HD - BS Buzzword

It's been on my mind since I can remember, what is High Definition? The generic answer that the guys at Best Buy will tell you, is that it's about the pixels, specifically, the height of the video. DVD is at 480 lines, most downloadable content runs 720 (whether it's VOD, streaming, or a good old fashioned download), and Blu-Ray boasts 1080 lines of resolution.

But here's the funny thing, I can rip a DVD to my computer and then re-encode it to a 720 or even 1080 size picture. Guess what happens then? I could legitimately sell that movie (assuming I had the distro rights to do so) and call it "High Def." Is that a load of crap? Absolutely.

So where's the real kicker for High Def? It's in the bitrate, to some degree. I'm not saying size doesn't matter, it does (no matter what your mother told you), but the human eye can't even tell the difference between 720 and 1080 if the screen is smaller than 38 inches (and I doubt you've got 38 inches).

So what is bitrate? Bitrate is the amount information the video actually holds. You're probably familiar with this term from the copious amounts of CD ripping you did in middle school (or gradeschool, god I'm old). The higher the bitrate, the better the sound, the bigger the file. This is especially so for video, most people can recognize quality differences in video than in audio, and video has a lot more info.

So why is HD BS? Because the companies telling you that it is the latest and greatest aren't talking about High Def, they're talking about a buzzword they can use for marketing. This buzzword makes you buy tons of new techie toys and allows them to charge more for a product. Don't believe me? Here are some numbers from George Ou.
















As you can see, HD is nothing more than a marketing trick to fool the innocent and weak. Trust in the companies providing HD content? I won't, not for now, except perhaps for Sony (developers of Blu-Ray). But Blu-Ray has less fan 5 years of life left in it, replacements have already been developed. See Ultra High Definition Video.

The bigger problem is America's infrastructure. At the dawn of the internet, we were kings. Now, we have some of the slowest bandwidths, up and down. The beautiful thing is that the providers are investing nothing to fix that, in fact they are doing quite the opposite by instituting bandwidth caps. This means when physical media dies, and believe me it will in the next 10 years, and all we're left with are downloads, they're either going to look like crap or eat up all your bandwidth.

So the next time your cable company tells you it's added more HD programming, it's because they've actually lowered all the bitrates to be able to fit said programing through their shamefully unimpressive bandwidth. The next time you pay more for an HD stream or download, remember that the quality isn't even as good as DVD (which is more than a decade old). Well, America seems to be failing at a lot of things lately, why not fail at the internet and video as well.