[zalas]

Originally Posted by houkoholic

The AIR DVD was known to have compression issues to begin with. That was the reason people were excited about the BD release in the first place, in hope that it fixes these problems.

Yeah, poor Misuzu's forehead ;_;

Also let me guess, did you by any chance obtained the HD source off the internet, which obviously had gone through another compression process which would degrade the picture quality? Because off the air BS-i AIR was really quite a fair bit nicer than the DVD if you watch it as it was, SD source up-converted or not, it was done well. This was the reason that the Japanese fans were disappointed about the BD AIR because most agreed that it looked barely better than the DVD.

Yes, I was watching that rip on the internet, so I can not say for sure exactly what the BS-i stream was like. See, now we are at an impasse. Unless someone can obtain the original MPEG2 stream on which AIR was broadcast and rip a frame out of it and compare it with a frame on the DVD on a high quality monitor, we wouldn't be able to tell which was better quantitatively.
Now, when you said that the BS-i version was a ton better than the DVD version, I had thought you meant that the BS-i version was from some mysterious HD source. Even a bad rip of that would've captured at least some (albeit noisy) detail from the HD that wasn't in the DVD release. However, if it was from a SD upconvert, the bad rip would then probably look poorer than the DVD, due to the fact that the bad rip of the upconvert would be travelling through 2 lossy channels (BS-i, ripper), while the DVD would be travelling through only 1 lossy channel (DVD encode). If the original source were HD, the DVD would've traveled through two lossy channels (downconvert, DVD encode). Furthermore, if the original source were only SD, then of course BS-i would have a much better time fitting the same material onto a bitstream more than twice as wide (assuming 20Mbit stream for BS-i).

Yes, BD AIR would be encoded in MPEG2, which is a mature codec, but what about the other parts of the equation I've mentioned which also factors into the overall maturity of the format - the players and the manufacturing process, both are being held up right now (as evident by the BR group having to hold a conference to instill consumer confidence that they're on target on delivering what they promised). No matter how you try to spin it, the fact of the matter is that BD has only been out for a few months as players only just began to hit the streets, plus the first of these players are riddled with hardware problems, it is an immature format and there is no arguments you can make against this fact.

The whole discussion seemed to have been focused on picture quality/storage size from the way it was going, so I did not realize you are now thinking of other problems with BluRay. I agree that there are problems with BluRay in terms of actual logistics, but that's not what we were arguing here. As BD is a digital format, a physical manufacturing process and/or authoring process should have little to nothing to do with the quality of the video stream, as long as the video stream is correctly etched onto the disc, bit by bit. Thus, the only reason AIR BD would look terrible would be in the video encoding chain, and thus it's either 1) the source, 2) the upconverter or 3) the MPEG2 encoder. The only part that actually is part of the BluRay spec would be the MPEG2 encoder. The rest has nothing to do with BluRay itself, and would've been the same had it been HD-DVD.