A while back posted that I had a wmv format Hi-Def DVD that played on my Sony player. I was wrong. There are two discs in the package, one is normal DVD the other wmv to be played on windows XP machines.
The wmv files are very interesting. There are two copies of each video on the disc. One 720p with a video bitrate of 6000kbps, and another that is 1080i with a bitrate of 8000kbps for the video.
Both of them look amazing. It's really quite a feat when you consider that they are "only" 6000kbps (720p) and 8000kbps(1080i). This is basically the same bitrate MPEG-2 needs to do standard definition.
Hopefully we will soon seee DVD players that can play these wmv files AND downconvert them to SD if necessary. If this happens we'll have a lot of authoring options available.
Using SD video we can probably double or triple the amount of video content on a DVD using the wmv codec. Bitrates of 3000kbps with very good quality are doable. Imagine 4 to 5 hours of SD video on a DVD-5 disc.
Also, hopefully HD video can be placed on a DVD so that either SD or HD viewers can get at the content. This is how it should work anyway, for a seamless transition from SD to HD.
Of course this all assumes that authoring software will be updated to author using wmv format video. But, I'm sure many people have noticed wmv is a disc template option in WS2. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that it looks like we're headed in that direction.
I think one of the stumbling blocks to this may be hardware related, it seems that it takes quite a bit of processing power to decode these HD wmv video streams. I am showing 20-40% cpu usage for 720p streams (25% average) and 30-50% cpu usage for 1080i streams (35% average). cpu usage shoots up with high motion scenes as you would expect. I'm showing 10% to decode a normal MPEG-2 DVD stream. My system is pretty powerful being a P4 3.06 so even dedicated hardware is going to have to be pretty powerful to decode these streams.
The future should be interesting...
- Mark
The wmv files are very interesting. There are two copies of each video on the disc. One 720p with a video bitrate of 6000kbps, and another that is 1080i with a bitrate of 8000kbps for the video.
Both of them look amazing. It's really quite a feat when you consider that they are "only" 6000kbps (720p) and 8000kbps(1080i). This is basically the same bitrate MPEG-2 needs to do standard definition.
Hopefully we will soon seee DVD players that can play these wmv files AND downconvert them to SD if necessary. If this happens we'll have a lot of authoring options available.
Using SD video we can probably double or triple the amount of video content on a DVD using the wmv codec. Bitrates of 3000kbps with very good quality are doable. Imagine 4 to 5 hours of SD video on a DVD-5 disc.
Also, hopefully HD video can be placed on a DVD so that either SD or HD viewers can get at the content. This is how it should work anyway, for a seamless transition from SD to HD.
Of course this all assumes that authoring software will be updated to author using wmv format video. But, I'm sure many people have noticed wmv is a disc template option in WS2. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that it looks like we're headed in that direction.
I think one of the stumbling blocks to this may be hardware related, it seems that it takes quite a bit of processing power to decode these HD wmv video streams. I am showing 20-40% cpu usage for 720p streams (25% average) and 30-50% cpu usage for 1080i streams (35% average). cpu usage shoots up with high motion scenes as you would expect. I'm showing 10% to decode a normal MPEG-2 DVD stream. My system is pretty powerful being a P4 3.06 so even dedicated hardware is going to have to be pretty powerful to decode these streams.
The future should be interesting...
- Mark
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