3D Escher

Posted on July 14, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

One possible artistic use of 3D display technology would be to represent the impossible. Imagine: you have two objects on the screen, one clearly ‘closer’ to you than the other, as conveyed by the 3D rendering.

Now, imagine if that closer object moves behind the object further back. No change in the its apparent position, except that it is blanked out as it reaches the more distant object.

I wonder how that would look.

Meanwhile, how about a free Blu-ray? No label, no box, no slick. But just like the real thing. First in comments (resident in Australia only) making the request gets it. Law Abiding Citizen with Jamie Foxx and Gerard Butler. Picture: 2.35:1, 1080p24, MPEG4 AVC. Audio Dolby TrueHD 24/48 3/2.1 @ 3214kbps. No extras. Locked to Region B. Rated MA.

Posted in 3D, Blu-ray, Giveaway | 4 Comments

3D and HD

Posted on July 13, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

It seems that the Playstation 3 is likely to get its Blu-ray 3D firmware upgrade in September. That the PS3 can be upgraded at all for this purpose is something I find quite interesting.

My understanding is that the preferred signal for Blu-ray 3D is a form of 1080p48. Certainly that is the volume of video data sent: 1080p24 x 2 for the two eyes. It could be that these are conveyed one after the other, which would seem the obvious way, but I suppose there could be reasons for some form of interlacing or other data organisation.

(I’ve just tried plugging the Panasonic Blu-ray 3D player into the Epson EH-TW5500 home theatre projector, because I reckon that projector most likely supports 1080p48 signals, which can be produced by some video processors. But the Panasonic player must have queried the projector, decided it doesn’t support 3D, and simply supplied it with a regular 1080p24 signal from the 3D disc.)

Presumably, then, for the PS3 to support Blu-ray 3D output it must have a chipset capable of delivering data at 1080p48 or something. Or must it? It certainly supports 1080p60 output, so it could convert the output to this. You’d get 3D, but pans would be jerky. So we’ll have to wait and see how it comes out.

Meanwhile, I was trying to find some worthwhile upcoming HDTV to give the Panasonic Blu-ray recorder a workout. Golly, it’s hard to find out these days. Prime doesn’t seem interested in indicating which of its programs are in HD, and neither does WIN. It turns out that there are a couple of movies on Saturday night on Prime, so I’ll record them to see how it goes. I can always, I supposed, record ‘Ultimate Fighting’ from OneHD. Ho hum.

Update (1:31pm): Simon in comments below wonders whether the HDMI 1.3a output of the PS3 allows for 3D. Actually, it doesn’t. HDMI 1.4 does. But that’s only the spec. The HDMI organisation goes to great lengths to say that even if some device has HDMI 1.x compliance, that doesn’t necessarily mean it implements all the features.

The most obvious example of this is … the PS3. Even though rated at HDMI 1.3 right from the start, until the PS3 Slim came out, it could not deliver the new HD audio standards as bitstreams. This was a hardware issue to do with its chipset. The new firmware supports bitstream of Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA, but only on the PS3 Slim. If you set an older model to ‘bitstream’ output, you get either the DTS core or the embedded Dolby Digital as appropriate.

A post on hidefdigest suggests that all Blu-ray players will support Blu-ray 3D, but only at 1080i. It claims this is because ‘for a 3D picture, two images have to be shown nearly simultaneously. Since HDMI 1.3 can’t handle two 1080p pictures at that speed, you’ll get two 1080i pictures.’

That’s plainly wrong. HDMI 1.3 can handle two 1080p pictures easily. 1080p24-3D or 1080p48 requires only 80% of the bandwidth of 1080p60. The problem would be whether the video chips are versatile enough to cope with 48fps in addition to the more common 24fps, 50fps and 60fps. Just because a chip can output a higher speed doesn’t mean that it can deal with a lower, non-standard speed. There are lots of TVs that are perfectly happy with 1080p60, but won’t touch 1080p24, even though it demands only 40% of the other signal’s capacity.

Anyway, it appears that the PS3’s video output is sufficiently versatile to produce some form of 3D output. And, once again, we’ll see what it is when it finally arrives. But 1080i makes no sense at all.

Posted in 3D, Blu-ray, HDTV | 4 Comments

Blu-ray blank media

Posted on July 12, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

I’ve got Panasonic’s latest Blu-ray recorder here, the DMR-BW880, and on opening it up was startled to find that there were no blank recordable Blu-ray discs contained in the box. Previous models have included them I think.

So I went to Panasonic’s website to see how much they’d cost to purchase a couple for testing purposes. Incredibly, I don’t think the prices have come down at all. Single layer (25GB) discs are $30 for write once, $40 for rewritable, and dual layer are $60 and $80 respectively.

Each!

Googling around, I found a place in Melbourne (BD-R Blu-Ray Discs Australia) that does mail order at far more reasonable prices. No brand names, though, as far as I could tell. One of the more attractive products is a pack of ten 50GB BD-Rs for $129 (ie. $12.90 each).

Update (1:19pm, 13 July): BD-R Blu-Ray Discs Australia tell me that they do BD-Rs, but not BD-REs (rewritables). I wondered what their customer makeup is like, and here’s what they say:

We do have a variety of customers that use our discs for archival/data storage as well as AV purposes. Some of customers include AV Central in SA, Michael’s Camera House and a large number of Wedding photographers and design agencies (e.g. Hard Hat Digital).

We also have a number of customers who use them for burning Blu Ray movies and other personal use. We have tested our discs on pretty much every burner on the market so you should not have any issues using our discs for any of the purposes you need.

Posted in Blu-ray, Recorders | Leave a comment

News coming

Posted on July 11, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

Australians, might be a good idea to rescan your digital TV stations, or a least the ABC. I did so this afternoon and ABC 20 HD has now gone. Instead there is ABC 24 HD (720p), which will soon be the 24 hour news station. Only running a promo on a loop at the moment, but that’s what ABC 20 was doing before anyway.

IceTV says that it’s likely to be going live any day now.

Posted in DTV, HDTV | 3 Comments

Is the gap still narrowing?

Posted on July 11, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

In one of the last pieces I wrote for the Melbourne Herald Sun before a regime change lost me that outlet (that regime has now gone too) concerned a then new solid state hard disk drive replacement from SanDisk. In that piece — written July 2007, three years ago — I wrote:

… the price of flash memory continues to drop. Five years ago the best price I could find for flash memory cards for a digital camera were 256 megabyte Compact Flash (CF): at a cost of $277! That works out to $1.08 per megabyte. The equally popular Secure Digital (SD) format cost more: $1.63 per megabyte at best.

Now, the best prices for reputable brand memory cards are well under three cents per megabyte for both SD and CF, with the former a little cheaper.

In 2002 the biggest solid state memory card readily available was a one gigabyte CF card, at a whopping $1,789. Today you can buy an eight gigabyte CF for less than a quarter of that price — or two 4GB ones for less than an eighth (the largest card sizes usually cost significantly more per megabyte than smaller ones).

Now, three cents or less per megabyte is incredibly cheap … until you compare the prices of hard disk drives. Once again checking prices for reputable brands, the best I could readily find costs a hair over 0.05 cents per megabyte (320GB models seem to be the best value for money at the moment on this basis). Yes, that is one twentieth of a cent per megabyte, compared to flash drives’ roughly three cents per megabyte. Another way of putting it is that each megabyte of space on flash memory costs about fifty times what it does on hard disk.

But five years ago, each flash megabyte cost about two hundred times each hard megabyte, so the gap is narrowing.

So how are things today? Without looking especially hard, I found that you can buy a 1TB USB external hard drive for $95. So the price of a hard disk megabyte has fallen further, to about 0.001 cents, a factor of five in the last three years.

A quick look around gives the most economical flash memory to be 4GB USB at 0.32 centres per megabyte. That makes a flash MB a bit over 30 times more expensive than a hard MB, so the contraction continues, but seems to have slowed in recent times.

Posted in Computer | Leave a comment

Big Brother

Posted on July 9, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

Last night I received an email from Amazon.com wondering if I am ‘looking for something in [its] Romantic Comedy DVD department’. The offering at the head of the list is … To Die For. I suppose that amazon noticed I was checking out this title a few weeks ago while preparing a post on the subject and used this as a hint as to what I wanted.

I wonder how amazon would have described it had it wanted to query my desire for the other To Die For I noticed on its website.

Posted in Cinema, Computer, DVD | Leave a comment

Side by side

Posted on July 8, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

For those who aren’t in a position to receive any of the 3D TV broadcasts, this is what Simon’s comment to the previous post refers to:

Germany beating Australia in World Cup - 3D

The basic TV standards (max resolution of 1920 at 1080i at 50 hertz) can’t be fiddled with, so instead of interleaving left and right eye views, like Blu-ray 3D, they are broadcast side by side. The 3DTV then has the job of cutting these frames in half, rescaling them and presenting them in the correct order so they work with the LCD shutter eyewear.

Posted in 3D, DTV, HDTV | 2 Comments

Is Blu-ray 3D BDXL?

Posted on July 8, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

This is weird, and I don’t yet quite know what to make of it. As I mentioned, I’m looking at the Panasonic 3D TV and its Blu-ray 3D player. With the TV you get two freebie Blu-ray discs: Coraline and Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.

Note, this is a proper 3D Coraline using the sequential frame method to show different images to different eyes. Things are confused by the earlier Coraline discs which carry an anagylph 3D version (ie. using coloured glasses). That version works, but the colour range is very restricted.

Now for the weirdness. I thought I’d do a Blog post on how the files are structured on a Blu-ray 3D disc. It was doing this I noticed something very odd.

On a regular Blu-ray disc the content files are held in a folder BDMV\STREAM. Here are the first few from this disc:

 Directory of E:\BDMV\STREAM

30/03/2010  12:40 am    10,503,985,152 00001.m2ts
30/03/2010  12:40 am     5,199,513,600 00002.m2ts
30/03/2010  12:40 am    17,915,559,936 00003.m2ts
30/03/2010  12:40 am     8,772,323,328 00004.m2ts
30/03/2010  12:40 am        97,308,672 00005.m2ts

On a Blu-ray 3D, the 3D content is contained within a subfolder of the BDMV/STREAM folder, called SSIF. Here is the full contents from this disc:

 Directory of E:\BDMV\STREAM\SSIF

30/03/2010  12:40 am    15,703,498,752 00001.ssif
30/03/2010  12:40 am    26,687,883,264 00003.ssif
30/03/2010  12:40 am         1,032,192 00032.ssif
30/03/2010  12:40 am            61,440 00034.ssif
30/03/2010  12:40 am     1,002,817,536 00037.ssif

Now those are mighty big file sizes of course, but even a rough estimate of their total has them adding up to 85,000,000,000 bytes. In fact, according to the DOS DIR /S command, the total contents of the disc add up to 88,187,945,799 bytes. As I later discovered, BDInfo also gives this figure.

This is bit of a problem because the maximum capacity of a dual layer Blu-ray is 50,050,629,632 bytes.

Windows reports 46.6GB. But when I look at the ‘Properties’, it reports 50,050,629,632 bytes, which is the maximum capacity of a dual layer BD down to the last byte. That would make sense, since there is no reason why my computer’s Blu-ray drive would read more than two layers (both BDInfo and the DIR /S command work by toting up the sizes of all the individual files on the disc, as read from the directory index on the disc).

So what we appear to have here is one of two things. Either this is a super capacity Blu-ray disc carrying 82GB of data, or it is playing silly buggers with folder and file structures and indexes for some reason which is by no means clear.

The other day the Blu-ray Disc Association approved a new BDXL format, which offers 100GB in three layers and 128GB in four layers. This disc would nicely fit into three.

It would make sense for this new format to be introduced in conjunction with Blu-ray 3D, which also requires hardware changes. But I haven’t heard that this is actually happening.

Update (10:30am): The version of Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs included with the TV (disc name ICEAGE3_3DBUNDLE_F2) apparently has a size of 75,678,512,103 bytes, or 70.5GB.

Update 2 (10:47am): The answer to the question posed in the title is: No. In fact, it turns out, that my alternative explanation is correct: ‘it is playing silly buggers with folder and file structures and indexes’.

This post over the the Unofficial Blu-ray Specs Thread gives the answer:

It’s actually 38.68 GB total of “real” data, the SSIF folder (Stereoscopic Interleaved File) is a virtual folder created by combining files in the normal stream folder. 00004.m2ts is the left-eye stream, with normal AVC encoding, nothing out of the ordinary. 00005.m2ts is the right-eye stream with the 3D extensions, using MVC encoding (Multiview Video Coding). They combine, or interleave, to create the virtual 32.7 GB 00004.ssif file in the SSIF folder, which is the actual 3D version of the movie. The file system layer enables a set of files to share the same sector data.

Is that clever or what? If you play the movie back in a 2D player, you get a left-eye-view of the movie. And from the file listings I gave above, if you add the sizes of the 00001.m2ts and 00002.m2ts files together, you get exactly the size of the virtual (ie. it isn’t really there) 00001.ssif file.  Likewise for 00003.m2ts, 00004.m2ts and 00003.ssif.

It makes sense too. Presumably some part of the left eye view is identical to the right much of the time, and the rest is quite similar, so the 3D extensions files would basically contain ‘difference’ information (and, of course, wouldn’t need to carry any audio or other data streams).

Posted in 3D, Blu-ray | 5 Comments

Inception coming

Posted on July 7, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

Christopher Nolan’s new movie, Inception, is due to release in Australia on 22 July. You may remember Nolan, responsible for such brilliant works as Memento (featuring an Australian actor pretending to be an American), The Prestige (featuring an Australian actor pretending to be a British Peer, pretending to be an American), and a couple of Batmans (featuring a couple of British actors pretending to be Americans).

It seems that those who have had a chance to see it already are very impressed indeed.

Meanwhile, first to ask in comments (Australian postage only please) gets The Bourne Ultimatum on Blu-ray. No box, no proper label, but the real thing none-the-less.

Posted in Blu-ray, Cinema, Giveaway | 1 Comment

Money, money, money …

Posted on July 6, 2010 by Stephen Dawson




I have been meaning to do this for months. Here is a PayPal donate button to give me money. Do it or not as you see fit. Obviously, I’d appreciate it. (I don’t have a day job. For the last 14 years I’ve been entirely freelance). I’ll leave it here as a sticky for the moment until I learn enough about templates and styles to stick it in the sidebar.

Posted in Admin | Leave a comment