Time Warner: Download Too Much and You Might Pay $30 a Movie

[Played_Out]

Saiyar said:

thekitchensink said:
See, this is one of the reasons that I get in the car and hop over to Blockbuster when I want to rent a movie.

But about the question of why BR/HDDVD are necessary, I believe that a 2-hour SD only takes about 1-2 gb. On a DVD, this means they have 7 gb left for extra content. For an HD movie using 4-5 gb, there isn't much room for extra content on a DVD, necessitating more storage.

Spiderman 3 in 1080p with five 5.1 lossless audio tracks takes up 43 GB.

 

I was going to point out how wildly inaccurate that statement was, but you beat me to it.

It's all about the bitrate. Superbit DVD's tend to use about 8gb for a film whatever the length. A HD movie needs about 4x as much space as an SD movie to maintain the same image quality (at a higher res obviously). Therefore, a 2 hour movie in HD could use as little as 4-5gb, but the image quality would be terrible.

EDIT: That would be assuming they used the same codecs, which is admittedly unlikely as HD formats support more (and better) codecs. It's all theoretical, but 4-5gb would look shit even in VC-1 or H.264.