{"id":310,"date":"2009-03-30T16:23:13","date_gmt":"2009-03-30T05:23:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/?p=310"},"modified":"2010-01-28T13:28:37","modified_gmt":"2010-01-28T02:28:37","slug":"serenity-re-encode-improves-quality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/?p=310","title":{"rendered":"Serenity re-encode improves quality"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of posts ago<\/a> I mentioned that the Universal Pictures (Australasia) Pty Ltd Blu-ray release of First Blood<\/em> had an identical video encode to the previous HD DVD release<\/a>. I have now checked both Total Recall<\/em> and Serenity<\/em>, which Universal had also sent me. Total Recall<\/em>, as can be seen here<\/a>, is also identical to the earlier HD DVD. I confirmed that by comparing 737 ‘I’ frames from each and finding them bit-perfect matches.<\/p>\n

Serenity<\/em>, though, is very different. I shall write it up in due course in the appropriate place<\/a>. Here, though, I will mention that besides the obvious differences (the Blu-ray has two PIP functions, for example), when I extracted frames and compared them, they were quite different. The ‘I’ frames were even in different places for the most part.<\/p>\n

The extraction of frames from the HD DVD version fell over after only the first one hundred ‘I’ frames. I don’t know why. So I had a limited number of chances to find matching frames between the HD DVD and Blu-ray versions. But I did manage to find one. Here it is, shrunk down:<\/p>\n

\"Serenity<\/p>\n

Now here is a 250 by 300 pixel detail from that frame, unscaled, and compressed only in the lossless PNG format, with the HD DVD capture on the left and the Blu-ray capture on the right:<\/p>\n

\"Serenity<\/p>\n

The differences are there, but by no means obvious. In fact, I chose this section because it was with the forested hills that the differences were most marked. If you examine them closely, you will see that the dark parts are a little darker on the Blu-ray, and the detail a bit clearer. It’s as though a fine veil or haze overlays the HD DVD version. But an almost transparent one, just enough to knock the edge of clarity off.<\/p>\n

The full PNG frames from which I extracted these details were the following sizes: 2,201,983 bytes for the HD DVD extract, and 2,421,047 bytes for the Blu-ray. In other words, the HD DVD frame was 91% of the size of the Blu-ray frame. That suggests that it was inherently more compressible than the Blu-ray version, given that the application I used employed the same compression parameters (for example, it produces identical HD DVD and Blu-ray PNG shots for Total Recall<\/em>, Corpse Bride<\/em> and First Blood<\/em>). That in turn suggests that there truly is more detail in the Blu-ray version.<\/p>\n

I expect to have more up under the review<\/a> in a few days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of posts ago I mentioned that the Universal Pictures (Australasia) Pty Ltd Blu-ray release of First Blood had an identical video encode to the previous HD DVD release. I have now checked both Total Recall and Serenity, which … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,16,13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=310"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311,"href":"https:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310\/revisions\/311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}