| **Slash** said: i havent made up my mind on it and dont want to belittle the service, as i'm interested in it myself. I just bought a 50" Panasonic Full HD TV and ordered a xbox 360 aswell. But i just watched 108ßp movies for the first time and saw lot of differences in the video quality as they often differ in video bitrate numbers and therefore also have better or worse picture quality even when they are all in 1080p. So i was wondering how they can achieve a great video quality with only 4mbps stream compared to Blueray where the bitrate is around 30mbps. |
I'll explain :)
But first can mods ban about 6-7 fuckers in this thread who are PS3 fanboy trolls making a nuisance of themselves.
Here is why...
1. Bluray "standard" follows a set of rules so that the full benefits of the codec aren't used to get the best compression possible.
2. Bluray has multiple audio streams usually at least 1 is lossless taking around 3-4mbit on it's own just for the lossless audio whith the difference only being audible on VERY high end setups.
3. Codecs have advanced since bluray was released and the Xbox 360 has much more processing power than a normal bluray player to be able to use the advanced features of the codec.
4. Generally instead of h264 or MPEG4-AVC as it's often called, the Xbox 360 will be using the VC1 for encoding, this is highly optimised in certain low bitrate situations - it is an inferior codec at high bitrates however. Go check out some old HD-DVDs for example that use VC1. They manage to "cram" an entire movie on a 15GB disc with multiple audio streams and extras. This is with *older* implementations of the codec from a couple of years ago even.
5. The quality will not be as good as bluray at it's maximum potential of course, but it will be VERY close, you will not notice the difference on any set less than 50-60inches and only on films that needed a high bitrate in the first place - e.g very old films that have lots of grain and print damage, this takes a lot of space to look good.
6. The films on the service will mostly be NEW films that compress very well and don't need ridiculously high bitrates to look good because they are shot on digital cameras etc.
7. VC1 handles grain much better than h264 in any case.
Finally, believe what you will but the proof is in the pudding and it's funny reading the ignorant comments from a lot of the wankers in this thread who I'm sorry to say shouldn't be given the stand to make such stupid remarks purely in the name of being a fanboy and to rubbish anything MS does.
If you have a geuine well thought out comment that is critical then thats cool. The shit in this thread isn't.
3.
