Thursday, December 21, 2006
HD DVD Insider's Tour comes to the UK!
Back when Microsoft's video encoding guru Amir Majidimehr posted details of the HD DVD Insiders Tour on the American site AVSForum.com, I jokingly suggested that he come to the UK and do the same thing here. The Insiders Tour is a chance for home cinema geeks to basically get to meet the guys responsible for the high quality video we enjoy as standard on the HD DVD format.
Well, as it turns out, good old Amir was looking for an excuse to visit Britain anyway since he has relatives here, so, it actually happened! NTSC-UK forum member Angry The Clown suggested that I talk to the people at PJ Hi-Fi in Guildford, just outside of London, to see if they'd be up for hosting the event.
You can guess the rest! The event, which I think is the very first one in the world to happen outside America, took place today, so many thanks to Microsoft's Amir and Kevin flying out here to do their thing, and thanks also to Elliot and the rest of the PJ Hi-Fi gang for hosting the event, and for letting us in free, no less!
Yep, it's Amir and Kevin themselves!
Amir kicked things off by giving us some background info on who he was, and how he got to be in the position he's in. He listed his previous jobs, and most interestingly, shared a lot of info on how the VC-1 codec – the killer finishing ingredient that makes the compression quality on most HD DVD titles so good.
After a lot of demonstrations – some from titles I've seen and some from discs that are released but I don't own, Amir handed things over to Kevin, who's in charge of the HDi system on HD DVD. That's the specification that handles things like menus and interactive features, some of which are very neat. What's interesting is that Microsoft actually developed this system with Disney, who are, as we speak, only releasing on Blu-ray Disc, which ended up using Java for its interactive content (or lack thereof, there still isn't any after 9 months).
After the event, we all braved the London fog and headed to a bar just across the street, where we discussed HD DVD, HD DVD, more HD DVD, CRT projectors, and HD DVD again. The best part of the night for me was talking to Amir here about the current state of most DVDs. We talked about how annoying the filtering process that screws up just about every major title is. You have absolutely no idea how nice it is to talk to someone about this huge pain in the ass and have them know exactly what you're talking about, right off the bat. It's a shame that as a mass-consumer product, studios get lazy with DVD and just throw their content at an MPEG-2 encoder with predefined settings and author it to disc, rather than getting the best picture quality possible. Amir then told me about how the VC-1 guys at Microsoft (that means him and his team) have told studios who've done bad encodes – no names were dropped – to go back and do them again – and they even helped out where necessary. Anybody who ever tries to tell me that Microsoft are an evil, greedy corporation can silence themselves now...
It's a totally different mindset. The VC-1 crew come across as the kind of people who go the extra mile to get the best quality possible video. And so they damn well should – that's the whole point of the format existing!
We also talked about obnoxious region lockouts, and I was delighted to hear that the general gist going around is that they aren't ever likely to become a part of the HD DVD spec. Yep, if a regional lockout system just fails to materialise on HD DVD, don't be surprised.
What was also great about tonight was seeing PJ Hi-Fi's demo room facilities. My own LCD TV at home is a 1366x768 resolution KDL-32V2000 (soon to be replaced with a 1080p KDL-40W2000 if all goes well), and I've only ever seen HD DVDs running at something close to their 1920x1080 resolution on a fairly small monitor. Seeing them played back through a 1080p Sony QUALIA projector on an 8-foot screen was amazing! The best shots honestly did look astonishingly like a real print, and made me think twice about buying a new LCD TV instead of a projector.
What an amazing night. Meeting two guys in such important positions, in the flesh, was just incredible. Oh, and if anyone else from the AV (or AVS) Forums is reading, as well as Amir and Kevin, have a great Christmas!
Plus, I got an exclusive collectable, too!
Posted at 12:48 AM
