RAVE: Bluray

[TimeForGuinness]

I thought bandwidth was the main consideration to 1080i

1080i and 720p have the same bandwidth. The claim is that 1080i will have better spatial resolution as there are twice as many lines. In reality, you don't end up getting this as:
-The vast majority of HDTVs are fundamentally progressive and have to internally deinterlace anyway.
-The quality is actually limited by the bitrate/compression algorithm. Interlaced material gets worse compression meaning that any theoretical gains are mostly given up.
-Interlacing introduces artifacts.

The proper way to control bandwidth is with modern digital compression techniques not outdated hacks like interlacing.

Not arguing with you...never understood 1080i unless it was for bandwidth considerations.

[ghostrunner]

I should point out that Pirates of the Caribbean was always as crisp as it looks on Blu-Ray. If you had a quality home projection system with a TV sized screen and bought the film on reels, it should look at least as crisp as it did on Blu-Ray. It will look fuzzier when blown up onto a huge theatre screen but with the same level of detail. On standard DVD, the fuzziness is actually coming from loss of detail from the source film. The thing people were talking about in that forum topic was a feature of some TVs that tries to add extra (faked) frames to 24 fps film material to display on 60 or 120 Hz HDTVs. This seems like a bad idea to me. If your TV has this feature, I'd see if it can be deactivated.

Hmm. So the extra frames result in a live studio look?

[clevername]

yes. Frame interpolation is the term for it.

It's starting to make its way into the home theater projector world, too. I just bought a new projector and it has frame interpolation. I don't like what it does to movies and TV shows/dramas. It's fine for sports (though I honestly don't notice a difference with football) and things like the news and ESPN, but I'm leaving it off for all my film and Lost/Battlestar viewing. It makes it look like they were filmed live with a handheld digital video camera.

It does, though, look quite impressive to my eyes with video games.

[cards2468]

yes. Frame interpolation is the term for it.

It's starting to make its way into the home theater projector world, too. I just bought a new projector and it has frame interpolation. I don't like what it does to movies and TV shows/dramas. It's fine for sports (though I honestly don't notice a difference with football) and things like the news and ESPN, but I'm leaving it off for all my film and Lost/Battlestar viewing. It makes it look like they were filmed live with a handheld digital video camera.

It does, though, look quite impressive to my eyes with video games.

So does it just insert a frame in between 2 frames with each pixel emitting light in the color of the interpolation between the two frames?

[clevername]

yes. Frame interpolation is the term for it.

It's starting to make its way into the home theater projector world, too. I just bought a new projector and it has frame interpolation. I don't like what it does to movies and TV shows/dramas. It's fine for sports (though I honestly don't notice a difference with football) and things like the news and ESPN, but I'm leaving it off for all my film and Lost/Battlestar viewing. It makes it look like they were filmed live with a handheld digital video camera.

It does, though, look quite impressive to my eyes with video games.

So does it just insert a frame in between 2 frames with each pixel emitting light in the color of the interpolation between the two frames?

I honestly don't understand the intricacies of it. That's the basic idea I have of it, though.

[ghostrunner]

yes. Frame interpolation is the term for it.

It's starting to make its way into the home theater projector world, too. I just bought a new projector and it has frame interpolation. I don't like what it does to movies and TV shows/dramas. It's fine for sports (though I honestly don't notice a difference with football) and things like the news and ESPN, but I'm leaving it off for all my film and Lost/Battlestar viewing. It makes it look like they were filmed live with a handheld digital video camera.

It does, though, look quite impressive to my eyes with video games.

That's what I'm reading online too.

[Arthur Dent]

Not arguing with you...never understood 1080i unless it was for bandwidth considerations.

Heh. Wasn't trying to argue. I just find it bizarre that interlacing has been included in HDTV standards. It should have been a good opportunity to rid ourselves of it. It looks like more than half of HD channels are using 1080i instead of 720p. I'm guessing this is because 1080>720. Is this a victory of marketing over sound technical choices?

Hmm. So the extra frames result in a live studio look?

I think so. The problem is that movies are made for 24 fps film, so they are trying to add information that was never present in the source material. That's inevitably going to lead to problems. I think they should be trying to best reproduce the film rather than trying to "improve" it.

[cards2468]

Not arguing with you...never understood 1080i unless it was for bandwidth considerations.

Heh. Wasn't trying to argue. I just find it bizarre that interlacing has been included in HDTV standards. It should have been a good opportunity to rid ourselves of it. It looks like more than half of HD channels are using 1080i instead of 720p. I'm guessing this is because 1080>720. Is this a victory of marketing over sound technical choices?

Hmm. So the extra frames result in a live studio look?

I think so. The problem is that movies are made for 24 fps film, so they are trying to add information that was never present in the source material. That's inevitably going to lead to problems. I think they should be trying to best reproduce the film rather than trying to "improve" it.

I understand that 720p has benefits over 1080i, so I guess it has something to do with the "i" and the "p". What exactly is the difference between the two?

[Michael]

I have noticed some of the new HD TV's make the picture seem strange, almost too lifelike and the movement seems off, but I have only seen this at the electronics store, I amn sure this has something to do with the TV settings.

IMO this is an issue with LCD's. Plasma's have a richer, less "harsh" picture.

[Arthur Dent]

I understand that 720p has benefits over 1080i, so I guess it has something to do with the "i" and the "p". What exactly is the difference between the two?

The "i" stands for interlaced and the "p" stands for progressive. Progressive is normal in that each frame is drawn all at once. Interlacing was a technique used on almost all tube televisions which draws every other line in one scan and then the rest in the next scan. So, first you'd draw the even number lines, and then you'd go back and draw the odd lines. This allowed the TV designers to use scan the electron beam in the TV at half the speed. Of course, modern LCD or Plasma TVs don't use a scan beam, and the whole picture is on all the time, so these TVs must deinterlace any interlaced signals to display them. Interlaced video can lead to problems when there is motion as the two fields will have been captured at different times. If deinterlacing is done poorly, this will cause "combs" to appear in the image as the even and odd lines split apart. In the best case, deinterlacers blur the lines together.

Here's a wiki image of some of the issues: