Sony Pictures to use MPEG-2 on Blu-ray?
Ryan Block writes over on Engadget:
Old habits must really die hard for Sony: once more proving the divisiveness between their content and technology branches, Sony Pictures’ senior vice president of advanced technology Don Eklund apparently said, “Advanced (formats) don’t necessarily improve picture quality. Our goal is to present the best picture quality for Blu-ray. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, that’s with MPEG-2.”
Quick backgrounder: the Moving Pictures Experts Group who created MPEG-2 later created MPEG-4 AVC (aka h.264), which is spec for both Blu-ray and HD DVD (as well as Microsoft’s VC-1, among other codecs) and was designed to be technically superior to MPEG-2, and to ultimately replace it. It’s no big deal that one movie studio is choosing not to use a standard, proven, hi def-centric codec, but how poorly does it reflect specifically on Sony that their SVP of advanced tech doesn’t get it that h.264 offers the same image quality as MPEG-2, but at lower bitrates, or offers a high def picture at the same bitrates as the old standard? Ultimately this isn’t a big deal since they’ll surely change their mind eventually, but it makes us a little uneasy about who’s at the wheel over there, to say the least.
posted by Fergie @ 11/29/2005 06:03:00 PM
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