| Editorial February 2008
High-Definition: Where Are We?
High-definition video is the best thing to happen to home
entertainment in more than half a century -- ever since the first television sets and
local broadcast channels. There is nothing more satisfying than watching great
entertainment in full high-definition video with top-notch sound. On a recent Friday night
after a busy week, Live Free or Die Hard on Blu-ray was a complete joy and escape:
great image quality, great sound, involving storytelling, lots of action, interesting
characters. But the industry that provides us with this quality of high-definition
entertainment is also giving us the shaft in so many ways that it’s hard to maintain
enthusiasm.
The format war of Blu-ray vs. HD DVD continues to
annoy. Both require owners to update their firmware periodically or experience the dreaded
failure of their player to read the latest discs. On Saturday night, looking forward to an
evening of great entertainment, you sit down with your wife and family to enjoy Ratatouille
on Blu-ray or Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on HD DVD.
You load the disc and . . . nothing. The player crashes, or locks up so bad you have to
unplug it to get it working again. Before it can play the disc, your player needs a
firmware update.
So you boot up your computer to download the update and
burn it to a disc, or have your player connect directly to the Internet. Then you start
the firmware update, which itself takes 10 to 15 minutes. Altogether, you blow half an
hour on getting the player updated and the movie restarted. During that time everyone has
left the room once -- or twice -- at least one squabble has had to be broken up, the dog
has needed to be let out, and your family wants to know what the heck is going on.
After all, the DVD player never failed to play a disc. But if you weren’t the
sort of techno-fanatic who reads articles like this one, you might not even know that
hi-def players need firmware updates. In that case, it might take you days to figure out
what’s gone wrong.
Then there’s the issue of audio formats. Just a little
over a year into the era of hi-def discs and players, there are three hi-def audio
formats: uncompressed LPCM (Blu-ray only), Dolby TrueHD, and DTS-HD Master Audio.
You’d think at least one of these formats would be found on every disc, and
that’s almost true for Blu-ray -- it’s hard to find a BD without at least
one of them. But way too many HD DVD titles appear without TrueHD or DTS-HD
MA.
Both types of player deal with the available audio formats
poorly, to say the least. Some brand-new players still can’t decode DTS-HD MA. And
until recently, no hi-def player could send any of these formats to a surround-sound
processor or receiver. But even if you do your research and find a player that can
send these formats on, you might not know that, in the process, you’ll lose the
ability to hear secondary audio features such as commentary tracks and menu sound effects,
for which you might need a second connection (a lower-resolution audio connection and an
additional cable) to the receiver/processor. I’m sure that having secondary audio
capabilities was a cool idea, but the planners and manufacturers should have figured out
in advance that they’d have problems sending the digital audio out of the players,
and dealt with it long before players were launched.
And don’t get me started on video displays that have
larger color spaces than HDTVs are supposed to have, guaranteeing that they won’t be
very accurate when reproducing hi-def images. Then there’s the poor excuse for hi-def
programming you get from broadcast channels, cable services, and satellite services. There
may be many HD satellite channels, but other than Discovery HD and HDNet, they don’t
deliver the full resolution of high definition. These networks can carry so many channels
only because they use video compression, which reduces the resolution of detail in their
hi-def signals. It would be more accurate to call them HHD, for Half Hi-Def.
But all the problems and annoyances can’t erase the
fact that, even with all the problems, hi-def discs such as Planet Earth, Pirates
of the Caribbean: At World’s End, the five-disc version of Blade Runner,
and Pan’s Labyrinth provide sublime home-theater entertainment. In fact,
it’s time to go watch a hi-def movie right now!
...Doug Blackburn
db@hometheatersound.com |
