 A voyage through video
Joel Kopping
There is much about audio and video that fans take for granted nowadays. Audio will be pitch-perfect, and video will be high-def sharp. But, as little as a decade ago, things, if you'll pardon the pun, looked a little different. Joel Kopping examines how our movie-watching experience has evolved over the past decade.
While DVD had been out for a couple of years now, players were typically quite expensive, and you could still go to a video store and rent a video.
Video, or perhaps more correctly analogue VHS video, was the de-facto standard that everyone still used, and such was the popularity of video that US film studios continued to release new movies in this format until the end of 2006.
For the time, picture quality from those big and bulky VCR players was acceptable. Actual resolution wasn't fantastic and the best an average player could do was produce images of around 333 by 480 pixels, although Super-VHS was a little better. Colour depth and quality was okay, but as our average TV was a lot smaller than they are now, we didn't notice the poorish quality too much.
So while video quality was acceptable, audio quality, particularly for those people who had stated adding a home theatre system to their TV, was beginning to show its age. Here, the formats frequency response of around 100Hz to 10kHz and signal to noise ratio of approximately 42 dB meant that we missed all the low frequencies and high frequencies that we wanted – no, make that needed - to hear from our blockbuster films. We also only, at best, got to hear the movie soundtrack in stereo.
On the positive side, VHS machines were cheap, and recording from TV was easy. We know people who still have huge video libraries of sitcoms and series that were religiously recorded from the TV every week.
DVD, however, was soon to kill off VHS video in the domestic environment.
 By 2000, DVD had been around for about half a decade. It was mature, there were tons of titles available and it did so many things way better than VHS could ever dream of doing.
Firstly, there was the digital picture quality that, when compared to analogue VHS, was simply stunning. DVD delivered 576 by 720 pixels of on-screen sharpness, much better colour depth, deep black levels and colour saturation that was almost real-looking. What's more, players were smaller and better-looking than VHS machines, and the discs themselves were supposed to be much hardier than a tape could ever be.
Audio fans rejoiced too as they could finally hear full five-channel surround sound - just like in a commercial cinema - and the full audio bandwidth was reproduced too. Add to five surround sound channels the .1 low frequency effects channels and finally, we could hear explosions the way they were supposed to be heard.
DVD, initially anyway, had one flaw. You couldn't record films off TV the way you could with a VHS recorder.
This was soon addressed, when DVD recorders were released, but not before we, the poor consumers, had to see yet another format war essentially between the DVD RAM, DVD + and DVD – camps. Unlike VHS recordings that would work on any VHS player - assuming a standard speed was selected - recordings made in one DVD format often wouldn't play on anything other than a machine manufactured by the same company. Discs also had to be finalised, and if this process was interrupted, you usually said bye-bye to your recordings.
Things did get a whole lot better as manufacturers stopped squabbling and created DVD recorders with hard drives and models that supported both + and – disc formats.
As we passed the halfway point of the decade, another and even better video format emerged as the best way to watch and listen to even higher quality audio and video. Although here too there was a format war, with the only real losers – once again - being consumers.
The first Blu-ray discs were released around 2006 and this made owning a Blu-ray player - so named as it used a blue laser diode - something that most audio and video fans desired, even more so once its opposition in the form of HD DVD threw in the towel in 2008.
Like any new technology, Blu-ray players were eye-wateringly expensive when they were released, early players were painfully slow to load discs - you had enough time to make a cup of coffee while waiting for the player to recognise that you had actually loaded a disc - and you had limited choices of what to buy.
Blu-ray did, however, represent the possibility of a quantum leap forward in audio and video quality.
Together with the HDMI connection that was fitted to all Blu-ray players and new TVs, and which offered copy protection, Blu-ray delivered full high-definition video quality – and not up-scaled high definition that some DVD players now began to offer - of up to 1 920 by 1 080 pixels.
In addition to this, the format offered the potential of uncompressed audio, and much higher bit rate video.
Of these last two features, uncompressed audio in the form of Dolby True HD and DTS Master audio are now becoming a reality. We have yet to see a disc with the much promised better video quality, but this will eventually appear.
Lossless audio has added another dimension of reality – for those with systems good enough to deliver this improved audio - to movie-watching. When added to the high-definition video emanating from our players and being displayed on our new HD screens, watching two-dimensional images on screen has never been this good.
We mention two dimensions for a good reason.
This year, Blu-ray started bringing us 3D and this added dimension now lets us experience even more breathtaking and all-engrossing video than ever before. 3D will certainly be the video aspect that takes us into the next decade.
While we've concentrated on the hardware that we've used over the past decade, we would be remiss if we didn’t mention another video revolution that is happening around us, and one that with the release of affordable local uncapped internet, may just be what we'll be watching in the near future.
Full HD movie downloads that are stored on PCs and media servers, IPTV and HD broadcasting may spell the end of physical players like Blu-ray or DVD machines. Time will tell.
|
