Next-gen HDTVs may hide first-gen HD DVD limits, says Microsoft

Redmond (WA) - As Toshiba continues its multi-city promotional tour of North America for HD DVD, demonstrating its capabilities for patrons of Fry's Electronics and other stores from which they cannot yet purchase HD DVD players until at least April, one of the key remaining points of contention among would-be early adopters has been news that the first generation of HD DVD players, including Toshiba's HD-A1 and HD-XA1 models, are not capable of producing the best possible resolution for today's HDTV displays.

On Wednesday, a representative of the AACS Licensing Administrator body responsible for the principal copy protection mechanism for both HD DVD and Blu-ray players - who is also a Microsoft senior manager - told TG Daily that the fact that first-generation HD DVD players will only produce 1080 vertical lines of interlaced resolution (1080i) as opposed to progressive resolution (1080p) is immaterial, since owners of high-definition displays capable of rendering 1080 lines at 72 frames per second will be able to digitally reconstruct the 1080p image from the 1080i signal.

Richard Doherty, Microsoft's senior programming manager for media entertainment and technical convergence, as well as an official AACS LA spokesperson, told TG Daily that the distinctions between 1080i and 1080p are not rooted in the format specifications for either Blu-ray or HD DVD. Both formats should have the theoretical capability of translating moving images at the highest available resolution for digital film, which is currently 1080p at 24 frames per second (1080p/24). Further, Doherty believes that movie studios will prefer to encode their movies for both formats at 1080p/24 resolution, since 24 fps is the frame rate (analogous to the "refresh rate" for PC monitors) for film motion pictures. So if Toshiba's or others' HD DVD players only translate 1080i, the reasons concern the player, not the format; moreover, they may be temporary, as Doherty believes the translation issue could conceivably be solved in the near future with firmware upgrades to the player.

[Editor's note: In recent press stories on the topic of high-def video, you'll find a Richard Doherty of Microsoft and a Richard Doherty of AACS LA. These are the same person. However, you'll also find a Richard Doherty who happens to be a video industry analyst with the Envisioneering Group, and who has provided information to TG Daily and Tom's Hardware Guide in the past. That is a different Mr. Doherty, who coincidentally has the same name.]

Microsoft's Doherty conceded that manufacturers will see cost differences between implementing 1080p and 1080i signaling, both for the analog connection and the HDMI digital connection, and that those costs may have played a factor in Toshiba's initial design choice. "The vast majority of all HDTVs delivered so far do not know how to communicate at 1080p," said Doherty, "so Toshiba in their very first players has made a design decision that can be changed in the future, and in fact, could likely be changed on existing players...by a firmware update to support communication over 1080p."

But another way that consumers could solve the dilemma of how to get the optimal picture quality from a first-generation HD DVD player, Doherty said, is for them to purchase a modern HDTV display that can reproduce a 1080p image. Because the high-def signal is digital to begin with, he said, "you can in fact reconstruct completely the original frames, no matter how you communicate. So in fact, the difference over the digital connection is meaningless, and we're getting into a lot of areas of 1080p versus 1080i that, in fact, have no consumer difference whatsoever.

"Because [the signal] originally came from a progressive source - 1080p/24 on the disc - and was communicated in a digital form," Doherty reiterated, "it can be completely reconstructed in its native, original form."

In response to statements from Blu-ray proponents that its first-wave support of 1080p places it automatically ahead of HD DVD in the format war, Doherty classified their argument as "a big red herring." The current, new generation of so-called "smart displays" for HDTV, he said, whose maximum output is 1080p/60, should be capable of re-compositing the signal most appropriate for displaying film or video encoding from any high-definition disc. "So a very smart display," he said, "could take a connection in any format - whether that be 1080p/24, 1080i/30, or 1080p/60 - and reconstruct the appropriate and best-looking display for the display that you're looking at."

Yet even the top-of-the-line HDTV might not present consumers with the optimum scenario. The model for "smarts" in digital monitors these days, Doherty believes, is the PC display. "The PC has always been very good for a number of reasons, at changing resolutions, at scaling images, at changing frame rates of images, and generally with general-purpose software installed, going from any resolution in any temporal frame rate to any other...The only place where a consumer, at this point, can see the native format [of a high-def disc] is on a PC display."

Already, multi-sync monitors can project images at 72 frames per second, which is exactly three times the refresh rate of film. The math becomes simple, then, to have the movie playback software show each 24 fps frame of film three times. "When you have a six-bladed shutter in front of film emulsion," Doherty said, "that's the ideal looking image. PCs can actually do that, but no display that we're aware of can do that yet, but I do think they're coming in the future."

The problem that current non-PC video displays have, Doherty explained, is that they're derived not from computing but from television, whose standards are all based on broadcasting. As a result, their math is different: North American television broadcast standards are based on 60 Hz refresh rates. As a result, when current DVDs decode film signals for TVs, they perform a kind of mathematical translation called 3:2 pulldown, which the viewer has actually been seeing and putting up with all this time, just without realizing it. These residual artifacts have been dubbed judder by video engineers, and the viewer only becomes more aware of it after having viewed full HDTV in all its glory for any significant length of time.

Part of the whole principle of clearer video in HDTV isn't just the higher lines of resolution, but the fact that newer digital video components can decode in sync with the quality of image you expect to see on the big silver screen. "Only now do we see any kind of displays at all trying to match what you see in the theater, [since] everything has been attuned so far for broadcast," said Doherty.