[cphoffman42]

PetitPaul, on 01 March 2012 - 07:09 AM, said:

By the way 1080p _is_ HD; 720p is either "small HD" or "HD ready".

No, this is wrong. There are three HD resolutions: 720p, 1080i, and 1080p. 1080p might be the highest resolution, without interlacing, but it's not the one and only, true HD.

FWIW, "HD ready" is something else entirely—it means the TV does not have an over-the-air HD tuner built into it. Most "HD ready" TVs were sold in the early 2000s when there was still some uncertainty over how OTA HD broadcasts would work or if they would ever actually happen.

[JeremyNeish]

" the same movie in 1080p would tip the scales at roughly 10.64GB. That's a lot of data to download (especially in these days of bandwidth caps from most major ISPs). It would also take a long time to download, and eat up a lot of storage space."

I do professional video encoding and this is not an accurate statement. Due to the organic nature of most imagery, increasing resolution 4X doesn't actually increase the complexity of the image 4X, many parts of the image might be out of focus, or soft objects by nature. As a result the larger the frame size, the more efficient a codec becomes (per/pixel). So 4X the resolution will most likely translate to about 2X the bitrate, for the same quality, possibly even less for some footage.

In fact RED has shown that you can get 4K video at surprisingly low bitrates. If properly processed, I would bet you could get a 4K video for about the 10.64GB in your example, and suffer very little degradation (per pixel).

[classicmacs01]

Since the article used Hugo as a reference at $15 SD and $20 for HD 720p, it is only $22.99 at Amazon for the BD/DVD/Digital Copy Combo. I don't think anyone would pay for the "Apple" version at 1080p, if it costs more than the BD format. The BD format would also include either Dolby TrueHD or DTS HD Master Audio. The "Apple" version would most likely use compressed Dolby Digital to keep the file size as small as possible. I think the huge file size and bandwidth issues will make it an unattractive option. Watching widescreen video isn't exactly ideal on the 4:3 aspect of the iPad. I still prefer the Blu-Ray disc, no waiting for downloads and still higher quality in picture and sound.

[Frost7]

MutantPie, on 01 March 2012 - 06:40 AM, said:

" the same movie in 1080p would tip the scales at roughly 10.64GB. That’s a lot of data to download (especially in these days of bandwidth caps from most major ISPs). It would also take a long time to download, and eat up a lot of storage space."

I know, huh!?! If only there was some kind of media that we could instantly interface with a TV or other devices that can handle digital data (and here's a crazy idea kids) like a computer, perhaps on a disk, that would give us full HD resolution, not take any time to download, and was reasonably priced, and still had DRM, and it worked with Apple brand products. Oh, I'm so Blu that the Ray's of the sun can never shine on such a set-up.

Ha. Exactly what I was thinking. I've no doubt that one day we'll have downloadable TRUE HD on demand, but it's clearly still YEARS away. Case in point Microsoft's "1080p" videos on Zune HD. Oh sure, they're the same resolution as Blu-ray....... with heavily compressed audio, and video at 1/18th the data rate. That may be 1080p, but it ain't HD.

Disc isn't dead yet. Nor is it likely to be in the near future... we'll have movies available in 4K and 8K with fully uncompressed original audio on holographic discs before we get the data rate necessary just to stream Blu-ray quality.

[rlav]

Frost7, on 01 March 2012 - 05:17 PM, said:

Ha. Exactly what I was thinking. I've no doubt that one day we'll have downloadable TRUE HD on demand, but it's clearly still YEARS away. Case in point Microsoft's "1080p" videos on Zune HD. Oh sure, they're the same resolution as Blu-ray....... with heavily compressed audio, and video at 1/18th the data rate. That may be 1080p, but it ain't HD.

Disc isn't dead yet. Nor is it likely to be in the near future... we'll have movies available in 4K and 8K with fully uncompressed original audio on holographic discs before we get the data rate necessary just to stream Blu-ray quality.

Has anyone here bought an external Blu-Ray player to use with their Mac? Is it basically a trouble-free experience, or are there incompatibility issues?

[Fanfoot]

ViperJPB, on 01 March 2012 - 10:59 AM, said:

I think 1080P on a Retina display is a given. The video would look really poor on the iPad3 at 720P stretched to 2046. Almost like watching SD on an HDTV. No way they are going to have video on the iPad2 out shine the iPad3. I'm concerned about the fragmentation of apps that will support the retina resolution. iPhone apps on the iPad2 now look horrific already. Multiply that stretch by what...4 times...yuck. Are we going to see iPhone, IPad, and iPad HD apps? Plus many developers are already calling their iPad apps "Blah blah HD". So now "Blah blah Ultra HD"? Talk about a confusing symatic mess. Super excited for the new display but....Hmmm the transition is going to be annoying.

While you'd certainly be able to see the difference between a 1920x1080 and a 1280x720 image on an iPad 3 retina display, it would be MUCH harder to see the difference in a video. Even in a 1080p video if you actually freeze frame and look at an individual frame you might be a little shocked at the apparently low quality of the image, which often has large blocky areas (macroblocks) as a result of the way video encoding works. These errors just aren't that noticable when they only last for 1/24th or 1/29.97th of a second.

I'm not saying you won't be able to tell the difference between a 1080p and a 720p video on an iPad 3 retina display, but the differences will be significantly more subtle than you apparently imagine.

[MarkKaufman]

Now that's an idea, 1080p to go along with my tv and my Apple Uber monitor, which is higher than 1080p standards.

[zekegri]

Having the actual tvs include the blu-ray player and the Apple TV would of course be best instead of having to connect all these wires and configurations-hopefully Apple will come out with the actual TV-while at it why is there not a computer built into the TV and you could just simply switch between them when needed.

[richcon]

The draft of h.265 (actually called MPEG-4 HVEC) is out and the final standard should be done within a year, and that should allow 1080p movies to have the same file size as equivilent 720p movies in h.264. I wonder how long until we see Apple supporting that format in iTunes and across its devices.

[richcon]

On my 50" 1080p Plasma, I can clearly see the difference between 720p and 1080p video. So I hope Apple adds 1080p to the mix.

If the price is right I could see myself renting movies on demand in 1080p from them, and I have rented 720p movies from iTunes before. For buying, I'll probably stick to Blu-Ray; BD's video quality is the gold standard of 1080p, the discs hold 50 gigabytes, and it uses the same internal video compression format as iTunes. So it's going to be a long time before a downloadable format can match that. Plus with physical discs I don't have to worry about filling up my hard drive.

By the way, I'm more excited about an AppleTV that can play 1080p content than the ability to buy 1080p content from iTunes.

[SWHighlander]

1080? How about an iPad that can play most videos like my Mac can (with QuickTime and Flip4Mac)? Avi, wmv, mpeg, flv, etc. Out of 100 video clips on my Mac, QT can only export about 20 to an iPad/iPhone format. (The rest I get error messages.) Of those 20, that will then show up in iTunes, only 5 actually show up on my iPad 2 after syncing. 5 out of 100. That's PATHETIC. And who has time to do all this file conversion anyway? Apple needs to stop forcing everything to fit in their hole, and start making devices that just work. I should be able to play anything on my iPad. File conversion and error messages are so 1990s.

[richcon]

ViperJPB, on 01 March 2012 - 10:59 AM, said:

I think 1080P on a Retina display is a given. The video would look really poor on the iPad3 at 720P stretched to 2046. Almost like watching SD on an HDTV. No way they are going to have video on the iPad2 out shine the iPad3. I'm concerned about the fragmentation of apps that will support the retina resolution.

Won't look any worse than 720p looks on iPads now. Same screen size, same video resolution, same resulting quality. It might even be a little improved since smaller pixels means more accurate video scaling. It just won't look as crisp as 1080p will.

[BillyShambrook]

richcon, on 03 March 2012 - 07:58 PM, said:

The draft of h.265 (actually called MPEG-4 HVEC) is out and the final standard should be done within a year, and that should allow 1080p movies to have the same file size as equivilent 720p movies in h.264. I wonder how long until we see Apple supporting that format in iTunes and across its devices.

Apple would be in a very good position to implement the sale of H.265 files as they create the hardware and software themselves.
However H.264 was released back in 2004 and apple only started using it I believe about a years ago as their preferred codec (originally MPEG4 Part-2).
The needed processing power was obviously not available on handheld devices for H.264 back in 2004 however it was from about 3 years ago (apple lovers gonna hate this, but I am speaking about a Samsung device).
In the meantime apple could improve their H.264 encoding by experimenting with more features of the codec that they are still not utilising as of yet, and would also help if they dropped using their quicktime h.264 codec for encoding.