IT Werkz Sometimes

Someone suggested I downloaded some High Definition TV content so that I could play them back via the laptop and onto the new 42″ HD TV, just to get a look and feel.

Did a search and found something called Zudeo, which has now been renamed to Vuze and is supposed to be a HD version of Youtube. Downloaded some promotional clips of the new Pirates of the Caribbean and a few others and tried playing them on the Vista PC. Of course they didn’t play very well, in fact they didn’t play at all. They were .mov files which is the Apple Quicktime format and having checked the Apple site Quicktime isn’t Vista compatible. Sort of starts but just sits there trying vainly to load the .mov file, for ever.

The idea was to download the HD content onto the laptop and then play it back on that but with a VGA cable connected to the VGA socket on the back of the HD TV. The more I thought about this the more I thought this just isn’t going to work.  The minimum pixel count for HD is 1280 x 720 and the higher end is supposed to be 1920 x 1080 pixels. Not sure if my very basic laptop is gonna be able to deal with that.

To display content at this higher end you’d need something like a QXGA board which can display 2048 x 1536 pixels and one of the few examples of that is the 30″ Apple Cinema Display and that requires a dual link DVI connector, as well as an Apple PC.

Also, just because someone says it is HD how do I know that it is HD. It may have been HD at source, but how do I know whether it has subsequently been re-compressed. I suppose you could check on the file size as a HD 90 film should be about 40 gig which works out at a bit under half a gig per minute. Everything should be relative to that.

Not sure if I can be bothered with monkeying around with ‘maybe’ HD content, cables and file viewers. Get a box.

Quote of the day

‘Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing’ Ralph Richardson (1902-1983)

Having done some research I thought I’d get a Blu-Ray High Def DVD player.

Checked a local DVD chain for HD content and there were twice as many Blu-Ray disks for sale compared to the other HD DVD format.  Went to the electrical chain down the road and collared a couple of assistants and asked them if I put in a Blu-Ray DVD into a PS3 would it just play the movie or will it catapult me into some kind of PS3 menueing system from hell. They thought about it and nervously said it would just play the disk. I wasn’t convinced and thought it was probably more like wishful thinking on their part.

One of the assistants then started talking about the Blu-Ray HD DVD wars and how it was far from certain who was going to win. This isn’t what I have heard recently like twice as many Blu-Ray DVD’s had been sold in the last 3 months compared to the the number of HD DVD movies sold. Finally he admits that he had coughed up and bought a HD DVD a couple of months ago and was nervous about his bought format losing out. So he was effectively trying to talk people out of the Blu-Ray flavour. Can’t blame him for that, would probably do the same thing myself.

More research to be done this week and then I’ll make a decision. Ah, what the heck I’m almost certain to get a PS3.

Quote of some other day

‘Drugs have taught an entire generation of Americans the metric system’ P. J. O’Rourke (1947-)

My other half has gone and bought the Panasonic HD 42″ TV, to be delivered Friday or Saturday.

Wall mounting bracket due in the next couple of days and then to be welded to the wall. Now just got to get a HD DVD player. But which format. I’ve read that the Blu-Ray format is slightly better and it appears that Blu-Ray sales are actually higher than HD. When I did a quick search for players available the HD player was quite a bit cheaper than the Blu-Ray player. Somebody suggested I wait for a while to let all of this settle down a bit and instead download HD content via bittorrent and sling a cable from the PC to the TV. Only trouble with this is the cable would be at least 50 feet long.

Also these HD video files are gonna be huge and will take an age to download, and if I have any broadband usage limit then downloading many of these files are going to use that up. Apparently a film on HD DVD will be about 40 gig in size and the same film on Blu-Ray about 60 gig. Someone I know downloaded a supposedly HD version of an episode of Lost, 36 minutes without adverts, and it was only 6 gig. Odd size. If a 90 minute film on HD is at least 40 gig then a 36 minute film should be a third of that i.e. at least 13 gig. So where did the lost data go. Could be that what he downloaded was not the 5:1 sound but just plain old mono. Dunno if that accounts for so much missing data though.

AnyDVD will rip a Blu-Ray disk to the hard drive so maybe that’s what these people are doing when packaging up this HD content for downloading via bittorrent. The test would be to see if, having a ripped a Blu-Ray disk with AnyDVD onto your hard drive, that it could be written back to a blank Blu-Ray disk. But of course you need a Blu-Ray disk writer and the blank media and some software to do it. Even then would it actually play on a home Blu-Ray DVD player. The chance of all that lot working is so touch ‘n’ go I wouldn’t even bother.

Sony Vegas came with something called DVD Architect, yet another learning curve. Just done some research into that and its all about DVD authoring. Sling that term through wikipedia and you get a face-full of DVD technobabble so confusing you feel like weeping.

Quote of the day

‘Basic research is what I am doing when I don’t know what I am doing’ Wernher von Braun (1912-1977