consumerelectronicsnet.com posted an exclusive interview with Mark Knox, adviser to the HD DVD Promotion Group. Here are some excerpts:
... I know as a kid I always enjoyed watching Japanese monsters battling each other. But in this case, I don't think either one is going to get killed with electricity or lured on to the top of a rocket and shot into outer space.
... I think at this point there is going to be both (formats). That's not to discount possibility -- in my career I've worked for several different Japanese companies -- there is no way of knowing, frankly, no matter what the service is, who's working with whom at any given time. So I'm not ready to say unequivocally that there never will be a compromise reached, because you never know what may happen, but at this stage, it certainly looks like both will be on the streets, albeit they won't both be on the streets at the same time.
... Well there’s certainly more logos on the Blu-ray PowerPoint , that's for sure when it comes to the Blu-ray supporters. And a lot of that, frankly, is as much politics as it is technology. A good example of that is Samsung. Samsung is engaged in a joint venture with Toshiba to build HD DVD drives for notebook PCs as well as ultra -light PCs. They are incredibly engineered things that are either 12 1/2 millimeters high or 9 1/2 millimeters high, so they there pretty impressive pieces of engineering that were done by a combination of Toshiba and Samsung engineers. But, the other factor unrelated to optical disks is that Sony and Samsung have a bunch of other businesses that they're in joint ventures on, so therefore the Samsung logo is on Blu-ray PowerPoints. The other point is, I think, that many of the entities that are painted as exclusively supporting Blu-ray have absolutely never said that that support was exclusive. And so, just because the studio’s logo is on their PowerPoint does not mean that they mind might not also make HD DVDs . In each month that goes by where there are DVD players out there, and the manufacturing and authoring process is a pretty clear concept today for HD DVD , I think you're going to see a few more logos migrate, as it were. They may not switch sides and say, “I'm abandoning and never will do Blu-ray and will only do HD DVD ,” but I think you may see the point where they're saying, “You know what, I'm not exclusive Blu-ray.” You saw that happen are ready with a company like Hewlett-Packard.
... There were a few conversations that went on at CES, talking with Netflix about the robustness and the reliability. It was an easy conversation, because all we had to say was the basic design of the two disks are pretty similar. The materials are the same, it's just that the bumps on the waffle are smaller in the case of HD DVD.
... for the first generation of HD DVD players, we made the painful decision of not allowing the player to put out 1080p, because that 1080p signal is considered "optional" in the current HDMI specification. So as a result, we have no guarantee that the receiving television can display it directly, and also there's no guarantee under the auspices of HDMI 1.1 that the 1080p signal from the player won't cause even greater difficulty for the receiving device depending on what model and make it is.
... right now, the number of display devices that can accept real 1080p or HDMI is very limited for the simple reason that the current HDMI standard, version 1.1, does not require a TV to accept 1080p.
... A key issue is, how do you deliver a 1080p signal from a player to a TV? And when you do, will that TV be able to accept a 1080p signal directly, or will it communicate? One interesting thing about the new connection standard called HDMI is, part of the protocol for HDMI is also moving, frankly – we’re currently at version 1.1 and they're working on 1.2 and 1.3 are ready.
... the HD DVD disk that uses MPEG -2 is going to be a pretty rare bird, that's for sure. One of the reasons for that is, one of the basic differences in philosophy between the Blu-ray approach and the HD DVD approach is that in the HD DVD approach, we looked at how do we get five times the bits on the disk. The only way to get five times the actual bits on the disk is to change the way you make the disk completely. But if you're using one of the new codecs like H.264, or VC-1 which is a more standardized version of Windows Media Video, you at least double the efficiency of MPEG 2, which means that you don't need five times as many bits to get a large amount of time of high definition on a disk. So the basic idea of HD DVD is, there is only three times as many minutes on each layer of the disk. Regular DVD per layer is 4.7 GB, and an HD DVD per layer is 15 GB. A Blu-ray is 25 GB, but because they seem to be focused on MPEG 2, it has to be.
Read the entire interview here. It's pretty interesting!
... I know as a kid I always enjoyed watching Japanese monsters battling each other. But in this case, I don't think either one is going to get killed with electricity or lured on to the top of a rocket and shot into outer space.
... I think at this point there is going to be both (formats). That's not to discount possibility -- in my career I've worked for several different Japanese companies -- there is no way of knowing, frankly, no matter what the service is, who's working with whom at any given time. So I'm not ready to say unequivocally that there never will be a compromise reached, because you never know what may happen, but at this stage, it certainly looks like both will be on the streets, albeit they won't both be on the streets at the same time.
... Well there’s certainly more logos on the Blu-ray PowerPoint , that's for sure when it comes to the Blu-ray supporters. And a lot of that, frankly, is as much politics as it is technology. A good example of that is Samsung. Samsung is engaged in a joint venture with Toshiba to build HD DVD drives for notebook PCs as well as ultra -light PCs. They are incredibly engineered things that are either 12 1/2 millimeters high or 9 1/2 millimeters high, so they there pretty impressive pieces of engineering that were done by a combination of Toshiba and Samsung engineers. But, the other factor unrelated to optical disks is that Sony and Samsung have a bunch of other businesses that they're in joint ventures on, so therefore the Samsung logo is on Blu-ray PowerPoints. The other point is, I think, that many of the entities that are painted as exclusively supporting Blu-ray have absolutely never said that that support was exclusive. And so, just because the studio’s logo is on their PowerPoint does not mean that they mind might not also make HD DVDs . In each month that goes by where there are DVD players out there, and the manufacturing and authoring process is a pretty clear concept today for HD DVD , I think you're going to see a few more logos migrate, as it were. They may not switch sides and say, “I'm abandoning and never will do Blu-ray and will only do HD DVD ,” but I think you may see the point where they're saying, “You know what, I'm not exclusive Blu-ray.” You saw that happen are ready with a company like Hewlett-Packard.
... There were a few conversations that went on at CES, talking with Netflix about the robustness and the reliability. It was an easy conversation, because all we had to say was the basic design of the two disks are pretty similar. The materials are the same, it's just that the bumps on the waffle are smaller in the case of HD DVD.
... for the first generation of HD DVD players, we made the painful decision of not allowing the player to put out 1080p, because that 1080p signal is considered "optional" in the current HDMI specification. So as a result, we have no guarantee that the receiving television can display it directly, and also there's no guarantee under the auspices of HDMI 1.1 that the 1080p signal from the player won't cause even greater difficulty for the receiving device depending on what model and make it is.
... right now, the number of display devices that can accept real 1080p or HDMI is very limited for the simple reason that the current HDMI standard, version 1.1, does not require a TV to accept 1080p.
... A key issue is, how do you deliver a 1080p signal from a player to a TV? And when you do, will that TV be able to accept a 1080p signal directly, or will it communicate? One interesting thing about the new connection standard called HDMI is, part of the protocol for HDMI is also moving, frankly – we’re currently at version 1.1 and they're working on 1.2 and 1.3 are ready.
... the HD DVD disk that uses MPEG -2 is going to be a pretty rare bird, that's for sure. One of the reasons for that is, one of the basic differences in philosophy between the Blu-ray approach and the HD DVD approach is that in the HD DVD approach, we looked at how do we get five times the bits on the disk. The only way to get five times the actual bits on the disk is to change the way you make the disk completely. But if you're using one of the new codecs like H.264, or VC-1 which is a more standardized version of Windows Media Video, you at least double the efficiency of MPEG 2, which means that you don't need five times as many bits to get a large amount of time of high definition on a disk. So the basic idea of HD DVD is, there is only three times as many minutes on each layer of the disk. Regular DVD per layer is 4.7 GB, and an HD DVD per layer is 15 GB. A Blu-ray is 25 GB, but because they seem to be focused on MPEG 2, it has to be.
Read the entire interview here. It's pretty interesting!
