Alternative History - What if DVD had been 720p?

roxics

roxics

Veteran
Every once in a while this idea pops in my head that if DVD had been just a little better when released in '97/98, maybe 720p with Rec709 color we might not have even had Blu-ray until the recent release of UHD Blu-ray.

When you think about it, DVD was the last really universal video format. Blu-ray never had the saturation DVD had. Most computers at one point had DVD drives, both desktops and laptops. Many car entertainment systems had DVD drives for the kids in the back. Most people had a DVD player for their TV. Even today DVD-R discs are far cheaper and more readily available then BD-Rs.

The physical 4.7/3GB disc wouldn't have even needed to change, only the compression type. Something like H.264 of H.265 instead of Mpeg2 would have made 720p possible at a decent enough bitrate.

I know it's kind of a random thought. As a consumer I love Blu-ray. But I'm always stuck feeling like Blu-ray just isn't saturated enough in the marketplace and DVD just isn't high quality enough. So I think about things like - if only DVD had been just slighter higher quality we'd have a good compromise.
 
I know it's wishful thinking and would not have been possible due to the lack of those compression types at the time and the computing hardware needed for them. But one can dream of an alternative history and sometimes that can be fun.
 
Thinking back, I haven't purchased or rented a physical disc since May of 2007. Bluray came around right as it no longer mattered to me, what with all the streaming options that were cropping up at the time.

If we're talking alternative history, I wish I could go back to a college business class in 1985 and not have mocked a fellow student who proposed in a class "pitch" a device you'd hook up to your phone line to allow you to download a movie to watch later as an alternative to VHS tapes and the rental store.

I knew "too much" about the technology of the time to consider it even remotely possible, he knew "too little" to not dream it could eventually work. Sigh.
 
Didn't they have HD DVDs? (I don't know much about them.)

For these kind of things...it's always been about the available technology at the time, what makes sense on a mass scale, what's going to make the most money, and what's the future looking like (even though you don't always know how things will pan out).

For DVDs, those specs were probably the best compromise at that time after tapes and like many things in life, if something catches on and becomes a standard with people other available technology may not survive even though it may have been better for the end user.

Today, being connected through your mobile devices (and maybe eventually with hardware installed in your body when you are born) via a network of information all around you just makes more sense as the world moves faster than it has ever before.

I can't imagine Blu-ray sales are good?
 
Wouldn't have worked. DVDs were SD precisely because that's what everyone had to play them on. There were few HDTVs out there, so 720p DVDs weren't going to be useful to much of anyone. DVDs would have been a very niche format which would never have gotten off the launchpad.

The success of DVD hinged on the fact that it could deliver a superior, far more convenient experience compared to VHS, and no one had to buy a new TV to use them.
 
There was an HD-DVD that was backed by the DVD consortium. But Sony didn't want to play and because of the financial might and their properties might, they decided that they would not put their content on HD-DVD. Thus we ended up with Bluray which is owned in part by Sony.

I still buy physical disks for things I know I want to keep.
 
roxics said:
Rec709 color
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Rec.709 or Rec.601 would not have made any significant difference.
As long as the transform is correct the difference is mostly academic, and some would even argue the change caused more trouble than solutions (see for instance the problem with browsers still in 2018 using Rec.601 on Rec.709 footage).
 
Yep, the TV's were 4:3 back then so there were two revolutions going on - better resolution and the move to 16:9 or non-4:3 aspect ratios. Not all DVDs were 16:9 as some were pan and scan. But I know what you are saying. It is a shame the only global standard has to be so restrictive in today's terms. Although mp4 is a decent standard even though the ecosystem to deliver it varies widely. What I like about optical delivery is the stability of the medium and playback devices (most of the time TVs instead of phones!)
 
Considering the average consumer at the time of the transition from SD to 720/1080 had a hard time even telling SD from HD, I don't think a 720p DVD would have mattered at all. And what David says is true, I was producing DVD Bonus content like crazy at the time and I couldn't convine Fox, Warner Bros. or Paramount to spend a penny more to generate an HD master, just for archival purposes, which is a shame as we produced a ton of great content with people who have since died and because it is all SD, it get's sort of trash-binned as far as people's awareness that it even exists. This was all happening right when Sony came out with the Z1 and we even proposed shooting a lot of this content on HDV but the studios wouldn't cough up any extra so we said, "Screw it" and shot it all in SD, largely on our DVX100s.
 
ah HD-DVD's it didn't last long but we bought all of them in Vancouver and used them for multi screen presentations. 1080p on a dvd. Remember you couldn't burn a Blurray for a few years when it first came out
 
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I realize it was never going to happen for any number of reasons. It's alternative history/fantasy I'm talking about here. A little dream of what would have been nice. Just to have pushed DVD a little more.
The biggest reason is because DVD already supported 24bit audio on its release. So the audio quality had already reached the point where it doesn't really matter anymore to go higher resolution. Just would have been nice if the picture had gotten closer to that ideal as well.
 
The first few HDTV's I had at home were 720P and most DVD's looked great even on a 720 screen. It wasn't until I got a 1080 set that the image quality of DVD started to falter for me. But funny enough, I have some early Blu-ray copies of movies that are absolutely horrible and look worse than DVD.
 
roxics said:
Every once in a while this idea pops in my head that if DVD had been just a little better when released in '97/98, maybe 720p with Rec709 color we might not have even had Blu-ray until the recent release of UHD Blu-ray.
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The reason this did not happen is because they would have been unwatchable. Literally. The TVs at the time, at least in the US, topped out at a theoretical 525 lines of analog resolution. Nearly all TVs did somewhat less in reality. Which is why DVD ended up at 480 -- that was about the best you could hope for from the TVs at that time. And this just blew broadcast TV away -- about the best you could hope for from OTA broadcast was around 350 lines. So DVD was (quite) a big step up.

We got blu-ray when we did because we also got HDTVs at the same time. Blu-ray was 1080 because HDTV was 1080. They are a matched pair.

We're seeing UHD blu-rays and UHD TVs at the same time for the same reasons.

The real question for me is, why didn't we do HDTV sooner? We could have. The technology was there, testing, ready to go, a decade or so before we actually implemented it.
 
Bruce Watson said:
The real question for me is, why didn't we do HDTV sooner? We could have. The technology was there, testing, ready to go, a decade or so before we actually implemented it.
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It's the same answer to most questions: Money.

But you're right. If they had REALLY wanted to, we could have had HDTV probably 25 years ago, although it would have probably been an analog system. My family still owns a retail establishment and one of the lines that they used to carry was Zenith(who still remembers Zenith before LG gobbled them up). I remember being a kid and reading literature about Zenith being heavily involved with HDTV development and tests here in the US way back in the 90's(maybe earlier), well before most people(consumers) had even heard there was such a thing being developed.
 
Bruce Watson said:
The reason this did not happen is because they would have been unwatchable. Literally. The TVs at the time, at least in the US, topped out at a theoretical 525 lines of analog resolution. Nearly all TVs did somewhat less in reality. Which is why DVD ended up at 480 -- that was about the best you could hope for from the TVs at that time. And this just blew broadcast TV away -- about the best you could hope for from OTA broadcast was around 350 lines. So DVD was (quite) a big step up.

We got blu-ray when we did because we also got HDTVs at the same time. Blu-ray was 1080 because HDTV was 1080. They are a matched pair.

We're seeing UHD blu-rays and UHD TVs at the same time for the same reasons.

The real question for me is, why didn't we do HDTV sooner? We could have. The technology was there, testing, ready to go, a decade or so before we actually implemented it.
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Yeah I completely get what you are saying. I was there. I remember the quality jump to DVD. My first DVD player was a DVD-ROM in a new computer I built in the summer of '98. Hooking the output to a Trinitron monitor. I remember even my buddy Steve being impressed, which shocked me. I thought I'd have to go through a whole sales pitch to him about why DVD was better quality, but right away he said "Yeah I can see the difference, it looks great."

I think my desire has less to do with what was possible to watch at the time and more about a little future proofing. The assumption being that said blu-ray players would downsample to SD until 720p TVs came out.
Again, just an idea that would have been nice.
 
David Jimerson said:
The success of DVD hinged on the fact that it could deliver a superior, far more convenient experience compared to VHS, and no one had to buy a new TV to use them.
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Yes, while VHS used NTSC (or PAL) both the actual luma and chroma resolution was far below the standard.
 
roxics said:
The physical 4.7/3GB disc wouldn't have even needed to change, only the compression type. Something like H.264 of H.265 instead of Mpeg2 would have made 720p possible at a decent enough bitrate.
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The physical disc DID have to change, though. Yes, you can put HD content on a standard DVD, but you won't get enough to be useful in a practical sense. There just isn't enough room for the data.

Remember that the very first DVDs were single-layer, and even they had to be flipped in many cases to play an entire SD movie at an acceptable quality level.
 
David Jimerson said:
The physical disc DID have to change, though. Yes, you can put HD content on a standard DVD, but you won't get enough to be useful in a practical sense. There just isn't enough room for the data.

Remember that the very first DVDs were single-layer, and even they had to be flipped in many cases to play an entire SD movie at an acceptable quality level.
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It's definitely big enough. Look at the size of iTunes 720p downloads. Hugo for example is two hours and eight minutes and comes in at 3.99GBs. That's with H.264 compression. With H.265 you could probably shave 40% off that.
 
roxics said:
It's definitely big enough. Look at the size of iTunes 720p downloads. Hugo for example is two hours and eight minutes and comes in at 3.99GBs. That's with H.264 compression. With H.265 you could probably shave 40% off that.
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But you lose a lot for that; I said "acceptable quality level." Given the choice between Blu-ray and an H.265 digital copy, I'll take the Blu-ray every time. I will choose disc over streaming every time, if I care even slightly about the quality of the experience.

Besides, those compressions didn't exist at the time of DVD's release, of course. And before there were DVDs, there were video CDs, with movies encoded in MPEG-1. But the quality was sub-par.
 
I totally agree with you. I would take Blu-ray over and iTunes copy as well. But given the choice in 1998, I would have taken a 720p iTunes h.264 compressed movie on a DVD disc over a standard definition mpeg2 encoded movie.

Again this is alternative history... fantasy. So of course it wouldn't have happened because as you said the codecs nor the processors powerful enough to deal with them didn't exist.
 
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