Will horrible video standards ever change?

y2kwizard · Post by **y2kwizard** » Wed Nov 13, 2002 11:11 pm

Hello all. I'm just wondering if anyone has any idea as to when the video madness will end.

My main question is this: will there ever be a set standard for ALL MOVING MEDIA? I mean, will the standard for NTSC video, video stored in computers, etc. etc. ever converge? Will we eventually do away with those awful things we call fields, and will TVs ever use progressive scan? I feel that eventually hard drives will emerge that are so huge that storing uncompressed video will be no problem, and processors, RAM, etc. will be so fast and large that the computer has no problem handling all the raw data. WILL THE MADNESS EVER END??

The Wired Knight · Post by **The Wired Knight** » Wed Nov 13, 2002 11:19 pm

Varying technology and varying technology about I doubt this will ever happen. Everyone has a preference just as some still like VHS while otehrs prefer Laserdisc. Everyone has what they would like and to limit them to one choice would monopolize an entire medium and be ridiculous. It would be along the lines of telling all car dealers to make all their cars the same.

MistyCaldwell · Post by **MistyCaldwell** » Wed Nov 13, 2002 11:32 pm

It would also just be a matter of time before the bar would be raised from what you may consider incredible today. Then 20 years from now, what looks good today will again look crappy.

I'll bet you are really looking forward to 2007 huh

y2kwizard · Post by **y2kwizard** » Wed Nov 13, 2002 11:41 pm

The Wired Knight wrote:It would be along the lines of telling all car dealers to make all their cars the same.

What I'm suggesting is that car manufacturers all make their cars have the same type of steering: the interface must be the same...you don't want to have alot of cars with complicated joystick systems, square wheels that turn the car left by rotating the wheel right, etc. etc. I'm suggesting that video in general be simplified. No, I don't want all standards the same...I just want them simplified.......

The Wired Knight · Post by **The Wired Knight** » Thu Nov 14, 2002 12:20 am

Same problem. With each person comes a different preference.To go back to the car analogy, I like hard steering whiel others may like soft and/or twitchy. Garnted some things could be simpiler but due to the vast array of opinions and preferences I doubt they ever will get simpiler. The way things are currently allows for the greatest magnitude of appeal to the consumer.

Zarxrax · Post by **Zarxrax** » Thu Nov 14, 2002 1:28 am

The thing is, no one LIKES fields. Fields were created due to limitations of original tv sets. They should be definately done away with.

ErMaC · Post by **ErMaC** » Thu Nov 14, 2002 1:49 am

If no one likes fields, why were the Japanese pushing for 1080i to become the standard HDTV resolution?

Interlacing is sometimes a necessity - the 19.8MBit/sec allocated for an HDTV station is too little for 1920x1080 progressive scan in video framerates, so they needed to have it be interlaced so they could save on half of the resolution.

As for media converging: DV and DVD are doing a pretty good job of that, they're standards readable and compatable between computers, home theater equipment, video recording equipment, camcorders, editing systems, etc. The only problem is it comes at a time when HDTV is looming on the horizon. Who knows when the "HD-DV" standard will come around, and then what resolution will it run at? 720p? 1080i? Who knows.

And even now DV isn't completely standard once it gets on your PC. You can have Type 1 DV AVI files, Type 2 DV AVI files, Quicktime AVI files, raw DV streams, it goes on. But at least when it's DV you know that it's always 720x480, lower field first, 29.97 fps (in NTSC land) which is nice.

klinky · Post by **klinky** » Thu Nov 14, 2002 2:25 am

Technically I can't see how interlacing would improve on bitrate usage. If you had 24fields per second, yes. However, I am thinking 48fields per second. There really wouldn't be any difference between 24frames and 48fields. In fact wouldn't fields based video be less compressable due to interlacing "artifacts"?

Maybe I am all wrong

~klinky

ErMaC · Post by **ErMaC** » Thu Nov 14, 2002 2:33 am

You're right, which is why I said Video Framerates (i.e. 60 refreshes per second). If you need to update the screen 60 times a second, it's a lot cheaper to update half the screen at a time than the whole thing (in fact, half as cheap).

1080i generally means 1920x1080@60fields
720p means 1280x720@24 or 30fps
720i means 1280x720@60fields

Zarxrax · Post by **Zarxrax** » Thu Nov 14, 2002 2:38 pm

Again, thats due to technological limitations, not that people actually prefer interlaced video, which I think the original argument was (?). If there was no limitations on the hardware, I think we'd just have 60fps progressive video streams.

Anyways I'm not understanding this the same as klinky. 1080i is 60 fields per second. 1080p is 30 frames per second = 60 fields per second. Progressive video gets better compression than interlaced video. So I'm not really seeing how 1080i is half as cheap?