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CEN: And then we hear that Netflix is going to jump in and offer HD DVDs for rental, right when these Toshiba players are shipped as well.
Knox: Exactly. There were a few conversations that went on at CES, talking with Netflix about the robustness and the reliability. It was an easy conversation, because all we had to say was the basic design of the two disks are pretty similar. The materials are the same, it's just that the bumps on the waffle are smaller in the case of HD DVD.
CEN: There are a lot of consumers who are confused about 1080p and 1080i. These HD DVD players are capable of playing back at 1080p, aren't they? But I understand that a lot of the content to be released initially won't be able to let people see that kind of resolution on their TVs.
Knox: You hit on a very complex subject.
CEN: That's why there's a lot of confusion about it.
Knox: A key issue is, how do you deliver a 1080p signal from a player to a TV? And when you do, will that TV be able to accept a 1080p signal directly, or will it communicate? One interesting thing about the new connection standard called HDMI is, part of the protocol for HDMI is also moving, frankly ? we?re currently at version 1.1 and they're working on 1.2 and 1.3 are ready.
CEN: Nice, small plug. Easy to deal with, too.
Knox: Easy to deal with, and it has the ability of carrying both audio and video on the same wire. It takes a nine-year-old Nintendo champion out of the equation when it comes to hooking things up. [They laugh] But the issue is, exactly how do those two devices communicate with each other, and exactly what can receiving TV can display, and what can it accept? It?s variable depending on which set. So right now, the number of display devices that can accept real 1080p or HDMI is very limited for the simple reason that the current HDMI standard, version 1.1, does not require a TV to accept 1080p.
CEN: Can you get 1080p from player to receiver with a regular DVI cable?
Knox: In the latest DVI-D standard, it's very similar to the HDMI situation where you can put the signal out there, but the specification does not demand that the receiver know what to do with it. Or you can even demand that the receiver not get hiccups when it receives it. So the fact is, with a lot of the studios, the native resolution on the disk will not be 1080p per se.
CEN: One thing that distressed a lot of people was, Sony announced that it was going to be outputting and compressing films using MPEG2, and H.264 is a far superior compression scheme. Do you think that's going to be more prevalent with HD DVD, or will that be the case also where you're using old-fashioned MPEG2 instead of this new MPEG-4 with H.264 underneath?
Knox: No, frankly, the HD DVD disk that uses MPEG-2 is going to be a pretty rare bird, that's for sure. One of the reasons for that is, one of the basic differences in philosophy between the Blu-ray approach and the HD DVD approach is that in the HD DVD approach, we looked at how do we get five times the bits on the disk. The only way to get five times the actual bits on the disk is to change the way you make the desk completely. But if you're using one of the new codecs like H.264, or VC-1 which is a more standardized version of Windows Media Video, you at least double the efficiency of MPEG2, which means that you don't need five times as many bits to get a large amount of time of high definition on a disk. So the basic idea of HD DVD is, there is only three times as many minutes on each layer of the disk. Regular DVD per layer is 4.7 GB, and an HD DVD per layer is 15 GB. A Blu-ray is 25 GB, but because they seem to be focused on MPEG 2, it has to be.
CEN: They need that. So let's make sure I understand, Mark. They're using MPEG2 because they can, because they don't have to worry about it, but do you think they'll also migrate to H.264 and VC-1, as time goes on?
Knox: My understanding is that the specification for Blu-ray already allows H.264 or VC-1.
CEN: It does, sure, but they're not all going to use it.
Knox: They're not all going to use it, and I think it?s just a function of who's been working with it, and for how long, and how far along they are in the process of doing the encoding using those new codecs. I do know several gentlemen are earning lots and lots of frequent-flier miles pinging back and forth between Tokyo and Burbank, working with not only the studios but with the houses that do the authoring like the Luxe digital studios and Technicolor and so on, to provide them with equipment and give them the technical basis they need to be able to very effectively encode video using those new codecs. I can only guess that Blu-ray is not that far along, because it smells like a lot of that first group of releases are not going to be in those new codecs -- it's going to be MPEG2.
CEN: In your view, how long do you think it's going to take to work out the standards of HDMI and DVI-D, to the point were all output will be 1080p, and all receivers will be able to receive it?
Knox: I think that it's going to be a long time before you can say any HDTV you buy will be able to accept 1080p and deliver it directly to the display engine.
CEN: How long? Can you give us a ballpark figure?
Knox: I think what will happen is, it will start from the top down. For example, last year, there were many TV vendors that were putting ?p?s? on their cartons.
CEN: Yes, we saw that at CES last year, and even more this year, I noticed.
Knox: Yes. So an HDTV is saying, this is a 1080p TV. And it is a 1080p TV, because it takes a 1080i signal on one end and converts it inside the TV to 1080p, so that the resulting picture looks pretty darn good.
CEN: Does that mean that they can display true 1080p?
Knox: Now you get into even more difficulties, because exactly what did that process do? And there are three to five answers to that question. But the fact is that even with the simplest of processes, 1080p, even with the most standard up-conversion technology, does look noticeably better than 1080i as a native resolution of the display.
CEN: Sure it does.
Knox: But I think the key issue is, for the first generation of HD DVD players, we made the painful decision of not allowing the player to put out 1080p, because that 1080p signal is considered "optional" in the current HDMI specification. So as a result, we have no guarantee that the receiving television can display it directly, and also there's no guarantee under the auspices of HDMI 1.1 that the 1080p signal from the player won't cause even greater difficulty for the receiving device depending on what model and make it is.
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