looser used our newssubmit to tell us that the MPAA (Motion Pictures Association of America) is implementing a new copy protection standard for HDTV, which will make all current HDTVs completely obsolete.
The advantages of HDTV are obvious: better resolution, better signal quality. Your average cable TV comes in at 640x480 (NTSC), while HDTV can receive 1920x1080. If you look at Figure 1 on the right, which simulates the relative resolution of several formats, you can see clearly how much more picture resolution HDTV offers. |
The TV industry was virtually forced to move to HDTV by the FCC. Unfortunately, no one forced the Movie Industry to do the same thing. So here we are in 2002 watching DVDs with a resolution of 720x480 on a HDTV capable of more than twice that.
There are two reasons why the movie industry has taken so long to get HDTV content into our hands: Content (Copy) Protection and Media. Compressed DVD video takes up about 3.5-4.7 Mb/s on the DVD. With a dual layer DVD holding about 7.95 GB, you end up with about 3.8-5 hours of video on a Dual Layer DVD. The new Superbit DVDs use less compression and stay near the max of 7 Mb/s, so they get about two hours on a disc. HDTV needs about 20 Mb/s compressed (broadcast quality) to 24 Mb/s depending on quality , so a two hour video needs over 20 GB of disc space. Besides capacity, the DVD format only supports a 9 Mb/s transfer rate, making even short portions of HD content unavailable on DVD.
Content Protection (Copy Protection) is a big issue for the movie studios. They don't want you to be able to make a perfect copy of movies, which is definitely possible with movies in digital form
Read more about this here. It's just another example of the entertainment industry abusing it's power in disadvantage of the consumer.
Source: Hometheatherhifi
