The “Break it Down” Blog

This was originally posted over at Engadget but I thought it was damn handy, so here’s a reproduction of the best portion of it:

There is more information over at Engadget about studios and what not, but as far as the technical specifications of the HD-media goes this was the best portion of it.

The information spun out of a conversation with a friend about how the initial offerings of BluRay releases are using MPEG-2 encoding instead of something sexier like MPEG-4. Most likely reason is royalty payments as Ars points out, with Sony owning patents on MPEG-2 (Scroll down to the Following the Money part). I wonder if additional concerns could be with the actual processors in the media playing units. Pushing a full 1080p 1920×1080 signal using MPEG-2 is hard enough, are the processors powerful enough to decode a MPEG-4 or VC1/WMV HD signal on the fly without noticable choppiness? I have no idea. I also know that the form factor of a media player is considerably different than a dual core/dual processor desktop with a high-speed chip and graphics card that is able to perform the same function. Maybe specialized hardware is the answer here?

Call me crazy, but I’ll stick with the greedy-son-of-bitches theory for Sony, I can’t imagine why I would think that though…