Tim Green wrote:
2008/11/10 Mark Rogers mark@quarella.co.uk:
Will I even be able to read the HD-DVD in Linux? (My desktop is Ubuntu 8.10.)
Hmm, OK well that answers the easy bit :-) (And yes, instead of just adding that afterthought into the last email I should have Googled first.)
So it sounds like I should be able to rip and playback the disks with Ubuntu, albeit I may have some hoops to jump through. It looks like I'm going to have a lot more fun with the transcoding side of things though.
The more research I do the more confusing it gets. For example, I hadn't realised that the native video format on HD disks is H.264 which means that there is potentially 30GB of video already compressed to a level I'm unlike to be able to better, so transcoding is going to be pretty limited in what it can achieve.
What I don't understand is that HD quality surely isn't *that* much better than DVD quality? A DVD can be transcoded to around 1GB without loss of quality as an XVID, which means doubling the resolution should still comfortably fit a film on a DVD, so why the need for something 7+ times bigger?
Is it really just about having a new standard for locking content down and preventing us watching films on FOSS platforms unless we obtain them via BitTorrent?