Last week Toshiba, developer of the HD DVD format, finally acquiesced in the lengthy high definition format war. Sony, and its high definition Blu-Ray format, emerged victorious. Many heralded this event as not only a victory for Sony, but one for the consumer as well. The consumer, apparently befuddled by the multiple HD formats, can now rest easy as Blu-Ray is the heir apparent in the high definition war.

But those who survived the high definition format war will live only to face a new conflict, the war against online distribution.

Long before anyone knew the emerging party in the HD format war, both standard and high definition movies and TV shows were already traded online. Not too long after the advent of Napster, other P2P networks liberated their trading policies and allowed users to trade movies and TV shows. The earliest incarnations of these types of networks were Scour Exchange, iMesh, and Gnutella. Later protocols such as eMule and eventually BitTorrent took over the role of trading larger files.

Only recently, however, have high definition movies made their way online. The next generation of optical disc encryption failed to hold back individuals like Muslix64, who discovered a means to bypass the copy protection. Once this encryption was bypassed, it was only a matter of days before HD movies started showing up online. Because high definition content contains significantly more information than a standard XviD movie, many people were shocked to learn that a full length action movie might easily consume 25 gigabytes or more.

The difference in size has much to do with the actual definition of a movie file. True high definition is defined as 1,080 vertical lines of progressive scan resolution. Hybrid HD/computer monitors are slightly better than this standard, and have 1,200 lines of progressive scan resolution; however only PCs, Macs some game consoles can advantage of this higher definition format.

From there, the smaller the file size, the less “high def” the movie is. 1080i, or 1,080 vertical lines of interlaced resolution, is a lesser standard than 1080p. To save bandwidth, cable companies and TV stations interlace their broadcast. In other words, your TV or HD monitor only refreshes every other vertical line of resolution. The bandwidth hungry progressive scan format refreshes every line. Although the human eye generally can’t decipher interlace from progressive scan, it becomes more of an issue with larger screens. Interlacing is a short cut, and like a stretched HD image, small faults like this become magnified.

Date: 2008-02-24 Source: http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1668