What is HDVD?
Fine-arts shows in HDVD look and sound better than DVDs or even broadcast high-definition TV. For us, HDVD is more important than the invention of television in the first place.
We define high-definition video and sound as 720p, 1080i, or better video together with at least 5.0 high-fidelity surround sound. (We have made a lot of exceptions to the surround sound rule, especially for documentaries, when content of the title would not have benefited much from surround sound.) The term HDVD stands for three different ways to distribute high-definition video and sound:
- High-Definition Video Disc
- High-Definition Video Download
- High-Definition Video Device
High-Definition Video Disc includes:
- Blu-ray. This is the optical disc promoted by Sony. It's the only such disc now being sold in the United States and Europe with backing from a major manufacturer.
- HD DVD. This is the optical disc formerly promoted by Toshiba. Toshiba pulled out on February 19, 2008. However, there still is a market for HD DVD titles that were made while the "format war" raged on.
- CBHD. Have you heard of this one? This is "China Blue High-definition DVD," the Chinese variation of HD DVD. While Toshiba was the proud papa to HD DVD, nobody paid much attention to the bastard son in China. Indications are that CBHD has found it difficult to compete in the piracy-invested waters of the Chinese entertainment video market. But CBHD may still turn out to be a factor, at least in Asia.
High-Definition Video Download. If a fine-arts title is available in high-definition, then one day you should be able to get it by downloading it into your media center or a PC either as a streaming program or to local storage. We say "one day" because it's quite a daunting project to get an Internet bitstream properly integrated with a typical home theatre based on an AV receiver, a big screen, and a 5.1 set of speakers.
Still, the New York Met has already started this direction with their Met Player streaming download service. It appears you can get a high-definition video picture together with stereo (16 bit 44.1 kHz) sound. This is OK with some folks, but we don't call that high fidelity. Also we think opera benefits from surround sound, with the Met doesn't offer.
Many other players are entering the market with a blizzard of different distribution schemes. Hashing all this out will make the Blu-ray vs. HD DVD format war look like a children's game of Tic-Tac-Toe.
It once appeared that the leader in high-quality downloading might be the VUDU streaming video service. (VUDU quit making boxes---now they are getting the makers of TVs and Blu-ray players to include VUDU functionality in their hardware.) VUDU has available for streaming download quite a few of the fine-art HDVDs we have now in Blu-ray. They have also signed up a few classical music shows that are not available on disc at all. VUDU presents these classical titles through their "HDX" level of service, which gives, they claim, 1080p video and Dolby Digital 5.1 sound.
Well, Walmart bought VUDU. We recently revisited VUDU again on the Internet. It seems now that VUDU management either doesn't see fine-arts material as a separate category or feels that the category is too small to care about. To find a fine-arts needle, you must scroll through a haystack of pop junk. Next we tried a search for "Karajan Memorial Service." We got a hit. The thumbnail of this EuroArts title appears in a line of thumbnails along with "Elvis in Paradise," "Revolution," "Mr. Immortality," "Huckleberry Finn," and Hustler Magazine's " Genitorturers." [I'm not making this up.] When we asked for more information about "Karajan Memorial Service," we learned that the three main "Actors" in the show are "Anne Sophie Mutter," " The Berlin Philharmonic," and "Pyotr Tchaikovsky."
Reviews in the past have suggested that the actual quality of the VUDU "HDX" product was not as good as hyped. How will the PQ and SQ of VUDU offerings compare to the wonderful results we are now getting with discs? How practical/flexible will a one-time rental be? Will subscribers get access to subtitles in different languages and the extra features often found on a disc? If you are using VUDU as an alternate to buying fine-art Blu-ray titles, please let us know how it is going!
If you have expert knowledge about any other aspect of downloading movies in 1080 video and surround sound, we would sure love to talk to you.
High-Definition Video Device. Now we start looking further over the horizon and consider any transportable media (other than magnetic or optical discs) that could be used to make a video. The best example of this would be the read-only flash memory device. If you don't know about this, let me describe it this way: You get in the mail from your seller or rental company a smooth solid-state (no moving parts) object about the size of half a stick of chewing gum. You stick the end of this into a small hole on your audio-visual amp or PC. Then you watch Aida on your big high-definition television screen with 7.1 lossless audio. At the moment, this is, of course, just a day-dream.
Future Standards. So far, this discussion has been focused on how the video gets to the consumer. Another aspects of this will be the standard in the future for "high-definition." Today we think in terms of 720p, 1080i, and 1080p. This will one day be obsolete. The manufacturers are working now on video factors that will have, say, 4096 horizontal lines in the picture. And they say that once you see "4K," you will never be happy with 1080p again. And in the meantime, we will soon see a big push to bring 3-D to television --- maybe soon 3-D will be part of "high-definition."
At this time, nobody is suggesting that broadcast television will in the foreseeable future go to a standard higher than 1080p. What is suggested, however, is that the standards used in high-definition home theatres one day may be higher than 1080p (and completely divorced from the world of television broadcasting).
We now believe that at least 5.0 surround sound is an essential part of a typical HDVD recording. But this could change with advances in stereo sound. In nature, you hear surround sound with only two ears. The brain knows where each sound is coming from because it arrives at each ear at a slightly different time. So how do you take advantage of this ability of the brain in a home theater? First, you make two recordings with microphones about 7 inches apart (that's how far apart typical ears are). Then you pipe in the recording from each mike to one ear only and the listener will hear everything in surround! If sound from one side bleeds to the other side of the head, "crosstalk" occurs and the surround effect is lost.
"Real" stereo is being done now with earphones, but the problem remains that earphones are earphones. Others are working on using stereo speakers together with noise cancellation to deliver only one channel of sound to each ear. If they can figure out how to this, then all stereo recordings going back to LPs maybe can be used to produce real surround sound! You would need only two speakers in your home theater. (The AVR component would be considerably more sophisticated than is the case today.)
This page last updated January 11, 2012.