I've seen 2 nice quality planet earth episodes in HD on divx quality, that fit on one 4.7GB dvd.

So that's about 2GB per hour to do 1080p HD.

Why is the industry trying to rip us off with those "blu-ray" and "hd-dvd" formats which are expensive and unnecessary, while all they really have to do is to modify a plain dvd player a bit and equip it with a dvi/hdmi output.

Perhaps *this* is what they have done, and it's not really "HD-DVD", but plain divx HD quality-ish DVD, which 'd be fine.

From what I've read, Divx is comparable to the H.264 and VC1 codecs that are standard on the next-gen video discs. If you're willing to put up with a 4.5Mbps bitrate for your video then I guess DVDs aren't a bad choice for you.

I don't know how many of you have actually played a HD-DVD, but they have special features and extra content like you wouldn't believe. Not that its really special (Director et all commentaries are no longer just alternate audio tracks, they have a little picture in picture style window that shows the commenter talking, for instance...) The studios, for some reason or other, think that this drivel is essential, so they need the extra room on the HD-DVD to store it. From what I've seen, a typical transcode from HD-DVD to straight H.264 will barely fit on a dual layer DVD, plus it uses some of the more calculation intensive features in H.264 which HD-DVDs do not, in order to sqeeze more quality out of less storage. That doesn't leave a lot of room for footage of the cast eating lunch, or whatever other 'intertesting' content they accidentally record.

- Nexox