VUDU Inc., a leading provider of digital technologies and services that deliver Internet entertainment to consumers' HDTVs and Home Theaters, today unveiled HDX, a groundbreaking video format that for the first time enables the viewing of Internet-delivered movie content in full High Definition 1080p format that is optimized for 40 inch and larger HDTVs and Home Theaters.
This has way too much marketing BS language around it. I assume it's an alternative codec to MPEG4. It's not supposed to be better than Blu-Ray - just better than the other "real time" HD sources (does not include downloading). There is no way it's better than Blu-Ray - in fact for audio it only says it's 40% higher bitrate than regular DVDs.
BTW - what the heck is "pyschovisual processing"????
my impression also - although I am really looking for a good down load service. Xstream HD is vaporware so far and vudu is a struggling start up. I am hoping that someone will do a face-off with blu-ray on this new offering
I've been testing it out for a few weeks now. It is quite good. I'm not sure if it would hold up to a side by side test, but you would be hard-pressed to find any compression artifacts in the resultant PQ.
It's equivalency to Blu-ray refers to the 1080/24p format as well as the 640kbps Dolby Digital audio.
According to the information I have (which may be in the release), they have around 65 movies in HDX format available now. I'm not sure if they would show as such on their website because it's such a new format for them.
We will be publishing a white paper from them soon which goes over a lot of the "branding" speak that they refer to in their press release. Here is what their description of "psycho-visual processing" is:
The human eye is not uniformly sensitive to detail in light and dark areas of an image. With careful use of this knowledge during encoding, it is possible to exploit this sensitivity difference to improve the compression of the video and the perceived detail. The simplest forms of this have been in place for many years in digital video. For example, chroma subsampling reduces the amount of bandwidth allocated to the color channels, since the human eye is much more sensitive to luminance (brightness) than it is to chrominance (color).
