The launch of HD was a laborious one. Even though this revolution was promised for the beginning of 2006, we had to wait until the start of this year to see Toshiba launch their first HD DVD home cinema set in Europe. Blu-ray came a little sooner, in the end of October 2006, in the form of a BD-P1000 Samsung reader. It then got an enormous push with the arrival of the PS3; Sony’s next-gen console offering features a built-in Blu-ray player.

Today, nearly a year after the new formats’ tentative first steps, the revolution still hasn’t taken place. This is undoubtedly due to a combination of the amount of bugs in the first readers, the limited number of available films in these formats and of course the ridiculously expensive price of the readers (although, September and Christmas should bring a change).

The barriers to the adoption of HD are falling one after another: the number of available titles is always increasing, and manufacturers predict a launch of players at dramatically reduced prices. One such player is Sony’s BDP-S300, which costs less than €500.

What about PCs? They’re not too far behind and gaining ground fas. If the prices of HD DVD or Blu-ray players (and even more so burners) still make your wallet weep, the end of summer will see a Pioneer BDC-2202 player for less than €250 which will make high definition media affordable.

Most importantly, HD on PCs’ main obstacle will be overcome as PCs will now be powerful enough to decode HD videos without any problems thanks to new generation graphic cards. So, what was the problem until now?

MPEG2 is great, MPEG4 is a whole other story.

For the computers of 2006, reading HD videos was a big problem, they’re simply far too complex; it was impossible to decode them in real time in a fluid manner. It doesn’t seem like much but it brings you from a resolution of 720 x 576 pixels t 1920 x 1080 pixels, this multiplies the weight of a picture by 5. On top of that because of a lack of storage support, HD films use compression algorithms which are even more complex than the DVD’s good old MPEG2: enter the MPEG4.

Made popular by the DivX format, the MPEG4 is omnipresent nowadays, even infiltrating mobile phones. Although, this standard is highly versatile; you don’t find the same MPEG4 format in phones, HD DVD and Blu-ray. MPEG4 has two different formats in high def. discs, the MPEG4 AVC a.k.a ITU H.264 (this standard was jointly built by the Motion Picture Expert Group and the International Telecommunication Union) and the VC-1 (developed by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) which has been adopted by Microsoft for its WMV9 HD Advanced Profile format.

MPEG2, MPEG4 AVC and VC-1 use the same basic techniques but the last two have some finer points that give them a better intrinsic quality, meaning a better compression rate. The encrypting and decoding of videos take place in four main stages. Let’s have a look at them.