I don't know how many of you have actually played a HD-DVD, but they have special features and extra content like you wouldn't believe. Not that its really special (Director et all commentaries are no longer just alternate audio tracks, they have a little picture in picture style window that shows the commenter talking, for instance...) The studios, for some reason or other, think that this drivel is essential, so they need the extra room on the HD-DVD to store it. From what I've seen, a typical transcode from HD-DVD to straight H.264 will barely fit on a dual layer DVD, plus it uses some of the more calculation intensive features in H.264 which HD-DVDs do not, in order to sqeeze more quality out of less storage. That doesn't leave a lot of room for footage of the cast eating lunch, or whatever other 'intertesting' content they accidentally record.
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re: Codecs
I don't know how many of you have actually played a HD-DVD, but they have special features and extra content like you wouldn't believe. Not that its really special (Director et all commentaries are no longer just alternate audio tracks, they have a little picture in picture style window that shows the commenter talking, for instance...) The studios, for some reason or other, think that this drivel is essential, so they need the extra room on the HD-DVD to store it. From what I've seen, a typical transcode from HD-DVD to straight H.264 will barely fit on a dual layer DVD, plus it uses some of the more calculation intensive features in H.264 which HD-DVDs do not, in order to sqeeze more quality out of less storage. That doesn't leave a lot of room for footage of the cast eating lunch, or whatever other 'intertesting' content they accidentally record.
- Nexox