Vancouver said:
Anyone know any details about this? i.e. will they be remastering all current DVD's to be HD DVDs. Will they be 720p? who will come out with the players and will they be crazy amounts of money? Will they much MUCH better then 480p?
Also check out AVS forum - apparently there's been a lot of discussion over this on that website.
From what I know, there will be no comparison - HD DVD will be far superior to 480p - upto 1080p!, which will be noticeably better than 1080i which is already far, far better than 480p.
No - there won't be remastering as such - but a step-by-step release of HD-DVD software depending on how the market responds to them (demand v. supply) and how much money the studios can make. Players should follow a similar curve for most mass-market equipment - they'll probably be crazy-high for the first couple of years and then decline slowly and then rapidly as consumer acceptance takes on, and as production facililties start gearing up in volume. All the companies are in this game, but are following two separate formats - one is Blu-ray and the other is a different standard, with the Japanese companies divided between them. One of the keys is which format the studios will accept, or will they endorse both. The biggest issue for the studios is copy-protection, because with the fantastic quality of HD-DVD, they could lose billions of $ if they don't take steps to make sure piracy doesn't happen. So the higher resolutions will not likely be available except in a fully digital, super encrypted format - DVI/HDMI. But for all the encryption, there's all the hackers.....