[alexrose1uk]

You are correct in that I choose my wording there poorly. I'm actually somewhat familiar with these high-end profiles/formats that are mainly used in professional/studio situations, though I am far from being an expert. For example, most people don't know that the Beta Cassette didn't die. It stayed alive in the professional word and even got a digital version that some still use today.

Ironically I think I may have seen some of those pass through a few weeks ago, as I work for a company involved in broadcasting

Hi10 has been around for 7 years and no one gave a hoot until this season. Why? Because someone was finally able to drum up some hype. Probably because they finally got a consumer player that decided to throw in Hi10 support (not out of demand, though).

People are downloading archive quality rips and are worried about saving some HDD space? (some of the quoted numbers by some groups about how much space is really over blown, too).

I tended to blame the increase in interest not so much on hype, but simply that it's supported by x264 now, and decoding has been incorporated into CCCP, which seems to be the rough guidepost that a lot of these groups go by loosely. I don't follow the encoding standards heavily except when it becomes necessary, but I have at least noticed that trend.

In terms of the efficiency, well I guess it depends on the encoder, the settings (and how anal they are) and the actual source material itself. It does seem to allow for smaller equivalent quality releases, or higher image quality at a given size. How much depends on whats thrown into it, but as far as it goes, this is always going to be one of the grails of video encoding, and in, perhaps even what could be a limited situation, it does seem to be making some moderate space savings.

Whilst the efficiency of the original encodes could be debated, the simple fact I've seen a few releases whilst looking into Hi10, that almost halved from the original release and yet people are reporting they look identical to the original, well I can't say that's not potential, even if it is caused by perhaps over sized originals or overt attention to things like film grain.

At the end of the day, even if you're creating archivable copies; the last thing you want to do is waste space unnecessarily (as simply put it's waste), if people didn't still want to save space we wouldn't reencode files, which we do, because we can often factor the size of the file down by 20%+ with no visible side affects.
Wasted space is still wasted space If I can have my same file playback fine, but be stored in a file format that might save me another 20%...well, I'd be tempted to do so; it's less hard drives I need to buy etc etc

I guess the true question is, for the given show/medium/whatever, is the space saving or picture quality improvement, worth the increase in CPU requirements. I suspect for some media and shows it won't, but for other sources or media it might be; but again this sort of argument is always going to have an ounce of opinion

The PS3's limitation is not because of the hardware acceleration (which does exist in the PS3) or the CPU. It's just been locked away for so long, and even now is completely undocumented for the public.

I'd always understood the reason the original model PS3 doesn't support HDA bitstream whereas the Slimline does, is because the original utilised a realtek HDMI chip which simply doesn't support the format; whereas the slim model used an updated chip, which was why I'd used it in an analogy to the hardware video decoding Could be wrong but it seemed appropriate in this sense.



To be fair it seems we're not on a too dissimilar page with thoughts on this movement, I'd also rather for everyone's sake (it makes people's lives easier), that the groups would release both formats, rather than just one; but I also see why groups are moving now there is support in various players, CCCP etc, and in this case the target relevant source media benefits from the change in encoding standard, offering good potential bitrate savings whilst still retaining equivalent picture quality and reducing other artifacts.