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Home Cinema Choice award for Final cut

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ridleyville

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Post Mon Dec 31, 2007 8:27 am

Home Cinema Choice award for Final cut

In the Feburary 2008 edition of Home Cinema choice the Final cut has been featured throughout the mag. Images from the film are incorporated on to the screens of the different LCD and Plasma Tv's being tested.
Also there is a review that gave it a massive and maximum 5 stars.
They say it is the "most comprehensive DVD release we've ever seen."

In the individual ratings for Picture, sound, Extra's and Movie they all get 5 except for sound which is a 4 star.
An interesting point is that they say there is a new Lossless HD version coming out soon :shock:
lastly there was a pole. They asked if Deckard was a replicant.
The results were:
Yes 55%
No 29%
Don't Know 16%
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Post Mon Dec 31, 2007 8:48 am

Re: Home Cinema Choice award for Final cut

ridleyville wrote:An interesting point is that they say there is a new Lossless HD version coming out soon :shock:


what does that mean lossless? better quality ?!
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ridleyville

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Post Mon Dec 31, 2007 11:00 am

what does that mean lossless? better quality ?!


I had to look it up myself. Here is the explanation.

Lossless audio compression

As file storage and communications bandwidth have become less expensive and more available, the popularity of lossless formats such as Monkey's Audio, FLAC and Shorten has increased sharply, as people are choosing to maintain a permanent archive of their audio files. The primary users of lossless compression have been audio engineers, audiophiles and those consumers who want to preserve an exact copy of their audio files, in contrast to the irreversible changes from lossy compression techniques such as Vorbis and MP3. Compression ratios are similar to those for lossless data compression (around 50-60% of original size). Lossless formats such as Dolby TrueHD are also being introduced along with high definition DVD formats.

It is difficult to maintain all the data in an audio stream and achieve substantial compression. First, the vast majority of sound recordings are highly complex, recorded from the real world. As one of the key methods of compression is to find patterns and repetition, more chaotic data such as audio doesn't compress well. In a similar manner, photographs compress less efficiently with lossless methods than simpler computer-generated images do. But interestingly, even computer generated sounds can contain very complicated waveforms that present a challenge to many compression algorithms. This is due to the nature of audio waveforms, which are generally difficult to simplify without a (necessarily lossy) conversion to frequency information, as performed by the human ear.

The second reason is that values of audio samples change very quickly, so generic data compression algorithms don't work well for audio, and strings of consecutive bytes don't generally appear very often. However, convolution with the filter [-1 1] (that is, taking the first difference) tends to slightly whiten (decorrelate, make flat) the spectrum, thereby allowing traditional lossless compression at the encoder to do its job; integration at the decoder restores the original signal. Codecs such as FLAC, Shorten and TTA use linear prediction to estimate the spectrum of the signal. At the encoder, the estimator's inverse is used to whiten the signal by removing spectral peaks while the estimator is used to reconstruct the original signal at the decoder.

Lossless audio codecs have no quality issues.



Dolby TrueHD, from Dolby Laboratories, is an advanced lossless multi-channel audio codec, intended primarily for high-end home-entertainment equipment, such as HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc. In this application, Dolby TrueHD competes with DTS-HD Master Audio, another lossless codec from Digital Theater System.

Dolby TrueHD uses Meridian Lossless Packing (MLP) as its mathematical basis for compressing audio samples. MLP was used on the earlier DVD-Audio format, but details of TrueHD and DVD-Audio differ substantially. A Dolby TrueHD bitstream can carry up to 14 discrete sound channels. Sample-depths up to 24 bits/sample and audio sample-rates up to 192 kHz are supported. Like the more common legacy codec Dolby Digital, TrueHD bitstreams carry program metadata. Metadata is separate from the coding format and compressed audio samples, but stores relevant information about the audio waveform. For example, dialog normalization and Dynamic range compression are controlled by metadata embedded in the TrueHD bitstream.



TrueHD and high-definition optical disc
In the HD-DVD format, TrueHD is a mandatory codec ? all HD-DVD players must support the extraction and decoding of a 2-channel (stereo) waveform from a TrueHD bitstream, although all HD-DVD players currently support 5.1 decoding. HD-DVD allows the sole (primary) audiotrack of a movie to be encoded in TrueHD, with no (other) secondary audiotracks present. In Blu-ray Disc, TrueHD is an optional codec, meaning that TrueHD may only be present on a disc which already contains a primary Dolby Digital soundtrack. The primary Dolby Digital audiotrack ensures all Blu-ray players, including those incapable of processing TrueHD, can access a playable audiotrack.

For both HD-DVD and Blu-ray, TrueHD's capabilities are the same: the program may carry up to 8 discrete audio channels, at a sample depth & rate of 24-bit/96 kHz. The maximum (disc) encoded bitrate is 18 Mbit/s, although movie-titles (thus far) have remained below 5 Mbit/s. All TrueHD players are capable of downmixing the decoded TrueHD audiotrack to an arbitrary number of channels more suitable for player output. For example, all TrueHD-capable players can create a 2-channel (stereo-compatible) downmix from a 6-channel source audiotrack.

Connecting a TrueHD source to a TrueHD receiver requires a digital-link capable of transporting either the encoded bitstream (up to 18 Mbit/s), or the unpacked linear-PCM audio (>35 Mbit/s). HDMI 1.1 (and higher) can transport multichannel PCM-audio, and therefore can transport an unpacked TrueHD audiotrack. An HDMI 1.3 (or higher) link is required to transport TrueHD in raw bitstream form.[1] TOSLINK (and SPDIF) cannot carry TrueHD without transcoding, due to limitations of the specification.

HDMI-equipped players can internally decode TrueHD to LPCM, and output the LPCM over an HDMI 1.1 (or higher) interface; all HD-DVD players currently support this.[2] If a player cannot internally decode TrueHD, it can transport the bitstream over HDMI 1.3 to a receiver capable of decoding it; this feature is now supported on Toshiba HD-A35 HD-DVD player, as well as the Samsung 1400 BD player with a firmware upgrade. HD-DVD players can also transcode the TrueHD bitstream into a different legacy format (such as Dolby Digital or DTS), providing a high-quality approximation of TrueHD audio over a legacy TOSLINK cable for those that do not have HDMI.

The Phantom of the Opera, released April 18, 2006 on HD DVD, was the first movie to offer a TrueHD soundtrack.
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ridleyville

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Post Mon Dec 31, 2007 4:15 pm

I forgot to mention that there was a great pull out in the Home Cinema Mag.
Here is a photo, hope it comes out ok.

Image
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