Top Selling (including Pre-Order) Blu Ray And HD DVD Movies at Amazon as of 10/29/2007 (last week):

Blu Ray

1. Spider-Man - The High Definition Trilogy (1)
2. Ratatouille (6)
3. Spider-Man 3 (N/A)
4. Planet Earth - The Complete BBC Series (5)
5. Pirates of the Caribbean - At World's End (10)
6. Die Hard Collection (All Four Movies) (N/A)
7. Cars (N/A)
   
8. The Simpsons Movie (N/A)
   
9. Meet the Robinsons (7)
10. Fantastic Four - Rise of the Silver Surfer (N/A)

HD DVD

1. Transformers (1)
2. Planet Earth: The Complete Collection (2)
3. 2001 - A Space Odyssey (3)
4. Heroes (N/A)
5. Face Off (N/A)
   
6. Shrek the Third (N/A)
7. 300 (8)
8. The Shining (4)
9. Harry Potter Years 1-5 Limited Edition Gift Set (N/A)
10. A Clockwork Orange (5)

Onkyo Debuts HDMI v. 1.3a Home Theater in a Box System

Other:

SONY KDS55A3000 55" 1080P BRAVIA A series SXRD Rear Projection HDTV - They only have the 55 inch left and the price went up to $1699 But still a good deal!

The features we have for you today are both listener requested. Ashton sent us an email asking to to explain PCM, Linear PCM and Bitstreams and Nathan wanted more information about Aspect Ratios.

 

PCM, Linear PCM and Bitstreams

PCM - Pulse Coded Modulation. A standard method of encoding analog audio signals in digital form. The process involves taking samples of the waveforms from 8 to 192 thousand times per second (8 to 192kHz) and recording each sample as a digital number from 8 to 24 bits long. For our discussion PCM data are raw digital audio samples.

Linear PCM - Similar to PCM, but Linear PCM uses data that is spread evenly across the frequency range from highest to lowest, as opposed to nonlinear PCM which allocates more values to more important frequency ranges.

BitStream - This is the digital form of multiple channel audio data before it is decoded into its various channels. If your receiver is decoding a Dolby Digital signal from your DVD player it is reading a bitstream.

 

Aspect Ratio

Aspect Ratio is a topic that comes up almost weekly in our email bag. There are so many terms that mean the same thing like, Wide Screen, 16:9, or 1.78:1. So today we'll go through the some of the basics of Aspect Ratio for newbies and maybe even throw in something for our more experienced listeners.

Aspect Ratio defined - The ratio of width to height of a screen. Analog TV in the US and most of the world is 4:3. That means for every four units wide a TV is it is 3 units high. Likewise for HDTV the aspect ratio is 16:9 which means for every 16 units wide the TV is, it is 9 units high.

So why why was HDTV chosen to be 16:9 and how come I still have black bars on my DVDs?
Cinematic movies are not shot in 16:9 (or 1.78:1) so why did the HDTV specification chose this aspect ratio? Note - when talking about TV the aspect ratio is given in either 4:3 or 16:9, when talking about cinematic films the aspect ratio is obtained by dividing the width by the height. So when you read a DVDs information and see that its aspect ratio is 1.78:1 you know it will fill your entire screen. If you see 1.33:1 then you know its a 4:3 or Full Screen movie.

The reason 16:9 was chosen was that when you take all the cinematic aspect ratios and lay them on top of each other 16:9 turned out to be the best compromise. It minimized the amount of unused screen when all aspect ratios were considered. As a result your new wide screen TV could end up with black bars at the top and bottom. But these black bars are much less than what you would see on your old 4:3 TV.

But some movies are not shot in 1.78:1 and yet they fill up the entire screen on my new Plasma TV. This happens when some studios master the DVD for wide screen TVs. They will actually crop the film to fit perfectly on your screen. This bothers many film aficionado who prefer watching movies in their Original Aspect Ratio (OAR). Some DVDs will have this acronym contained in the movie details to help consumers quickly identify that the movie is not cropped. Many pay movie channels will also crop the movie and this has drawn the ire of many. Yet others say, I paid for all that screen real estate so I want the pixels doing something.

Common Aspect ratios and their uses

CinemaScope - 2.35:1 or (~14:6) - Developed by 20th Century Fox, which is the only studio still using it. The original Star Wars Movies were filmed in CinemaScope

Panavision - 2.40:1 or (12:5) - Developed by Panavision and became very popular in the 1970s. Today they make lenses for movies with a 1.85 or (18.5:10) aspect ratio.

Academy - 1.33:1 or (4:3) All movies were actually 4:3. When TVs came on the scene they were designed to this specification. Movies then moved to wide screen to differentiate themselves from television. The Robe was the first movie to be filmed in wide screen.

Other film formats include Todd-AO, 2.2:1 (Oklahoma in 1955), Metroscope, 2:1 (Dirty Dozen), Cinerama, 2.8:1, (How the West was Won 1962), and there are others that that you can find out about by following this link (http://www.dvdaust.com/film_formats.htm ).