I've been using BD Rebuilder and x264 to backup and remove the garbage (endless copyright notices, trailers, logo screens, etc.) from my purchased BluRays, and it's been doing a great job. I'm amazed by how far I can compress them down and still have an incredible picture quality, even all the way down to DVD-5. Recent builds have even been able to give me this quality with single-pass video encodes, cutting my processing time drastically. Many thanks to the x264 project (and for jdobbs's great BD Rebuilder) for all your impressive work.
One of the quiet secrets of the format war is that most people would have been perfectly content with DVD-9 in conjunction with the new codecs, even for 1080p HD.
Videophiles might have noticed a few things on long, action-packed movies, and a new format isn't all bad anyhow (I'd love a BD-burner for some backup stuff that is getting annoying on DVD-5, oh look, DVD-9 media is getting reasonably priced), but the Great and Terrible Need for a new optical format was somewhat oversold. 9GB really is a lot of data.
Well, 25GB BD-R blanks are going for around $2 a pop, so the format is still more expensive per MB than DVD-R. That will hopefully change by the end of this year. If you're only interested in using it for data, and don't care about the convenience of consolidation, you might do well to wait just a bit longer until the blanks and drives come down further in price.
That said, I've been getting great use out of my BluRay burner, and it's really done a lot to convince me to switch completely from buying DVD movies to buying BluRay, as I can now make backups and keep them protected.
I am planning on waiting anyhow. (I'll get one with my "next laptop", which is at least a year away most likely, barring accident.) But what I look forward to with BD is being able to back things up in fewer chunks. At the moment, 1 25GB chunk would cover all my highest-priority "critical" data. I'm clocking in at 15GB declared "critical" right now, so, not a DVD anymore, thanks to digital cameras and a baby. I commented on the price of DVD9s because last I had looked (a while ago!) they were about $4 a piece. Now they are only 2-ish, same as your cited price for a 25GB BD, and that's getting down to where I might pay for the convenience.
> One of the quiet secrets of the format war is that most people would have been perfectly content with DVD-9 in conjunction with the new codecs, even for 1080p HD.
Definitely. And if 1080p isn't required, 720p content would definitely look really good on a DVD-9 if encoded with h.264.
This post contains two .png (lossless) screenshots from Blu-rays that look absolutely horrible. I don't have much first-hand experience with Blu-rays, but I wonder if this kind of bad compression is a common thing?
I suppose the big studios do a decent job at encoding (though I might be wrong). Is this mostly a problem with smaller companies that might not be able to hire the proper expertise?
No doubt there will be an industry learning curve like with DVDs (with time they got better).
I don't have much first-hand experience with Blu-rays, but I wonder if this kind of bad compression is a common thing?
Fortunately it's not too common, but it's more common than one would like. This isn't unique to Blu-rays either; it happened a lot with DVDs. Various problems that I've seen are:
1. Improperly done telecine (e.g. telecining two different parts of the frame at different rates, more common in animation).
3. Completely borked interlacing (Family Guy first season DVDs).
4. Bad encoders that can't deal with massive bitrate peaks well (Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu R1 DVDs, see http://i43.tinypic.com/105b8rk.png).
The primary problem with Blu-rays is a lack of source quality, not these kinds of mistakes: a lot of Blu-rays simply don't have any detail beyond SD because their source material is horrible (examples: Cowboy Bebop: The Movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind).
The article links to those screenshots to show how bad some results from so-called "professional" Blu-ray encoding software. Although it wasn't the case early on, most Hollywood Blu-rays looks great now.
Check out this review of the Avatar Blu-ray http://www.highdefdiscnews.com/?p=42265 . About a third of the way down the page there are tons of lossless screenshots. That site has reviews for tons of titles; it's a good place to check sound/video quality before buying a Blu-ray title.
it's a good place to check sound/video quality before buying a Blu-ray title.
From a cursory glance it seems that site is rating known bad releases (e.g. U-571 and it's strong grain removal; Transformers 2's major blocking during action scenes) with 5 stars.
Sadly, grain removal is a matter of debate. I personally like grain, but apparently some people (even serious reviewers) are fine with post processing. Also, a quick search yielded me no mention of U-571 grain removal. Lastly, I personally saw no "major blocking" during action scenes of Transformers 2.
My understanding is that Blu-Ray has mandatory encryption, and that those encryption keys are quite expensive. I'm not even sure that Blu-Ray Association would allow FOSS BR authoring tools.
Also, fuck the "Blu-Ray Association". There's nothing they can do to prevent free authoring tools, and physical media will be obsolete in another 5 years anyway.
Somewhat off topic: Has anyone heard anything about Google and VP8? Weren't they supposed to be making an announcement about it (or was that just a rumor)?
