# HD Movies or Upconvert/HD-Lite?



## ClevelandRob (Jun 22, 2006)

I will be getting Dish HD installed next week and I am just curious if anyone can shed light onto what format, HD content really is.

In general, are movies actually HD transfers or are they just upconvert for us by stations like Voom Channels, Universal, TNT, etc.? For example, would watching _Happy Gilmore_ on Universal HD be better than watching the DVD on my upconvert Oppo DVD player?

I have never watched a movie in true-HD, but when I see commercials for movies such as the new Pirates of the Carribean, on my OTA, it looks awesome compared to watching DVDs. Is this what you get when you watch movies on Dish HD stations?


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## Ron Barry (Dec 10, 2002)

Rob, 

From my exprience, it is a mixed bag. You need to consider the age of the movie and ofcourse I don't think all conversions are created equal. From my understanding that a lot of the VOOM channel content is HD transferred material. The James Bond movies are just that and they great considering the age of the film. Same goes with the thunderbird TV shows. These are from my understanding HD transfers. 

HD has always been a mixed bag. Some great looking stuff and some not so great looking stuff and from my experience this holds true the most with movies. Lots of times ABC will do a HD movie on Saturday. Lots of them are cartoons and they look amazing and sound amazing. 

So to answer your question, Not sure about uniHD since I have not watched it a lot but overall it is a mixed bag and personally I don't find it channel related but more on an individual program.


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## kckucera (Aug 1, 2005)

"better than watching the DVD on my upconvert Oppo DVD player?"

Agree it is a mixed bag, I myself have an Oppo and the quality with "superbit" DVDs approaches what you will see visually with native 720p display with superior audio at 128bit raw settings and a good decoder. I have done A/B tests from superbit dvds like Fifth Element, TerminatorIII, and Riddick and can say that HD does have the edge over superbit and a major edge over standard DVDs. It is even superior when recorded and played back via my 921 than superbit although now the differences are very subtle. 

OTA HD is just simply superior to most VOOM and generally superior to HBO, Show and HDNet. However there are few shows as well produced as those on Disc, HDnet, and Equator. So much has to do with the production values of the individual peice being viewed. Digital transfers are depend on the raw film, quality of digitzation and compression methodolgies. Having said all of that, I am pleased with Dish HD in general, and save for primetime HD on OTA its hard to beat. The better you display equiptment the better OTA looks in comparison to Dish. 

I will hold off getting HD DVDs until the smoke clears having been both a Beta, and Video Disk user in the past and an early 921 adopter. Hope this helps.
Ken


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## ClevelandRob (Jun 22, 2006)

Thanks for the responses. I should have expected the results to be mixed. I don't recall ever watching a "superbit" DVD (I was unaware that the quality can be that much beyond standard DVD). I will be waiting for HD-DVD smoke to clear as well (though it is tempting). I look forward to being able to finally record HD, whether it is Dish content or my OTA.

It's good to know that these movies aren't just upconverted but are HD transfers. Anyone ever watch horror movies on MonstersHD? That station could make my switch to E* worth it all by itself!


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## kckucera (Aug 1, 2005)

Rob,
You can find superbit dvds on amazon, try a used one of a title you already own to see the difference, it really is noticable. As for Monster, it is one of my fav channels although most of the material is pretty old (lots of bela legosi etc) the transfers are pretty good save for the kitchy japanese godzilla stuff that looks like it was shot in 8mm. 

Equator, Discover, and HDnet do have so great material (travel stuff and Eye over Italy france etc is great. I have not yet moved to a 622 since my projector has hdmi interfaces and the situation is still fluid in that respect. I expect that as Dish moves towards MPEG4 picture quality will increase a little (though I am sure their reasoning is based on greater compression thus more bandwidth). Assuming Dish keeps the same amount of bandwidth for hi-def things can only get better.


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## ZigSteenine (Apr 18, 2006)

kckucera said:


> I will hold off getting HD DVDs until the smoke clears having been both a Beta, and Video Disk user in the past and an early 921 adopter. Hope this helps.
> Ken


Wow! I can see why you are holding off.:lol:


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## mikeyoung (Jan 15, 2006)

ClevelandRob said:


> I don't recall ever watching a "superbit" DVD (I was unaware that the quality can be that much beyond standard DVD).


"Superbit" is/was a marketing ploy to sell additional copies of movies that you may allready have. BestBuy sold them all off at discount for 9.99 each (A great deal by the way ...I bought as many titles as I could at that price).

There is no video diference in a "superbit", though the sound may be an upgrade over the standard if you have a appropriate receiver.


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## mikeyoung (Jan 15, 2006)

I should add to my previous post....as long as the standard DVD was transfered correctly in the first place.. sometimes they lower the bit rate so they can fit a bunch of crap on the disk...but ususaly recent High quality releases dont have this problem.


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

kckucera said:


> <...> I expect that as Dish moves towards MPEG4 picture quality will increase a little (though I am sure their reasoning is based on greater compression thus more bandwidth). Assuming Dish keeps the same amount of bandwidth for hi-def things can only get better.


That's personal wish what do not match official statements from Dishnetwork - do squize more channels into each transponder ( doesn't matter if it SD or HD).

We have/will have only one real HD channels - HD Demo 9443 at 61.5W.


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## Chris Blount (Jun 22, 2001)

mikeyoung said:


> There is no video diference in a "superbit", though the sound may be an upgrade over the standard if you have a appropriate receiver.


I respectfully disagree with that. There is definitely a video difference with Superbit DVD's. They have a much sharper and cleaner picture. When upconverted on the new Toshiba HD-DVD player, they look fantastic!


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## Stewart Vernon (Jan 7, 2005)

mikeyoung said:


> I should add to my previous post....as long as the standard DVD was transfered correctly in the first place.. sometimes they lower the bit rate so they can fit a bunch of crap on the disk...but ususaly recent High quality releases dont have this problem.


This is exactly the point of Superbit releases... instead of extra compression to cram the "bonus features" in... the Superbit DVDs omit all that stuff and devote the space on the DVD to as uncompressed a picture as possible. Hence the better quality picture in many cases.

It is, however, true that many studios have improved their release process and while Superbit seems to have "died" many newer DVDs are closer to being Superbit releases by default now. IF nothing else, the Superbit folks succeeded in improving the quality of the other releases.

Also... every once in a while I see a new release that says in the fine print it is a Superbit DVD... but they just don't have the fancy/different designed package to stand out the way they used to stand out.


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## mikeyoung (Jan 15, 2006)

Point well taken....funny thing is, a dual layer dvd at 9gb usually has plenty of room for high-bit rate movie + some extras, but they dont allways use all the space ?
could be that consumers are more informed now and expect better from standard release....in any case it benefits the consumer.


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## Stewart Vernon (Jan 7, 2005)

mikeyoung said:


> Point well taken....funny thing is, a dual layer dvd at 9gb usually has plenty of room for high-bit rate movie + some extras, but they dont allways use all the space ?
> could be that consumers are more informed now and expect better from standard release....in any case it benefits the consumer.


I hope so!

At least in my configuration I could tell a big difference in a Superbit DVD and the standard fare a few years ago. I've seen better quality on movie DVDs recently though.

Some TV shows are better than others, as they will try and cram as many as possible on each DVD to have less DVDs in the package.

I remember the first CD drive I bought for my computer, it could hold 650 MB of data but I bought many programs that only took 20-50 MB of space! It seemed like a waste.

Now I look at it differently... I don't just want a bunch of extras just to say the disc is full. I want quality... so if they can give high quality DVD movies and not use all the space, fine. I'd prefer that than crammed full but overcompressed to do it.


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## LtMunst (Aug 24, 2005)

Glad I collected the original Star Trek series on the 1st DVD release that only had 2 episodes per disk. The new release is cramming 3-4 episodes per disk plus a bunch of that extra junk.


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## BobaBird (Mar 31, 2002)

I simply don't have the shelf space for that so, despite my Pavlavian tendency to open my wallet every time a see the Trek logo, I passed. Besides, I already have the episodes 2 per disk in my complete LD collection. :grin:


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