DVD and Blu-ray. They both look the same - which can be described as great. A current Blu-ray ad has a man making a statement something like this - "I have friends who have HD-DVD players, and it’s nice and all, but Blu-ray knocks it out of the box". BS. There are technical differences with both formats, but again, to the average consumer there is no difference. You should also be aware that there are differences within the formats between the movies themselves. Take the movie Blazing Saddles for instance. The movie was made in 1974, before digital was even a word, at least to Hollywood. The HD-DVD version is sharper than the DVD version (I have both), but the film grain keeps it from looking as high-def as other movies out there like Serenity, which had the advantage of doing a direct digital transfer. Having said that, even with the highest quality transfers to the new formats, some people don’t really see much of a difference between DVD and the high-def versions of movies, or at least not enough to get excited about it.
• Which leads to this next point, both HD-DVD and Blu-ray players play regular DVDs. OK, that statement may have been obvious to some, but it’s another reason why the comparison to the VHS/Beta war is inaccurate. Even if you get stuck with the "losing" format, the player will still play DVDs. Maybe not much consolation, but it’s something. Also these next-gen players are the best up-scaling DVD players available. That means they make your current DVD collection look great.
• Oh and do I need to say that the quality of your display device needs to be adequate to really see the difference. You don’t need to run out and buy a display with 1080p. What’s that? Well, suffice is to say that 1080p is the most overrated specification in the industry right now. It’s kind of like the megapixels in digital cameras. The more you have the better right? Well not necessarily. It’s the quality of the optics, the size and quality of the chip capturing the digital signal, etc. Same goes for displays. Plasma and LCD panels do not have to support 1080p to give you a great picture. For all intents and purposes, there is no difference between 1080i and 1080p.
• HD-DVD inexplicably hasn’t yet released (as of January 2008) a burner that you can add to an existing computer system. They’ve announced ones, but after a year still haven’t shipped in any real quantities. You can order Toshiba laptops with them, but that’s it right now. Blu-ray is on their second and third generations of burners. Remember, these new formats aren’t just about video. They are also about storage. People want storage in the ranges of 25-30GB, and Blu-ray is kicking HD-DVD’s butt on this one.
• When an inexpensive dual format player exists all this hullabaloo will die. People will buy into high def DVD’s when the price point hits each individual’s sweet spot, and when they get an HDTV. Once consumers realize that a disc from either camp will play on a single player, the high-def disc cruise ship will leave the harbor.
• Finally, consumers are going to get smarter about HD content. Much of it will come from other sources namely the Internet in the form of independent, alternative content (and free?), and online rentals. Also, I watch a lot of content on my cable system. It’s only going to get better and more plentiful and varied and wonderfully higher definition. Until the next higher definition format comes along. You think I’m kidding look at SED, OLED and 4K.

Photo by Samanathon

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