TV calibration expert Joe Kane's take on high-def video formats
By Matt Burns 
posted Jul 18th 2006 1:44PM
posted Jul 18th 2006 1:44PM
Joe Kane is one of the world's foremost expert on TV calibration (Think Digital Video Essentials) and was recently interviewed about calibration and the high-def format war. The first half of the the video interview is all about calibration and if you can sit through the somewhat European content, (and bad camera zooms) it does become worth your while. He is stating that Blu-ray is all about greed. Why? Because they are using MPEG-2. He is basing this opinion on personal experiences of demoing VC-1 and MPEG-2 where not a single person failed to see the differences. We don't know if Joe is making any money on HD DVD or VC-1 (like Major Nelson) but it doesn't seem likely. This is just a man that is expressing his personal experiences on the subject.
Check it out.
Every Tech and myself at my office all agree that HD-DVD is going to be the winning format. At least we hope because I hope blu-ray dies a quick and horrible death, but I feel it will at least linger on for the PS3 even though that much storage for games is in no way needed at all.
I'm just waiting for the fandolts to come in and say Joe Kane is biased and doesn't know what he's talking about. :)
Palladin?
I'm not sure who the intended audience was for the interview, but if they weren't a technical crowd then it was fairly pointless.
Joe said:
1. Many TV's that are labeled as HD Ready aren't really HDTV capable. That's absolutely true, but he didn't explain why. Just because a TV can except the input doesn't mean that it can display it in all it's glory. I'm sure many people came away confused by what he was trying to say.
2. He said that HD-DVD's can deliver much higher image quality than terrestrial or satellite broadcast. Once again that's absolutely true, but he didn't explain why. To the general public HDTV is HDTV. They don't realize that broadcasters need to compress the source material to conserve bandwidth.
3. He implied that Blu-ray is an MPEG-2 only format. He did qualify it slightly by saying that the initial Sony movies would be using MPEG-2, but he didn't explain that Blu-ray also supports H.264 and VC-1.
He's a very plugged in guy, but I don't think it was a very good interview.
Greed? HD-DVD is all about greed. First they tried to use a red laser instead of blue. Then the powers-that-be claimed it would cost too much to make discs to the specifications of Blu-Ray. Then, to shore up its patent gravy-train, Toshiba sold itself out to Microsoft like a $5 street walker to back the format in exchange for not using Java for the menu screen graphics and to pimp VC-1 as its defacto codec. Does anyone really think H.264 is going to be widely used on HD-DVD titles? Dream on. Sure, Sony is going to double-dip by shipping MPEG2 encoded discs until their Blu-Ray player hits the market, but you can best bet that with the influence of Sony and Apple on the format, there will be relatively few Blu-Ray titles shipping encoded in the inferior-to-H.264 VC-1.
Jeremey I don't know. There are HD-DVD in Japan encoded in AVC and they haven't received rave reviews regarding picture quality. And Apple? They've been betting on the wrong horse for years. Remember DVD-RAM? And their MPEG4 implementation in Quicktime. Belech!
Hmurchison, who do you think created H.264 in the first place? So much for that "belech" comment about Quicktime, my friend.
Apple has a better track record at backing quality than Microsoft. Dolby's AAC audio format - which Apple uses for the iTunes Store files - is certainly better than Microsoft's tin can sounding WMA audio format. And most people would prefer Quicktime7 content over Windows Media9 (aka VC-1) content if they were shown side-by-side.
As for DVD-RAM, plenty of companies supported it. I seem to recall that Creative shipped such drives as well. At least Apple backed DVD-R (instead of DVD+R) which proved to be more compatible with most consumer DVD players, unlike the other scheme (DVD+R) that was backed by, yep, you guessed it, Microsoft.