xbox HD drive versus Sky HD

[SNICK]

Curious to know, just how much better is Hi Def playback on a Xbox HD add-on drive versus Sky HD (movies?) if at all.

Be keen to know if anyone has both to get their views.

 

[IdealDeek]

So far only got the Kong freebie disk & I think its easily on a par with BBCHD. Sky Movies HD can range from really rather average (upscaled perhaps) to terrific (Sin City/ROTS/WOTW) Looking on here I guess both sources can do average though!

 

[SuperSeven]

I think picture quality has more to do with how the film was encoded to HD, and less to do with the technology used to deliver it to your house (ie : HD-DVD or Sky)

Some people are saying HD-DVD is lots better, but then I've seen some films on Sky HD that had damm fine picture quality and I don't see how HD-DVD could improve on them. (If only all the Sky HD stuff was like this all the time)

 

[richard plumb]

HDDVD generally has little if any visible artifacts. Its as close to 'perfect' as I've seen. Thats to be expected as the discs are authored to be like that. Plus as they don't have to be encoded in realtime like Sky they can do more even at the same bitrate.

SkyHD on the other hand - *can* look fantastic but often doesn't quite. Its more noticable on skyone HD and skymovies 10HD with dark areas blocking badly sometimes. and also more noticable on a larger screen than on a smaller one

I'm sure sky will improve as their encoders improve. But then they'll drop the bitrates to more commercially acceptable levels. So I'm not sure if I expect any improvement over current skymovies 9HD levels for example

 

[T800]

On my 32" LCD I can't see a difference, on my 96" projector screen HD-DVD is better, similar to a good DVD - SkyHD.
HD-DVD has the edge with the detail and sharpness.

 

[richard plumb]

On my 32" LCD I can't see a difference, on my 96" projector screen HD-DVD is better, similar to a good DVD - SkyHD.
HD-DVD has the edge with the detail and sharpness.

Same for me. It takes a pretty bad skyHD channel (eg stargate SG1 the other night) to show up issues on my 37" LCD from 10-12ft away. But my 96" screen is far less forgiving

 

[T800]

richard sums it up well with "perfect", I look at M:I3 and it looks "right/perfect".

I watched M:I3 yesterday with a friend that hadn't seen it, we watched the DVD version because I wasn't willing to watch it with the poor sound from the add-on. Even though my friend didn't notice the SD picture because he hadn't seen much HD before, it was cringeworthy for me, it looked horrible, it totally blew his mind when I showed him the HD-DVD version when we had finished the film.

 

[orc brute]

well i have both sky hd and the xbox hd drive ,and i would say the xbox drive is better , i have a number of discs and the thing that i dont see on the discs is bit rate compression , which i do see on sky hd in other words if you are looking at a wall or large suface like the same colour , football field for example you would see all the digital blocking dancing around , its the same as smoke you can see the digital blocks in it , but watching kk as they approch skull island in the fog you dont see any artifacts at all , so out of the 2 i would have to go with the xbox drive , i am watching it on a 50" sagem dlp , and when its good its really good

 

[Tony Hoyle]

To my eyes (on a 92" screen) HDDVD absolutely blows away SkyHD - it even makes BBC HD look a bit poor (which was a shock, since I thought BBC HD was perfect previously).

Also with the mega compression that Sky are starting to do the gap is going to get wider - some of the programmes on Sky One HD recently have been unwatchably bad... and it's only a matter of time before all Sky HD channels are at that rate (SM10 already got there).

 

[ELGENERAL1994]

HD-DVD is much better. The stingy tramps at sky should increase the bit-rate allocated to the movie channels.

Why are we so behind the Germans and Yanks?