HD Hardware (cont’d)

HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Drives

Obviously, you’ll need a drive. It’s pretty easy to find a Blu-Ray drive. In the US, you can find the Pioneer, Panasonic, and Sony drive very easily. We recommend the Sony BWU-100A as it is the cheapest ($700-$750 street) and includes a copy of PowerDVD Blu-Ray Edition, and because it’s easily found at your local retailer of favorite e-tailer. The Sony and Panasonic drive are actually identical burners –the difference is that the Sony kit offers a better software bundle and a better price. The Pioneer and LG burners are also available right now, but these burners will only burn a single-layer blank BD-R. In Japan, the I-O Data BRD-UM2 BD Burner is also available.

When it comes to HD-DVD, it’s substantially tougher. Although HD-DVD was first to market in the consumer electronics arena, and the Toshiba HD-A1 uses an IDE HD-DVD drive from NEC, the drive in the HD-A1 reportedly does not support the standard AACS feature set. Our HD-DVD drive came from NVIDIA…

Choosing between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray is really like choosing between Coke in a bottle versus an aluminum can. In practice, the differences between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are minimal. Some of the early Blu-Ray discs had a lot of noise and MPEG-2 artifacts, but this is no longer the case. We’re certain that in 12-15 months, we’ll be seeing HD-DVD and Blu-Ray combo drives in the same way that DVD+/-R co-exist.

A Fast CPU

You won’t need a fancy CPU for VC-1 or MPEG-2 based HD-DVD/Blu-Ray movies, but for MPEG4 AVC (H.264), you’ll need a flagship CPU even with hardware-accelerated video processing. A Core 2 Duo Extreme E6700 running at 2.66GHz will barely be able to decode the most compute-intensive H.264 video. With PureVideo HD, a standard Core 2 Duo E6300 or Athlon64 X2 running at 2.2GHz or faster will work. You may be able to get by with lower bitrate H.264 video if you have a Pentium D930 or Athlon64 X2 2.0 GHz, but we wouldn’t recommend it.

Before we get to the tests…

It’s worth spending 2 minutes to talk about the benefits of HD video. I’ve seen several articles in the mainstream press that claim that there’s no “significant difference” in quality between upsampled DVDs and HD-DVD/Blu-Ray content. The mainstream press will also claim that they can’t tell the difference between 30 fps and 60 fps…

While it’s impossible to grab screenshots from HD-DVD and Blu-Ray movies, it is possible to grab movies from HD movies from OTA, or unprotected HD cable (via Firewire). I’ve collected several clips from various movies and TV shows broadcast across the globe. I’ll let you decide for yourself whether or not 1080p is a step up from DVD.