WMV-HD quality.

Lin3ar

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After owning a HD Ready set for 3 months I finally got fed up waiting for Sky and downloaded some WMV-HD trailers from the Microsoft web site, lunked my PC into the front room (much to my wifes annoyance:mad: ) and sat back ready to be amazed.
My initial thoughts were that it wasn't as good as I had expected it to be.There was an obvious step up but not the huge one I was expecting (having heard the 'biggest thing since colour TV' quotes)
However, after going back to watching Sky(which I had previously thought to of been pretty good quality) it became apparent how much better the WMV-HD trailers actually were.Sky looked awful :eek:
This leads me to the point of this thread.
How will Sky HD, HD-DVD and BlueRay compare to the quality of the WMV-HD trailers?
If there is another step up in quality with these formats then I am going to be very happy indeed.:D
 
This is the question not many will be qualified to answer. At the moment their are very few displays capable of showing full 1080p. Then their are no players capable of outputing 1080p apart from HTPC and D-VHS. Then very few people have seen a mastered Blue-Ray disc in the flesh.

I expect if you were to get all three, display, player and disc together you will be amazed. Most people though will be restricted to watching a Blue-Ray at a downscaled 720p so it will lesson the impact of a new technology some what as you say.
 
Not been impressed with any of the retail WMV discs I've seen terms of picture quality (all three of them:) ) but the codec they use while being a mpeg4 derivitive is different from H.264 and mpeg2.

The mpeg2 HD content I have looks in general far better than the wmv stuff but you have to remember that it may be an issue with the limitations of DVD storage or internet distribution and if the same codec (wmv/vc1) was used for broadcast HD or blu-ray/hd-dvd the the quality could improve.
 
Lin3ar said:
downloaded some WMV-HD trailers from the Microsoft web site, lunked my PC into the front room (much to my wifes annoyance:mad: ) and sat back ready to be amazed.
My initial thoughts were that it wasn't as good as I had expected it to be.There was an obvious step up but not the huge one I was expecting

With my LCD TV which has a resolution of 1366x768 - will only display 1024x768 from a PC input.

Were you watching the WMV-HD in your screens native resolution?

Cheers, Dave C.
 
wmv-hd quality is stunning....check your settings...and please bear in mind contrary to some sales people...it is not 3d :O)
 
I hate to sound like a scratched record here Lin3ar, but does your TV provide 1:1 mapping on your PC? Which model is it? WMV-HD looks stunning on my TV via DVI - and Dobly 5.1 rounds it off nicely.
 
I think the IMAX WMV HD DVDs look AWESOME on my PV500 (1024x768) but wasn't impressed with The Italian Job DVD.
 
Giblets2 said:
I hate to sound like a scratched record here Lin3ar, but does your TV provide 1:1 mapping on your PC? Which model is it? WMV-HD looks stunning on my TV via DVI - and Dobly 5.1 rounds it off nicely.

You don't sound like a scratched record to me mate :thumbsup:
Errrrrr.....1:1 mapping, I haven't a clue what that is :eek:
My LCD is a Panasonic tx32lxd52 if that helps and I set my pc resolution to 1280 by 720.

Thanks for the help.
 
Don't be too proud of the technological terror Bill have constructed...It's insignificant to the power of a well-coded Divx-HD!

Seriously now, to my eyes, any Divx-HD clip I have seen is superior in picture quality and size to a WMV-HD clip...and WMV-HD is not full 1980*1280p BTW...color banding is one of WMV-HD's biggets offences...
 
Lin3ar said:
My LCD is a Panasonic tx32lxd52 if that helps and I set my pc resolution to 1280 by 720.
It needs to be set to 1366x768 as that is the native resolution of your screen, otherwise the pixels on the PC and the ones on the panel don't line up and the screen looks blurry (or possibly clear, but too small in the centre of the screen). Do a search for 1:1 on these forums for more info than you could possibly want! :D

The point is, unless your PC and screen are seeing eye to eye then WMV-HD is never going to look its best, neither are games.

Some screens just don't do it properly (not sure about the Panny) but most people manage to get something close using Powerstrip or the like.

Hope that helps...
 
Try Quicktime 7 and some of their HD trailers, I think they look a lot better than WMV-HD.

Check out the trailers for Ice Age 2, they are stunning!

On their HD page, the nature trailers available are also amazing, the texture on feathers, and animal skin is incredibly real.

But make sure you connect your PC to your tv first, so your graphics card detects the tv, then change the resolution of the PC to 1366 x 768 (or something like that)

Then off you go, maximise your media player/quicktime player and you should be well impressed with the results - the only other thing to do is tweak the colour, brightness and contrast settings.
 
jedi-jae said:
Try Quicktime 7 and some of their HD trailers, I think they look a lot better than WMV-HD.

Check out the trailers for Ice Age 2, they are stunning!

On their HD page, the nature trailers available are also amazing, the texture on feathers, and animal skin is incredibly real.

But make sure you connect your PC to your tv first, so your graphics card detects the tv, then change the resolution of the PC to 1366 x 768 (or something like that)

Then off you go, maximise your media player/quicktime player and you should be well impressed with the results - the only other thing to do is tweak the colour, brightness and contrast settings.

Thanks.
I think I watched a Mission Impossible 3 trailer on Quicktime and it was stunning.
Can the Quicktime demos be downloaded to hardrive or do they need to be watched on the fly?
 
Have watched the Matrix trilogy in WMVHD and the PQ was amazing.......in fact they have the best PQ I have yet to see from the limited amount of HD I have viewed.

I have seen a mixture of WMVHD, H.264 and transport streams.

I am sure it was mainly down to the transfer though, the picture just looks amazingly clear :thumbsup:
 
Quicktime trailers can be saved, and the easiest way to do this is to pay for Quicktime Pro 7, about £20 I think, you get a number of features unlocked when you buy it, including the means to save trailers. You can also export .mov files as mpeg4, 3gp. You can edit clips too, and apparently design your own skin for quicktime - though I've yet to try this.

Or, if you search the folder where your browser stores its web pages you may find the file there. I'm sure there are other "cheats" to allow you to save quicktime files though.

I was happy to buy it, as well as being able to save all the quicktime movies, you also get a full screen playback option, which removes the quicktime application frame that you normally see if you maximise the player.
 
Lin3ar said:
Thanks.
I think I watched a Mission Impossible 3 trailer on Quicktime and it was stunning.
Can the Quicktime demos be downloaded to hardrive or do they need to be watched on the fly?

yes:smashin:

i use this site http://www.davestrailerpage.co.uk/trailers_k.shtml

also,for anyone that doesn't have a top end pc,download this player/codec.

http://home.arcor.de/mutterstadt/avc.win32.0.71h.zip

http://home.arcor.de/mutterstadt/tcpmp.win32.0.71h.zip

unzip them into their own folder.

king kong in 1080p runs smooth as silk on my xp2800/512mb/9800pro pc.
 
I find quicktime alternative, coreaac, and the test version of coreavc version 0.0.0.4, using Media Player Classic (included in quicktime alternative).

Make sure you unclick downmix to stereo in the filter settings page of coreaac else you wont get 5.1
 
jedi-jae said:
Try Quicktime 7 and some of their HD trailers, I think they look a lot better than WMV-HD.
.

I think the black levels on all quicktime mov's are wrong including the HD stuff

I have an extensive HD collection and although some WM9 titles such as Speed, amazing caves etc do look great in 1080p they do not compare to a decent mpeg2 transport stream at high bitrate such as gladiator bev etc. WM9 (like divx etc for SD) always seems to soften the image slightly even if we are talking about 1080p the compression seems to max out and loose some fine detail

As I said though I think some WM9 titles do look amazing.
 
I think the main problem with Hidef material whatever the format is, is that if your screen is too small or if you are sat too far back you will not be that impressed, or see any difference with HD Vs SD material. There was a calculation chart kicking about a while ago and I worked out that from 13' 6" back you would have to have a TV bigger than 37" to see any difference. I can't say whether this is true or not as I haven't demoed any HDTVs. I do have a Hidef PJ though which is setup with a 6' 6" wide screen and can tell you that hidef material is amazing, and after watching it going back to watching a DVD is awful.
 
There is a simple way to save Quicktime movies to your hard drive from the free version.

Click on a trailer on the Apple web site. Quicktime launches and the trailer starts to load. Now press CTRL + I on the keyboard. A window opens showing you the file details and the download URL. After copying the URL data to the clipboard, quit Quicktime and do the same for the next trailer.

VLC Media Player can play Quicktime movies full screen, so you don't need Quicktime Pro for that either.
 
Quickbeam said:
There is a simple way to save Quicktime movies to your hard drive from the free version.

Click on a trailer on the Apple web site. Quicktime launches and the trailer starts to load. Now press CTRL + I on the keyboard. A window opens showing you the file details and the download URL. After copying the URL data to the clipboard, quit Quicktime and do the same for the next trailer.

VLC Media Player can play Quicktime movies full screen, so you don't need Quicktime Pro for that either.

thanks for that but could I have the idiots method for saving trailers.I have no idea what a URL or clipboard are :oops:
 
black levels on quicktime movies are wrong? hmm, I don't know what you mean, they look great to me. surely that's why Quicktime is the preferred trailer format? One of the reasons George Lucas uses quicktime for all the vids on the star wars site is the quality and performance of the format.

Personal opinion I guess, but the new quicktime Cars trailer in 720p is nothing short of amazing.
 
Kevo said:
I think the IMAX WMV HD DVDs look AWESOME on my PV500 (1024x768) but wasn't impressed with The Italian Job DVD.
KEVO - I have a pv500 and I have the Samsung "upscaling" DVD recorder - What would you recomend for output settings settings - I am usuing 1080i amd Component. My choices are 720p/1080i and component/RGB - I am using the HDMI input to the PV. I looked at a couple of DVD'd the other night and didn't see much if any difference from normal DVD viewing - am I connecting correctly?
 
There wont be much difference, your TV scales the standard DVD picture, or you DVD player will scale it......either way the process is similar. How much better can the scaler in your player be, compared to your TV?

The discussion here is about real HD source material.
 
Well if you believe the people over on the american HTPC forum www.avsforum.com, then quite a bit. There are endless descriptions/arguments about BiCubic, Lancoz and how many Taps used (no idea what any of this actuall means :)) produce the best results
 

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