South Park's first HD episode hits Xbox Live tomorrow

[dmiller68]

The Xbox Live Video Marketplace is getting some of the truly compelling content we've been waiting for, as Wired is reporting that the first high definition episode of South Park will be available for download tomorrow. At the incredibly great price of free -- for the first two weeks -- all Xbox Live members can download the "Good times with Weapons" episode. If you for some reason don't have a 360, or don't have the internet and are reading this via teletype, Best Buy will also be making the episode available on HD DVD discs free with the purchase of an Xbox 360 or the HD DVD add-on between March 20th and April 3rd. Animated TV shows have been missing in HD for too long, hopefully we'll see more of those and more HD content on XBLM -- like HD Battlestar Galactica episodes we don't have to wait 6 months to see, as suggested by our friends at Joystiq.

Source

Maybe at this rate the xbox will kill both HD-DVD and Blu-ray.

[D_Litch]

Originally Posted by dmiller68

Maybe at this rate the xbox will kill both HD-DVD and Blu-ray.

We can only hope...

[Jon Liu]

The quality is still not quite there though. It's very similar but, I think there's a lot to be said about going from 720p resolution to a 1080p resolution when studios are making transfers. Now, this is not directed towards viewing a 1080p resolution on a 720p set. When encoding a movie at 1080p all the resolution is there and so when you downconvert to a 720p display, you still get to retain some of that difference, albeit not resolving all the full detail. Now, the same cannot be said about 720p source upconverted to a 1080p set. Which, a lot of TVs now a days are 1080p. if studios were to encode it to 720p natively then upconverting to 1080p you definitely won't get the resolve that you would with a native 1080p resolution like you do on HD-DVD and Blu-ray.

It's not a huge difference by any stretch but, once people have seen the difference and understand the differences then, I believe, they will continuously choose HD-DVD or Blu-ray over just downloading the movie in a lower resolution.

It's good that movies and TV episodes are coming out to download but I am one of those who likes having hard copies of my media, which explains why I have so many DVDs and now Blu-rays and HD-DVDs.

[dmiller68]

Originally Posted by Jon Liu

The quality is still not quite there though. It's very similar but, I think there's a lot to be said about going from 720p resolution to a 1080p resolution when studios are making transfers. Now, this is not directed towards viewing a 1080p resolution on a 720p set. When encoding a movie at 1080p all the resolution is there and so when you downconvert to a 720p display, you still get to retain some of that difference, albeit not resolving all the full detail. Now, the same cannot be said about 720p source upconverted to a 1080p set. Which, a lot of TVs now a days are 1080p. if studios were to encode it to 720p natively then upconverting to 1080p you definitely won't get the resolve that you would with a native 1080p resolution like you do on HD-DVD and Blu-ray.

It's not a huge difference by any stretch but, once people have seen the difference and understand the differences then, I believe, they will continuously choose HD-DVD or Blu-ray over just downloading the movie in a lower resolution.

It's good that movies and TV episodes are coming out to download but I am one of those who likes having hard copies of my media, which explains why I have so many DVDs and now Blu-rays and HD-DVDs.

I'm with you... That is been the tough part of starting to use Netflix. I have yet to try the MS service. I'm by no means implying that downloading will ever be as good as disc. I'm almost to the point of buying a blu-ray player too continue my collection building.

[D_Litch]

I like hard copies of movies as well, I would just prefer to d/l a movie that I would've normally rented, instead of going to the hell-hole that is "The Movie Rental Store".

[lovekeiiy]

I like the idea of downloading movies. It's just another option to getting the content. Like some of the others on here, I like put things I want to keep in a hard media format. Unfortunately, HDD crash. I've lost a lot of vidoes and pictures because of two HDD crashes.

Downloading is rather new, so I consider it in it's infancy. Most of us, like it or not, are early adaptors, which means we get to be the guinne pigs.