Sonic upgrading CinemaNow movie streaming to 1080p
By Richard Lawler 
posted Jul 29th 2009 3:45PM
posted Jul 29th 2009 3:45PM
posted Jul 29th 2009 3:45PM
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Wow, 1080p at an adaptive bitrate that requires no buffering. I wonder whether one will be able to see the movie through all the macroblocking?
Yeah I know. I roll my eyes everytime i see these carefully worded promises. Notice its "Blu-ray resolution" instead of Blu-ray quality.
Netflix, arguably the best of the streaming services, currently can't even deliver me reliable 720p HD streams (5 minutes in and the signal is rebuffering to a lower bitrate and my 8-10 Mbps broadband is much higher than average for American broadband speeds). How Microsoft, Vudu, etc plan to give us 1080p streams without crushing the signal to death I will love to see.
I have seen enough crappy 720p signals from cable providers to know that higher resolution has almost nothing to do with picture quality. Yeah, technically the picture's got 720 lines of vertical resolution but the macroblocking can get as big as postage stamps. But they still proudly call it "HD".
I've always wondered if given the same bandwidth given for video a movie looks subjectively better compressed at 1080p compared to 720p. Obviously high res means more blocking since there are twice as many bits but then again, higher res means blocking is smaller so perhaps it doesn't look so bad. Either way declaring something "Blu Ray resolution" may be truthful but it is intentionally deceptive too.
There's nothing deceptive DrXym.. they are saying that the resolution is the same as Blu-ray which is 1080p. 1080p resolution is 1920x1080 so comparing to anything else with that resolution is not deceptive. If they said, it's Blu-ray quality and it wasn't, then that would be deceptive. Don't you agree?
They could've went with X times resolution of DVD. Would that be deceptive as well?
Of course it's deceptive and don't pretend it isn't. If the service is just 1080p, why not say it, better yet say the Mbps. By drawing comparison to Blu Ray the implication is that its comparable to Blu Ray when it isn't.
Folks,
You have to see this to believe it. Widevine was showing the HD Adaptive streaming at Cablelabs last week.
It was amazing to see. The clip was 1080i it was encoded in H.264. It seamlessly adapted from 2.5 Mbps to 10Mbps ...I think there were 4 or 5 different bit rates. The quality was amazing. It was playing back on Windows, Mac and a Blu-ray player.
What was even more amazing then the HD adaptive technology was that the 1080i Mbps H.264 clip played back on the PC/MAC. They attempted to play back the low bit rate version using a Flash player and silverlight and the CPU maxed out, stuterd and lost frames.
Sonic and Widevine really have something here.
- Morgan
Folks,
You have to see this to believe it. Widevine was showing the HD Adaptive streaming at Cablelabs last week.
It was amazing to see. The clip was 1080i it was encoded in H.264. It seamlessly adapted from 2.5 Mbps to 10Mbps ...I think there were 4 or 5 different bit rates. The quality was amazing. It was playing back on Windows, Mac and a Blu-ray player.
What was even more amazing then the HD adaptive technology was that the 1080i Mbps H.264 clip played back on the PC/MAC. They attempted to play back the low bit rate version using a Flash player and silverlight and the CPU maxed out, stuterd and lost frames.
Sonic and Widevine really have something here.
- Morgan