Monday, March 8, 2004
New Bravo D2 DVD Player Supports Windows Media 9 High-Definition Playback
Posted by Jason Dunn in "NEWS" @ 06:00 AM
"The 480p/1080i/720p/custom scaling MPEG-4 DVD/media player adds control of brightness and contrast on DVI, enhanced DVD-ROM drive, improved analog video output and a new remote control. Available in the V Inc. titanium finish, the Bravo D2 began shipping in February with a suggested retail price of $249.99. The Bravo D3 offers an HD DVD player with enhanced REALmagic HD deinterlacing and integrated Windows Media Player 9 HD decoding with HighMAT formatted playback. The Bravo D3 will be shipping in the first quarter of 2004 with a suggested retail price of $349.99."
If you've never seen the insane quality that WMV High Definition Video is capable of, brother, you're in for a nice surprise! If you've got broadband muscle to download 2 minute video clips at 115 MB in size, go grab a few and see what I'm talking about. I don't have an HDTV yet (more on that later), but these look good enough to eat on my LCD monitor! Of course, the sheer power required to play the back is not for the meek. I just watched a Scooby Doo 2 trailer 8O and my 2.8 Ghz P4/1 GB RAM/ATI Radeon 9600 Pro system wasn't enough to play it back without hiccups (granted, I have quite a few other apps running right now).
Getting back to WMV playback for a minute, this is something I'm very interested in. I've taken to creating high-quality WMV files from my video projects, if they're things that aren't important enough to archive back to MiniDV tape, but important enough to want a full resolution copy of for later use. By creating a 720 x 480, 2000 kbps WMV file, I'm keeping much of the quality from the original MiniDV recording, but I'm keeping the file size way down (20 minutes is about 280 MB). Gosh, there's so much to talk about! Next week I think we'll delve into video storage strategies.
If you've never seen the insane quality that WMV High Definition Video is capable of, brother, you're in for a nice surprise! If you've got broadband muscle to download 2 minute video clips at 115 MB in size, go grab a few and see what I'm talking about. I don't have an HDTV yet (more on that later), but these look good enough to eat on my LCD monitor! Of course, the sheer power required to play the back is not for the meek. I just watched a Scooby Doo 2 trailer 8O and my 2.8 Ghz P4/1 GB RAM/ATI Radeon 9600 Pro system wasn't enough to play it back without hiccups (granted, I have quite a few other apps running right now).
Getting back to WMV playback for a minute, this is something I'm very interested in. I've taken to creating high-quality WMV files from my video projects, if they're things that aren't important enough to archive back to MiniDV tape, but important enough to want a full resolution copy of for later use. By creating a 720 x 480, 2000 kbps WMV file, I'm keeping much of the quality from the original MiniDV recording, but I'm keeping the file size way down (20 minutes is about 280 MB). Gosh, there's so much to talk about! Next week I think we'll delve into video storage strategies.
