[ganthc]

Originally Posted by Ruined

Heh, I am correct and my math is not screwed up. On XBOX Live Marketplace most of the HD movies are in the ~5GB range. The reason they are so small is because they use the VC-1 codec, which is around twice as efficient as DVD's MPEG2 codec. Meaning, you can accomplish with VC-1 the same resolution using half the space of DVD's MPEG2.

Would this mean that any upconvert DVD player that is linked to an HDTV could technically have burned on to them the above files, and they would technically be HD content?

In fact, there actually were SD DVDs with HD video on them, such as disc 2 of Terminator 2: Extreme Edition. This title's disc 2 was encoded in an early version of the VC-1 codec also, using the WMVHD format - which was not playable in a DVD player but worked on computers. Terminator 2 Extreme Edition WMVHD @ 1080p using VC-1 took up a little less than 7GB. The DVD version (disc1) of the set took up space in the same ballpark but was only at 480p since it used the much less efficient MPEG2.

So, as long as the content encoder uses VC-1 or AVC, 4-5gb 720p HD movies without significant artifacting are easy to crank out.

So this could also be a "digital copy" solution for blu-ray as well? I am just interested in meeting the needs of those that have DRM concerns, since the digital copy seems to be the test environment for such workarounds at this point.

We'll see how it goes over the next 5 years. But it is interesting to see that the vast majority of BD-capable players (PS3) are also capable of digital movie downloads, which according to Sony they are in the process of rolling out. Then of course you have the 10 million+ XBOX 360 userbase which is capable of digital movie downloads, the Netflix/LG download box, Vudu, and AppleTV all in the HD digital movie download business... Amazon Unbox currently offers SD movie downloads to Tivo customers, which may move to HD in the future. LG has also stated they may be adding Netflix movie download capabilities to their BD players for enhanced functionality. Of course cable company giants and Verizon's FIOS will be pushing HD movie downloads via their own Video On Demand services as well.

Plus, arguably the most popular BD standalone players (Panasonic BD30, Panasonic BD50) both have SDHC flash drives right on the front with support for AVCHD format HD video playback (1080p @ up to 25mbps bandwidth, up to 64gb-128gb storage) ... Toshiba is also hugely invested in flash as well as Samsung & Panasonic so these companies I'm sure wouldn't mind an HD flash format. An AVCHD/SDHC-based flash format could easily handle the majority of HD DVD encodes out there with no quality loss.

It will be quite the competition for J6P's HD-dollar, that is for sure.

And hopefully some of this competitive pressure can push price points down on bd in the future as well. If the format war caused such dramatic cost cuts for bd, I can imagine that downloads may pose a similar downward trend for bd in the future.